Benedictus (originally Baruch) de Spinoza sprang from a Jewish family of Portugal or Spain, which had fled to Holland to escape persecution at home. He was born in Amsterdam in 1632; taught by the Rabbin Morteira, and, in Latin, by Van den Ende, a free-thinking physician who had enjoyed a philological training; and expelled by anathema from the Jewish communion, 1656, on account of heretical views. During the next four years he found refuge at a friend's house in the country near Amsterdam, after which he lived in Rhynsburg, and from 1664 in Voorburg, moving thence, in 1669, to The Hague, where he died in 1677. Spinoza lived in retirement and had few wants; he supported himself by grinding optical glasses; and, in 1673, declined the professorship at Heidelberg offered him by Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, because of his love of quiet, and on account of the uncertainty of the freedom of thought which the Elector had assured him. Spinoza himself made but two treatises public: his dictations on the first and second parts of Descartes's Principia Philosophiae, which had been composed for a private pupil, with an appendix, Cogitata Metaphysica, 1663, and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670, in defense of liberty of thought and the right to unprejudiced criticism of the biblical writings. The principles expressed in the latter work were condemned by all parties as sacrilegious and atheistic, and awakened concern even in the minds of his friends. When, in 1675, Spinoza journeyed to Amsterdam with the intention of giving his chief work, the Ethics, to the press, the clergy and the followers of Descartes applied to the government to forbid its issue. Soon after Spinoza's death it was published in the Opera Posthuma, 1677, which were issued under the care of Hermann Schuller,[1] with a preface by Spinoza's friend, the physician Ludwig Meyer, and which contained, besides the chief work, three incomplete treatises (Tractatus Politicus, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae) and a collection of Letters by and to Spinoza. The Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, in five parts, treats (1) of God, (2) of the nature and origin of the mind, (3) of the nature and origin of the emotions, (4) of human bondage or the strength of the passions, (5) of the power of the reason or human freedom. It has become known within recent times that Spinoza made a very early sketch of the system developed in the Ethics, the Tractatus Brevis de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate, of which a Dutch translation in two copies was discovered, though not the original Latin text. This treatise was published by Böhmer, 1852, in excerpts, and complete by Van Vloten, 1862, and by Schaarschmidt, 1869. It was not until our own century, and after Jacobi's Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Moses Mendelssohn (1785) had aroused the long slumbering interest in this much misunderstood philosopher, who has been oftener despised than studied, that complete editions of his works were prepared, by Paulus 1802-03; Gfrörer, 1830; Bruder, 1843-46; Ginsberg (in Kirchmann's Philosophische Bibliothek, 4 vols.), 1875-82; and Van Vloten and Land,[2] 2 vols., 1882-83. B. Auerbach has worked Spinoza's life into a romantic novel, Spinoza, ein Denkerleben, 1837; 2d ed., 1855 [English translation by C.T. Brooks, 1882.]
[Footnote 1: See L. Stein in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. i., 1888, p. 554 seq.]
[Footnote 2: For the literature on Spinoza the reader is referred to Ueberweg and to Van der Linde's B. Spinoza, Bibliografie, 1871; while among recent works we shall mention only Camerer's Die Lehre Spinozas, Stuttgart, 1877. An English translation of The Chief Works of Spinoza has been given by Elwes, 1883-84; a translation of the Ethics by White, 1883; and one of selections from the Ethics, with notes, by Fullerton in Sneath's Modern Philosophers, 1892. Among the various works on Spinoza, the reader may be referred to Pollock's Spinoza, His Life and Times, 1880 (with bibliography to same year); Martineau's Study of Spinoza, 1883; and J. Caird's Spinoza, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1888.—TR.]
We shall consider Spinoza's system as a completed whole as it is given in the Ethics; for although it is interesting for the investigator to trace out the development of his thinking by comparing this chief work with its forerunner (that Tractatus Brevis "concerning God, man, and the happiness of the latter," whose dialogistical portions we may surmise to have been the earliest sketch of the Spinozistic position, and which was followed by the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) such a procedure is not equally valuable for the student. In regard to Spinoza's relations to other thinkers it cannot be doubted, since Freudenthal's[1] proof, that he was dependent to a large degree on the predominant philosophy of the schools, i.e. on the later Scholasticism (Suarez[2]), especially on its Protestant side (Jacob Martini, Combachius, Scheibler, Burgersdijck, Heereboord); Descartes, it is true, felt the same influence. Joël,[3]: Schaarschmidt, Sigwart,[4] R. Avenarius,[5] and Böhmer[6] = have advanced the view that the sources of Spinoza's philosophy are not to be sought exclusively in Cartesianism, but rather that essential elements were taken from the Cabala, from the Jewish Scholasticism (Maimonides, 1190; Gersonides, died 1344; Chasdai Crescas, 1410), and from Giordano Bruno. In opposition to this Kuno Fischer has defended, and in the main successfully, the proposition that Spinoza reached, and must have reached, his fundamental pantheism by his own reflection as a development of Descartes's principles. The traces of his early Talmudic education, which have been noticed in Spinoza's works, prove no dependence of his leading ideas on Jewish theology. His pantheism is distinguished from that of the Cabalists by its rejection of the doctrine of emanation, and from Bruno's, which nevertheless may have influenced him, by its anti-teleological character. When with Greek philosophers, Jewish theologians, and the Apostle Paul he teaches the immanence of God (Epist. 21), when with Maimonides and Crescas he teaches love to God as the principal of morality, and with the latter of these, determinism also, it is not a necessary consequence that he derived these theories from them. That which most of all separates him from the mediaeval scholastics of his own people, is his rationalistic conviction that God can be known. His agreement with them comes out most clearly in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. But even here it holds only in regard to undertaking a general criticism of the Scriptures and to their figurative interpretation, while, on the other hand, the demand for a special historical criticism, and the object which with Spinoza was the basis of the investigation as a whole, were foreign to mediaeval Judaism—in fact, entirely modern and original. This object was to make science independent of religion, whose records and doctrines are to edify the mind and to improve the character, not to instruct the understanding. "Spinoza could not have learned the complete separation of religion and science from Jewish literature; this was a tendency which sprang from the spirit of his own time" (Windelband, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. i. p. 194).
[Footnote 1: J. Freudenthal, Spinoza und die Scholastik in the
Philosophische Aufsätze, Zeller zum 50-Jährigen Doktorjubiläum gewidmet,
Leipsic, 1887, p. 85 seq. Freudenthal's proof covers the Cogitata
Metaphysica and many of the principal propositions of the Ethics.]
[Footnote 2: The Spanish Jesuit, Francis Suarez, lived 1548-1617. Works,
Venice, 1714 Cf. Karl Werner, Suarez und die Scholastik der letzten
Jahrhunderte, Regensburg, 1861.]
[Footnote 3: M. Joël, Don Chasdai Crescas' religions-philosophische Lehren in ihrem geschichtlichen Einfluss, 1866; Spinozas Theo.-pel. Traktat auf seine Quellen geprüft, 1870; Zur Genesis der Lehre Spinozas mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des kurzen Traktats, 1871.]
[Footnote 4: Spinozas neu entdeckter Traktat eläutert u. s. w., 1866; Spinozas kurzer Traktat übersetzt mit Einleitungen und Erläuterungen, 1870.]
[Footnote 5: Ueber die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozistischen
Pantheismus und das Verhältniss der zweiten zur dritten Phase, 1868.]
[Footnote 6: Spinozana in Fichte's Zeitschrift für Philosophie vols. xxxvi., xlii., lvii., 1860-70.]