SPINOZA, BARUCH, or BENEDICT DE SPINOZA, a Dutch philosopher; born in Amsterdam, Holland, November 24, 1632. He was trained in Talmudic and other Hebrew lore by Rabbi Morteira; acquired a knowledge of Latin from the freethinking physician Van den Ende; came under the influence of the new philosophic teaching of Descartes; ceased to attend the synagogue; refused a pension offered by the rabbis for his conformity, and was expelled from the Israelitish community; fled from Am sterdam to the suburbs to escape the enmity of the fanatical Jews; removed from thence, after five years' seclusion, to Rynsburg, where he lived till 1663; subsequently went to Voorburg; and ul timately (1671) settled in The Hague. By his craft as a grinder of optical lenses he maintained a frugal position in the households of the friends with whom he lived. He refused a pension from the French king and a professor ship in Heidelberg because their ac ceptance might hazard freedom of thought and conduct; but he accepted a legacy from his friend De Vries. The first result of his labor was published anonymously in 1670 under the title of "Theological-Political Tract," and be cause it put forth a strong plea for liberty of speech in philosophy it was placed on the "Index" by the Catholics and condemned by the authorities in Holland. Such, indeed, was the storm
which this treatise occasioned that the author himself published nothing fur ther. After his death all his unpub lished writings were conveyed to Am sterdam, and there the "Posthumous Works" was published (1677). In the "Ethics," therein included, his system of philosophy was developed; each of its five books being dignified by a series of axioms and definitions after the method of Euclid in his geometry. In all there are 27 definitions, 20 axioms, and 8 postulates; and the central conception of the whole system is that God, who is the inherent cause of the universe, is one absolutely infinite substance, of which all the several parts which we recognize are but finite expressions; that man, being but a part of this greater whole, has neither a separate existence nor a self-determining will; but that he can, by means of knowledge and love, so far control his passions as to enter into the joy which springs from this idea of an all-embracing God. He died February 21, 1677.