SPINOZA, SrO-Dof2:1, BARUCH, or BENEDICT (1632-77). A famous Dutch-Jewish philosopher, born in Amsterdam, November 24, 1632. His father, a Portuguese merchant. had fled from Catholic persecution to the Netherlands. Spi noza was carefully educated in Jewish the ology and speculation. He was, however, alien ated from the orthodox belief by studies of physical science and of the writings of Descartes and probably those of Giordano Bruno. His here sies resulted in threats of severe punishment from his instructors in the Talmud and the Cabala, and the relation soon became so unpleas ant that Spinoza withdrew from the synagogue. The rabbis. in 1656, excommunicated him and secured his banishment from Amsterdam. How ever, he remained in the neighborhood of the city for five years, supporting himself, as in later years, as a lens-maker.
Previous to his expulsion from the Jewish com munity Spinoza is said to have fallen in love with the daughter of Can den Ende, his master in Greek and Latin. and to have been rejected by her. Possibly even before his expulsion he composed his first work, Tractatus de Deo et Hominc ejusque Felicitate (discovered in a Dutch translation in 1832, the Latin original not being extant). in which the form of his developed system is foreshadowed. And the De Intellectus Etnendatione and Tractatus Theologico-politicus are also probably referable to the period of his Amsterdam residence, although the latter was not published instil 1670 and the former until 1677.
In 1661 Spinoza went to Ehynsburg, near Ley den, and two or three years later to Voorburg, near The Hague. Shortly after, yielding to the solicitations of friends, he removed to The Hague itself. The Elector Palatine, Charles Louis, of fered him a chair at the University of Heidelberg, but Spinoza declined the position in order to be free from any restrictions upon his thinking. An offer of a pension, on the condition of his dedicat ing a work to Louis X1V., he rejected with scorn. His domestic accounts, after his death, show' that he preferred to live on a few pence a day rather than be indebted to another's bounty. He died February 21, 1677. His constitution was no less undermined by consumption and overwork than his sensitive mind was wrought upon by persecu tion and the violent severance of natural ties.
But no word of complaint ever passed his lips; simplicity and heroic forbearance, coupled with an antique stoicism and a child-like. warm, sym pathizing heart, were the salient features of his character. His life, in its nobility and suffering, is perhaps the most convincing plea for the vitality of the philosophy for which it served as the human context.
Spinoza's philosophy finds its most adequate expression in his great work, Ethic(' Ordine Geo inetrico Denonstrata (posthumously published in 1677). The basis from which it was developed was mainly Cartesianism. Certainly from Descartes he derived his empirical rationalism and his conception of exact demonstration. This latter, on the analogy of geometrical demonstra tions, consisted of a series of axioms with corol laries, propositions. and elucidations. designed to render bias or extraneous inference impossible, and there can be no doubt that Spinoza was one of the most conscientious of thinkers in his effort to eliminate the personal equation. Never theless, there are few philosophers in whom the personal element is more distinctive. The very fact of Spinoza's severance from his own race and religion, together with his failure to adopt Christian thought, made the individuality of his system the more inevitable; he was bound by no tradition and so followed to the fullest the instincts of his reason. Be was influenced by Descartes in method and probably by Bruno in his pantheism, but his system is still his own to a degree seldom true in the history of philosophy.
This system is a thorough-going and compli cated pantheism. The universe is identical with God, who is the substance of all things. The conception of substance (which Spinoza inherited from the Scholastics) is not that of a material reality, hut of a logical subject—the self-suffi cient and comprehensive basis for all reality, capable of sustaining as its attributes all tem poral existences. Spinoza recognized the possi ble existence of an infinite number of such at tributes, but held that only two kinds are known to us—extension, or the world of material things, and thought. These two comprehend existence and they include all that exists in a real and pal pable way, at least so far as human knowledge is concerned.