come, is the truest utterance of his time in his effort to make all problems scientifically clear; and this is not contradicted by the fact that he had little influence in shaping contemporary thought.

The Historical Place of Spinoza.* Spinoza did not get full standing, nor was he widely read, until Lessing, one hundred years later, resurrected his teaching and Goethe adopted it. He produced what the Renaissance was striving for, but what the Renaissance could not yet grasp the complete logical formulation of its deepest thought. Spinoza produced the only great conception of the world during this period, and it excited the hostility of contemporary Catholics, Protestants, and free-thinkers alike. The product of his thinking was a new systematic scholasticism, which, if the time had been ready for it, would have entirely superseded the mediæval. He succeeded in placing metaphysics upon a scientific and mathematical basis, for his philosophy was not only logical in its content but mathematical in its form./ Spinoza's philosophy is the Renaissance expression of medieval scholasticism, the expression of that rationalism which underlies both the thought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is as if Thomas Aquinas had been transported into the Renaissance, and finding that science would not support and explain dogma, had conformed dogma systematically to the new science. Mathematically science was the new dogma. Spinoza is the last word of mediævalism,\although his language is the science of the

* Read Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, chap. iii; Baldwin, Fragments in Philosophy, pp. 24-42; Eucken, Problem of Human Life, pp. 362-380. Inexpensive translation of Spinoza's chief works by Elwes in Bohn Library.

Renaissance. The utterance of Spinoza sounds strange because, while his thought is mediæval, his expression and form are scientific.

Spinoza strove before everything else for a unitary system, and yet it is interesting to see how much he has been honored from different quarters.Artists, religious devotees, poets, idealists, materialists, and scientists have found in him their truest expression. This is not only because each has found something different, but because his philosophy had actually a many-sided character. His teaching had the advantage of being thoroughly radical. It is the most impersonal of all the systems; and yet it grew out of the most genuinely personal piety.

The Influences upon Spinoza.

1. His Jewish Training. Spinoza was born a Jew and remained a member of the Synagogue until he was excommunicated at the age of twenty-four. Although he was the original genius who transcends his limitations, his young mind was moulded after the Jewish type. He received the strictly religious training of the Jewish boy in the Jewish academy at Amsterdam, where he learned a trade1 in connection with his studies. He studied the Talmud, mediæval Jewish philosophy, and the Cabalistic literature. In a Jewish curriculum the classical languages had no place; and mathematics, except arithmetic, was generally overlooked. His early instruction emphasized above everything else the unity and the supremely transcendent, theistic character of God.

2

1 The trade, the grinding of optical lenses, which Spinoza learned in the Rabbinical school, was his means of support in later life. This required some knowledge of physics and mathematics.

2 Especially Maimonides, Gersonides, and Chasdai Creskas.

(Pollock (Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy, p. xxvi) says that only three of the portraits of Spinoza may reasonably be considered authentic. One is a miniature of the philosopher in the Summer Palace at the Hague: the second is a painting in the Town Museum at the Hague; the third is the one given here, which is an engraving found in copies of the original edition of Spinoza's Posthumous Works (1677). This portrait seems to be somewhat idealized, but of the three it is the most artistic and lifelike.)

However, his separation from the Synagogue at this early age could not but modify his theology. It made him a free Jew. He was no longer under the restraints of Jewish traditions. While he never abandoned his belief in God as a unity, he gave up his belief in the transcendent theistic God of the Hebrew prophets; and he differed from the contemporary Jewish Cabalistic teaching of emanations from God. He seems to have so modified the orthodox Hebrew conception of God that it rather resembles that of the medieval mystic Christian.1

2. His Impulse from the New Science-Descartes' Influence. The "free-thinking" for which Spinoza was excommunicated by the Synagogue was obtained first from his instruction in the school of Van der Ende, a physician of daring naturalistic tendencies. This was when he was eighteen. Spinoza had already learned Italian and French; Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hebrew were his native tongues;2 Van der Ende taught him German and Latin, and introduced him to the science of the time. It was then that he read Descartes, whose philosophy he made the point of departure of his own. Spinoza was not an inventive genius like Descartes and Leibnitz. He was one of those systematic thinkers who are obliged to carry their thought through its logical conclusion. The mathematical method of Descartes furnished him the method, and Van der Ende gave him the encouragement for carrying out his independent thinking unrelentingly. His statement of his modified Jewish conception of God in mathematical terms makes him the most complete representative of Rationalism.

1 The Short Treatise, which became known in the middle of the nineteenth century, shows the powerful influence of Bruno upon him. 2 Curiously enough, he spoke Dutch with difficulty.