"Spinoza" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seventeenth century In the 17th century constructions a priori were based on ideas, in the 18th century on sensations, but always following the same mathematical method fully displayed in the "Ethics" of Spinoza.] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Heine himself (Elster edition, V. 294) says in regard to the question whether Hegel did borrow so much from Schelling: "Nichts ist lAecherlicher als das reklamierte Eigentumsrecht an Ideen." He then shows how the ideas were not original with Schelling either; he had them from Spinoza. And it is just so here. Brentano started the legend; Heine goes back to him indirectly. Eichenidorff and Vogt directly; Schreiber borrowed from Vogt, Loeben from Schreiber, and Heine from Schreiber—and thereafter it would be impossible to say ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... there is nothing to prevent him from making his aim, not so much pleasure, as self-preservation; or from taking as his goal wealth, power, reputation, intellectual or moral attainment, or what not. [Footnote: Thus, Hobbes made his end self-preservation; Spinoza takes much the same position; Nietzsche makes that which ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... was the author of theories in philosophy that have been adopted and imitated by both Coleridge and Wordsworth, while Van Hartmann teaches that there is but one last principle of philosophy, known by Spinoza as substance, by Fichte as the absolute I., by Plato and Hegel as the absolute Idea, by Schopenhauer as Will, and by himself as a blind, impersonal, unconscious, all-pervading Will and Idea, independent of brain, and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the farthest possible from being what Spinoza has been called, "a God-intoxicated man." Real reverence for sacred things did not enter into his mental equipment. A story illustrating his lack of reverence for what he called "long-faced" brethren was told by J. M. Grant ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... boat? (Arist. de Anim.) And in another state of being is the soul to be conceived of as vanishing into infinity, hardly possessing an existence which she can call her own, as in the pantheistic system of Spinoza: or as an individual informing another body and entering into new relations, but retaining her own character? (Compare Gorgias.) Or is the opposition of soul and body a mere illusion, and the true self neither soul nor body, but the union of ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had devoted the labor of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms, and fruits to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinoza's, viz., "De Emendatione Humani Intelectus." This was now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and, instead of surviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of inspiration or of miracle; for the reality of the inspiration or of the miracle can only be established by reason." Before Hume, assaults on the miracles recorded in Scripture were numerous and varied. Spinoza and the Pantheistic School had started the question, "Are miracles possible?" and had taken the negative. Hume's question is, "Are miracles credible?" And as they are contrary to human experience, his answer ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 22 Spinoza's ethical system was closely parallel to that of Hobbes. He denied the intrinsic difference between right and wrong; but he regarded aristocracy as the natural order of society. With him, as with ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two friends went together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literature {234} and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, and he quoted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the University; by Albertus Magnus in the Cordeliers, hard by the College of Bourgoyne; by Pic de la Mirandole, who lived I care not a rap where and debated I know not from Adam how or when; by Lord Bacon, who took more bribes in a day than you and I could compass in a dozen years; by Spinoza, a good worker of glass lenses, but a philosopher whom I have never read nor will; by Coleridge when he was not talking about himself nor taking some filthy drug; by John Pilkington Smith, of Norwood, Drysalter, who has, I hear, been lately horribly bitten by the ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... astronomer, who wishes to comprehend the solar system, would do well to acquire a preliminary acquaintance with the elements of physics. And it is accordant with this presumption, that the men who have made the most important positive additions to philosophy, such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, not to mention more recent examples, have been deeply imbued with the spirit of physical science; and, in some cases, such as those of Descartes and Kant, have been largely acquainted with its details. On the other hand, the founder of Positivism no less ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... a curse almost like that cheerful one visited upon Spinoza, the lens-maker, when he forsook the synagogue and took up his home with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... hours before making her final discovery—that she should exist a day and a night in utter vacancy while the ultimate moment still beckoned her from to-morrow. Would time never pass? Was there no way of strangling it before it came to birth? She picked up her favourite books from her desk—Spinoza, Shelley, "The Imitation of Christ"—but the throbbing vitality in her own breast caused the printed pages ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... more moral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideals of the soul. For instance, it is said that many Jews disbelieve in a future life; but if they did believe in a future life, it would be something more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza. The Moslem Paradise is a very Earthly Paradise. But with all their fine apprehensions, the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity; that of being a Chosen Race. It is the vice of any patriotism or religion depending on race that the individual is himself the thing to be ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Jewish spirit, that represents the antagonist—that spirit which at first, after the birth of Christianity, and aided by the filth of Roman civilization, with its inherent evil germs, this people devoted to a world-historic power of evil; and which, even in its most brilliant revelation, in Spinoza, as has been most clearly demonstrated from his own works by Schopenhauer, seeks only its own advantage, to which it sacrifices the whole, but does not recognize the whole to which it must lovingly ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... Geulincx 2. Spinoza (a) Substance, Attributes, and Modes (b) Anthropology; Cognition and the Passions (c) Practical Philosophy 3. Pascal, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... their style. With the Latin works of writers who think for themselves, the case is different, and their style is visible; writers, I mean, who have not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others. An affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further, the language in which a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which he belongs; and here there are many hard and fast differences, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... himself—very striking. You will find it generally at the beginning of his History of England. There have been saints among infidels too, e.g., Hume and Spinoza, on behalf of whom I think it a duty to say something as the Church has devoted them to eternal flames. To use a German phrase, "They were 'Christians in unconsciousness.'" That describes a good many people. I believe that as Christians we ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... As for Spinoza, whose spirit you already possess, I think that you can go straight to the last theorems. You will be sure to have intuitive understanding of what he says about the soul's repose. Yes, those are moments experienced by us too rarely in our weakness, ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... policy he had assumed. For natural science he shewed little interest, and indeed at that time it scarcely could be reckoned among the ordinary subjects of education; philosophy he pursued rather as a man than as a student, and we are not surprised to find that it was Spinoza rather than Kant or Fichte or Hegel to whom he devoted most attention, for he cared more for principles of belief and the conduct of life than the ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... seventh century, B. C., Kapila, the father of Hindu Evolutionists, explained this theory for the first time through logic and science. Sir Monier Monier Williams says: "Indeed if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozites more than 2,000 years before the existence of Spinoza; and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin; and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution had been accepted by the scientists of our time and before any word like Evolution existed in any language of the world." (P. 12, "Hinduism and Brahminism.") Prof. Huxley ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... the 18th of August 1896. At Leipzig he was one of the founders of the Akademisch-philosophische Verein, and was the first editor of the Vierteljahrsschrift fuer wissenschaftliche Philosophie. In 1868 he published an essay on the Pantheism of Spinoza. His chief works are Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemaess dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses (1876) and the Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1888-1890). In these works he made an attempt to co-ordinate thought and action. Like Mach, he started from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... important question—that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza—most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God—asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... deny that the pantheistic theory, which identifies God with the universe and ourselves with God, has its fascination and {45} glamour—a fascination which is not ignoble on the face of it. The modern founder of Pantheism, Benedict Spinoza, was a man of pure and saintly character, a gentle recluse from the world, lovable and blameless. Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in avowing our belief that the glamour of Pantheism is utterly ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... readers are hardly inclined to think that the word paradox could once have had no disparagement in its meaning; still less that persons could have applied it to themselves. I chance to have met with a case in point against them. It is Spinoza's Philosophia Scripturae Interpres, Exercitatio Paradoxa, printed anonymously at Eleutheropolis, in 1666. This place was one of several cities in the clouds, to which the cuckoos resorted who were driven away by the other birds; that is, a feigned place ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... that everyone endeavours, as far as possible, to cause others to love what he himself loves, and to hate what he himself hates: as the poet* says: "As lover let us share every hope and every fear: ironhearted were he who should love what the other leaves."** [* Ovid, "Amores," II. xix. 4,5] [** Spinoza transposes the verses: "Speremus pariter, pariter metuamus amantes; Ferreus est, si quis, quod ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... briefly state your metaphysical system of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains, the laws that govern them, and the reasons which induce you to consider them as essentially distinct from each other. My motive for this request is the following:—As soon as I "settle", I shall read Spinoza and Leibnitz, and I particularly wish to know wherein they agree with, and wherein differ from you. If you will do this, I promise you to send you the result, and with ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... out. I want you to get for me the spectacles which Swedenborg used to wear; not the smaller pair—those he gave to Hans Christian Andersen—but the large pair, and these seem to have got mislaid. I think they are Spinoza's make. You know he was an optical-glass maker by profession, and the best we have ever had. See if you can get them for me." When I looked up after reading this letter, I saw the postman hastening away across the sands, and I cried out ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... to love the law that Moses brought, To sing the songs of David, and to think The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught, Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink The universal air—for this they sought Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain, And truth's perpetual ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... called the Over-flow of a spiritual imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous, God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those applied to the objects of experience, but the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... philosophy—or, rather, I had been feeling her out; and from a sketch of Spinoza's anticipations of the modern mind, through the speculative interpretations of the latest achievements in physics of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Ramsay, I had come, as usual, to De Casseres, whom I was quoting, when Mr. Pike snarled orders ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... to indicate how the Ideas of Plato, the "sub specie aeternitatis" of Spinoza, the "Liberation" from "the Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Beatific Vision" of the Catholic saints are all analogues and parallels, expressed under different symbols, of the same universal feeling. The difference between these philosophic statements of the situation and mine, is that, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... stretch of the meaning of the word, or by courtesy, that he can be called a philosopher. His philosophy, it is maintained, ends where all true philosophy begins; and his style or method has frequently been described as unworthy of a systematic thinker. Spinoza, who has exercised so great an influence on the history of thought in Germany, was among the first who spoke slightingly of the inductive philosopher. When treating of the causes of error, he writes, "What he (Bacon) adduces besides, in order to explain error, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... great men are always dolts, the fact is that intellectual superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as bodily strength; and that fact has been established beyond cavil by the laborious inquiries of Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians of the English school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is probable, would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and grandsons of Veit Bach contributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... could by listening to a rapid flow of unintelligible French on one side, and to equally unintelligible scientific talk on the other. By and by this was merged into a discussion some recent book. They seemed to get deeply interested in a dispute as to whether Spinoza was or was not at any time ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... vague; people might play at cat's-cradle or study Spinoza, just as they pleased; but, whatever they did, they must give their minds to it. She kept house from an easy-chair, and ruled her dependants with severity tempered by wit, and by the very sweetest voice in which reproof was ever uttered. She never praised them, but ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... fantastic nature seems to have dawned on him at last, and he gave it up for a still simpler creed consisting merely in reverence for the Deity and in respect for the moral law. In the matter of public worship he was of the same opinion as Spinoza and many other philosophers. He esteemed public worship salutary for the state, and paid an annual subscription to the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia; but he also esteemed it his privilege to stay away from service, and indulged in this privilege to the full, making ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... feeling. True from a certain viewpoint. We cannot originate intellect either. The germ of intellect with all its potential possibilities was present in our most primitive tree-climbing ancestors. But as much difference as there is between the intellect of an Australian bushman and the intellect of a Spinoza, a Shakespeare, a Darwin, a Victor Hugo, a Goethe or a Gauss, so much difference is there between the love of a primitive savage and the love of the highly cultured modern man. The love or so-called love of the primitive or ignorant man (and woman) is a simple matter and is practically ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... I p. lxii; see also pp. lx, lxi) "that Schopenhauer should have spoken of the Upanishads as 'products of the highest wisdom'...that he should have placed the pantheism there taught high above the pantheism of Bruno, Malebranche, Spinoza and Scotus Erigena, as brought to light again at Oxford in 1681, may perhaps secure a more considerate reception for those relics of ancient wisdom than anything that I could say ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Athens, and Hyperates, the mathematician, were all traders. Plato, called the Divine by reason of the excellence of his wisdom, defrayed his travelling expenses in Egypt by the profits derived from the oil which he sold during his journey. Spinoza maintained himself by polishing glasses while he pursued his philosophical investigations. Linnaeus, the great botanist, prosecuted his studies while hammering leather and making shoes. Shakespeare was a successful ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... say they believe in God, but they tell you, when pressed, they mean by that name "everything"—God is everything. The term "Pantheist" is from pan, all, and theos, God. Webster defines the term thus: "One that believes the universe to be God; a name given to the followers of Spinoza." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Isabel Meredith, so far as the outlook of her book extends, is a disciple of Spinoza. But ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guerins, Heine, Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to the indifference of the English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was called for till four years were past, no third for ten, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of his intellect developed itself in sympathy with the Romanticists, but he never lost his passion for religion, a subject on which he published five discurses in 1799. We find in them a trace of the pantheism of Spinoza. His translation of Plato, accomplished between 1804 and 1806, gave him high rank as a classical scholar. In 1817 he joined the movement toward the union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. As a preacher he was unprepossessing in appearance, being sickly and hunchbacked, but ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be filled with that Amor intellectualis Dei, the beatific vision of the vita contemplativa, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any copy of the Spectator picked ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Spinoza said, of things which have nothing in common, one cannot be the cause of the other; and to me it seems eminently unphilosophic to believe a Being having nothing in common with anything, capable of creating or causing everything. ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... same result. The Primeval Monad of the Pythagorean system, which retires into darkness and is itself Darkness (for human intellect), was made the basis of all things; and we can find the idea in all its integrity in the philosophical systems of Leibnitz and Spinoza. Therefore, whether a Theosophist agrees with the Kabala which, speaking of En-Soph, propounds the query; "Who, then, can comprehend It, since It is formless, and non-existent?" or, remembering that magnificent hymn from the Rig Veda ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... not be also triangular. Carry out this view, says Fitzjames, and you make our conceptions the measure of reality. Mysteries, therefore, become nonsense, and miracles an impossibility. In fact, Ward's logic would lead to Spinoza, not to the deity of Catholic belief. Ward might retort that Fitzjames's doctrines would lead to absolute scepticism or atheism. Fitzjames, in fact, still accepts Mill's philosophy in the fullest sense. All truth, he declares, may be reduced to the type, 'this piece of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... is instructive to compare Dante's political treatise with those of Aristotle and Spinoza. We thus see more clearly the limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to a broader ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... consideration, has remarked, in an analysis of Cousin's system, 'with regard to his notion of Deity, we have already shown how closely this verges upon the principle of Pantheism. Even if we admit that it is not a doctrine, like that of Spinoza, which identifies God with the abstract idea of substance; or even like that of Hegel, which regards Deity as synonymous with the absolute law and process of the universe; if we admit, in fact, that the Deity of Cousin possesses a conscious personality, yet still ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... is to be the thesis of these lectures, 44. Most philosophers contemn it, 45. Foreignness to us of Bradley's Absolute, 46. Spinoza and 'quatenus,'47. Difficulty of sympathizing with the Absolute, 48. Idealistic attempt to interpret it, 50. Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Pluralism, 54. Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of what interaction involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... react into free thinking or to make a frontal attack on revealed truth. They took their stand on a fundamental Christian theism, the common religion of all good men; they repudiated the negative enormities of Hobbes and Spinoza. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... of the "circumscribed aggregate" of units forming the individual consciousness into the unlimited abyss of similar units constituting the "Absolute Being" of the Cosmists, or the "Divine Essence" of the Buddhists. Again, the doctrine in a vague form pervades the philosophy of Spinoza, and is next clearly enunciated by Wundt. Lastly, in a recently published very remarkable essay "On the Nature of Things in Themselves," Professor Clifford arrives at a similar doctrine by a different route. The following is the conclusion to which he arrives:—"That ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... John Knox. John Calvin. Jerome Zanchius. Theodore Beza. Leo X. Justin. Arius. Athanasius. Moses Maimonides. John Agricola. Michael Servetus. Simonis Menno. Francis Xavier. Faustus Socinus. Robert Brown. James Arminius. Francis Higginson. Richard Baxter. George Fox. William Penn. Benedict Spinoza. Ann Lee. John Glass. George Keith. Nicholas Louis, Count Zinzendorf. William Courtney. Richard Hooker. Charles Chauncey. Roger Williams. John Clarke. Ann Hutchinson. Michael Molinos. John Wesley. George Whitefield. Selina Huntingdon. Robert Sandeman. ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... nine cases out of ten. A brilliant mathematician, he had taken his doctorate without difficulty, and his thesis had even attracted some attention. From the higher speculations of modern mathematics to the study of philosophy is but a step, and Claudius had plunged into the vast sea of Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, without, perhaps, having any very definite idea of what he was doing, until he found himself forced to go forward or to acknowledge himself baffled and beaten. This he was not willing to do, and so he had gone on and on, until one day, some six months ago, he had asked himself what ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... topics, however bitter and however much distorted by the old party spirit, there is yet a clearer recognition than of old, that widely-spread discontent is not a reason for arbitrary suppression, but for seeking to understand and remove its causes. We should act in the spirit of Spinoza's great saying; and it should be our aim, as it was his care, "neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's actions, but to understand them". That is equally true of men's opinions. If they are violent, passionate, subversive of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the modern mind which at its ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... area and small in population, can also boast of having contributed much that is excellent to the literature of the world, and in its roll of famous literary men are to be found names which would redeem any country from the charge of intellectual barrenness. Spinoza, Erasmus, and Hugo de Groot (Grotius), to name no others, form a trio whose influence upon the thought of the world, and upon the movements which make for human progress, has been beyond estimation, and which still belongs to-day to ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and not ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... If Spinoza's dictum be true, that "a wise man's meditation is not of death but of life," then Andreyev is surely not a wise man. Some philosophers might have written their works even without a guarantee against immortality, though Schopenhauer, ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... of other minds and the inspiring "spirit of the age"; the enjoyment of such knowledge is in an even wider communication. The practice and enjoyment of the arts of goodness are necessarily social, because the good life can only be lived in a good society. Spinoza has summed up the truth in saying—"The highest good is common to all, and all may equally enjoy it." So it appears that the highest goods are essentially at once individual and social, pointing once more the attainment of the higher synthesis in which the antagonism of the "one" and the "all," ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... who knows something of the great Jews of the Middle Ages—that in Disraeli we discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of the natural equality of men which Nietzsche combated all his life. It was certainly the great Maimonides himself, that spiritual father of Spinoza, who guided the pen of his Sephardic descendant, when he thus wrote in his Tancred: "It is to be noted, although the Omnipotent Creator might have formed, had it pleased him, in the humblest of ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Entwickelung und Kritik der Leibnitzischen Philosophie,"— Zimmermann's "Leibnitz u. Herbart's Monadologie,"—Schelling's "Leibnitz als Denker,"—Hartenstein's "De Materiae apud Leibnit. Notione,"—and Adolph Helferich's "Spinoza u. Leibnitz: oder Das Wesen des Idealismus u. des Realismus." To these we must add, as one of the most valuable contributions to Leibnitian literature, M. Foucher de Careil's recent publication of certain MSS. of Leibnitz, found in the library at Hanover, containing strictures on Spinoza, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... is precious and beautiful and lovely the vulgar man is hopelessly excluded. They are all around him; but he has no eyes to see, no taste to appreciate, no heart to respond to them. "All things excellent," so Spinoza tells us, "are as difficult as they are rare." The vulgar man has no heart for difficulty; and hence the rare excellence of art and beauty remain forever beyond ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... unphilosophical to believe in a personal God, omnipotent and omniscient, than in natural forces unconscious and irresistible? Is it unphilosophical to combine power with intelligence? Goethe, a Spinozist who did not believe in Spinoza, said that he could bring his mind to the conception that in the centre of space we might meet with a monad of pure intelligence. What may be the centre of space I leave to the daedal imagination of the author ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... recall their contents as readily as though the pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that Schiller had at Weimar long fallen off from Christianity, and occupied his mind tranquilly for a time with the views of Spinoza (realistic pantheism). Like Herder and Goethe, he viewed life in its great entirety and sacrificed the individual to the species. Accordingly, through the gods of Greece, he fell out with ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with Spinoza, there is an impatience, too, with the perpetual references to death, and they both constantly turn to the everlasting truth of life. "It is this harping on death that I despise so much," exclaimed Browning, in the later years of his life, in a conversation ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... the new home, they are constantly with him in his mind. This is not offered as a defense for over-reaching and cannot be allowed by a magistrate as a plea for law-breaking; but it is offered to the unprejudiced reader in compliance with Spinoza's golden rule: Human errors must not be ridiculed and condemned, but understood. Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem. This wise caution is the more to be heeded in the present instance, as, from the same source, devotion ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... doubt—"Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?" There were books enough; very few French books; but then any one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages; all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats burnt to the water's rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I do by the solitude of this place, get charged with emotive fluid like a Leyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at hand to disperse it. Human love is a subjective thing—the essence itself of man, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says—ipsa hominis essentia—it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris is projected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that if any other young lady had appeared instead ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Cause; then an Albigense hurled from his rocks because he refused to part with the leaves of his old Bible; now a Dutch peasant woman, walking serenely to the stake because she refused to bow her head before two crossed rods; then a Servetus burnt by Protestant Calvin at Geneva; or a Spinoza cut off from his tribe and people because he could see nothing but God anywhere; and then it was an exiled Rousseau or Voltaire, or a persecuted Bradlaugh; till, in our own day the last sounds of the long fight are dying ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... permanent importance, form it so lightly. He would not deem it a trifle, that he was to enter into the closest relations with another soul, which, if not eternal in themselves, must eternally affect his growth. Neither, did he believe Woman capable of friendship, [Footnote: See Appendix D, Spinoza's view] would he, by rash haste, lose the chance of finding a friend in the person who might, probably, live half a century by his side. Did love, to his mind, stretch forth into infinity, he would not miss his chance of its revelations, that he might the sooner rest from his weariness ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... to fail the Buddhists in their literature—would fail us to describe this sect in full, or to show in detail its teachings, wherein are wonderful resemblances to European ideas and facts—in philosophy, to Hegel and Spinoza find in history, to Jesuitism. Nor can we stay to point out the many instances in which, invading the domain of politics, the Ten-dai abbots with their armies of monks, having made their monasteries military ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... mankind at large regards not: it will not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their author was driving at with them, and finds that this object of his is one with which it sympathizes." There is no way of getting the multitude to listen to Spinoza's Ethics or Plato's Dialectics but something is gained when a man of science like Dr. Schwegler happens to possess the gift of fluent and easy statement, and can pour into a work like the present, which is the expansion of a hasty encyclopaedia article, the vivacity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... a melancholy reflection upon the history of the Jews that they have failed to pay due honor to their two greatest philosophers. Spinoza was rejected by his contemporaries from the congregation of Israel; Philo-Judaeus was neglected by the generations that followed him. Maimonides, our third philosopher, was in danger of meeting the same fate, and his philosophical work was for long viewed ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich |
