SPINOZA: 1677 AND 1877. 217 



solitary of the Pavilioengragt grew to be in the opinion of right- 

 thinking theologians and philosophers ! 



Portraits were spread abroad exhibiting him as " bearing on his 

 face the signs of reprobation." A distinguished philosopher, bold as 

 he, but less consistent and less completely sincere, called him " a 

 wretch." But Justice was to have her day. The human mind, attaining, 

 in Germany especially, toward the end of the eighteenth century, to a 

 more enlightened theology and a wider philosophy, recognized in Spi- 

 noza the precursor of a new gospel. Jacobi took the public into his 

 confidence as to a conversation he had held with Lessing. He had 

 gone to Lessing in hopes of enlisting his aid against Spinoza. "What 

 was his astonishment on finding in Lessing an avowed Spinozist ! 

 " "Ev KoX Tiav," said Lessing to him this is the whole of philosophy. 

 Him whom a whole century had declared an atheist, Novalis pro- 

 nounced a " God-intoxicated man." His forgotten works were pub- 

 lished, and eagerly sought after. Schleiermacher, Goethe, Hegel, 

 Schelling, all with one voice proclaim Spinoza the father of modern 

 thought. Perhaps there may have been some exaggeration in this 

 first outburst of tardy reparation ; but time, which sets everj'thing in 

 its place, has substantially ratified Lessing's judgment ; and in the 

 present day there is no enlightened mind that does not acknowledge 

 Spinoza as the man who possessed the highest God-consciousness of 

 his day. It is this conviction that has made you decree that his pure 

 and lowly tomb should have its anniversary. It is the common asser- 

 tion of a free faith in the Infinite that on this day gathers together, 

 in the spot that witnessed so much virtue, the most select assembly 

 that a man of genius could group round him after his death. A sov- 

 ereign, as distinguished by intellectual as by moral gifts, is among us 

 in spirit. A prince who can justly appreciate merit of every kind, by 

 distinguishing this solemnity with his presence, desires to testify that, 

 of the glories of Holland, not one is alien to him, and that no lofty 

 thinking escapes his enlightened judgment and his philosophic admi- 

 ration. 



I. 



The illustrious Baruch de Spinoza was born at Amsterdam at the 

 time when your republic was attaining its highest degree of glory and 

 power. He belonged to that great race which, by the influence it has 

 exerted and the services it has rendered, occupies so exceptional a 

 place in the history of civilization. Miraculous in its own way, the 

 development of the Jewish people ranks side by side with that other 

 miracle the development of the Greek zuind ; for if Greece, from 

 the first, realized the ideal of poetry, of science, of philosophy, of art, 

 of profane life, if I may so speak, the Jewish people has made the 

 religion of humanity. Its prophets inaugurated in the world the idea 

 of righteousness, the revindication of the rights of the weak a re- 

 vindication so much the more violent that, all idea of future recom- 



