BENEDICT DE SPINOZA. 457 



TABLE SHOWING SPINOZA'S POSITION IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 

 ARISTOTLE. 



Arabic and Jewish Schools (I0th-12lh Centuries). 

 Ibn-Sina (Avicenna). Ibn-Gebirol (Avicebron)." 



Ibn-Roshd (Averroes), Ibn-Ezra. 



etc. Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), 

 etc. 



English School. 



Hobbes 

 Locke, b. 1632 

 Berkeley 

 HUME 



Neo-Platonists. 



Chasdai Creskas Giordano Bruno, 

 (fl. 1410). 



Knew little of Spinoza. 



DESCARTES. 



SPINOZA, b. 1632. 



Leibnitz. 



German School. 



Darwin.-, 



Lessing. Jacobi. Moses Mendelssohn. 



KANT— | | 



Coleridge. Fichte. Hegel. Schelling. 



Huxley. 



G. H. Lewes, etc. 



a century. Leibnitz, the man most capable of 

 doing him justice, preferred to take the opposite 

 course, and he was ill-treated even by the people 

 who might have been expected to take him up if 

 only for the reason that he was hateful to the 

 theologians. He fared little better at the hands 

 of Bayle and Voltaire than at the hands of ortho- 

 dox apologists. To Lessing, the founder in some 

 sort of German literature and criticism, belongs the 

 credit of having seen and announced Spinoza's 

 real worth. In a certain memorable conversation 

 with Jacobi he said, in so many words, " There 

 is no philosophy but the philosophy of Spinoza." 

 This and much more came out after Lessing's 

 death in a long correspondence between Jacobi 

 and Moses Mendelssohn, which finally degener- 

 ated into a controversy. After the report of that 

 one conversation, the record of all this is now of 

 little interest ; from these, however, and from 

 other letters preserved among Lessing's works, 

 the fact comes out that Lessing thoroughly un- 

 derstood Spinoza, and had grasped the leading 

 points more firmly than many of Spinoza's later 

 critics. 



Meanwhile Goethe too had found out Spinoza 



for himself, and he has recorded how the study 

 of the " Ethics " had a critical effect on the de- 

 velopment of his character. 1 And his statement 

 is fully borne out by the witness of his mature 

 work. Goethe's poems are full of the spirit of 

 Spinoza ; not that you can often lay your finger 

 on this or that idea and give a reference to this 

 or that proposition in the "Ethics," but there is 

 a Spinozistic atmosphere about all his deeper 

 thoughts. There is a set of speculative poems, 

 " Gott und Welt," which gives the most striking 

 instances ; but the same ideas are woven into all 

 parts of Goethe's work, and may be found alike 

 in romance, tragedy, lyrics, and epigrams. 



The influence thus started in philosophy and 

 literature spread rapidly. Kant's great work in 

 philosophy was independent of it ; but a strong 

 current of Spinozism set in immediately after 

 Kant, and acted powerfully on his successors. 

 Fichte, though his system widely departs from 

 Spinoza's, had obviously mastered his philosophy 

 and felt the intellectual fascination of it ; and 

 many of his metaphysical ideas are simply taken 

 from Spinoza. Hegel said, " You are much of a 

 1 " Aub meinem Leben," book xiv. 



