SPINNING WHEEL 



5500 



SPIRAEA 



SPINNING WHEEL, the first mechanical ar- 

 rangement for applying a rotary motion to a 

 spindle for spinning cotton or flax into 

 threads. The principle was the same as that of 

 the spindle used by hand, but by mounting the 



AN OLD SPINNING WHEEL, 



spindle horizontally and passing a band or 

 small belt from a groove in the spindle over 

 a large wheel, turning the wheel by the foot 

 gave the spindle a more uniform motion. 



The material to be spun was* carried on a 

 distaff. The wheel was turned with the left 

 hand or foot, the material being drawn out 

 by the right hand. The degree of fineness de- 

 pended on the rapidity with which the twisting 

 thread was drawn out. For very fine thread 

 two spinnings were necessary. See SPINNING. 



SPINOZA, spino'za, BARUCH [BENEDICT] 

 (1632-1677), a Dutch-Jewish philosopher, born 

 in Amsterdam. His parents had fled from 

 Catholic persecution in Portugal, and in the 

 Netherlands he received careful instruction in 

 Jewish theology. Under the influence of the 

 philosophy of Descartes and Giordano Bruno, 

 he broke with the Jewish faith, and his hereti- 

 cal views brought about his excommunication 

 in 1656. He spent several years near Amster- 

 dam, at Rhynsburg and Voorburg, finally re- 

 moving to The Hague. In his insistence on 

 maintaining a position granting absolute free- 

 dom of thought, he lived in solitude, depending 

 on the profits from lens making, in which he 

 was proficient, and declining both the position 

 of professorship at the University of Heidel- 



berg and the pension offered him by Louis 

 XIV of France. His life was lonely, cheered 

 only occasionally by the companionship of a 

 few friends. The story that his days were sad- 

 dened by an unsuccessful suit for the hand of 

 the beautiful daughter of the learned physician, 

 Van den Ende, is now generally discredited. 

 Gentle, sensitive, heroic, with constitution 

 weakened by consumption, he lived a life of 

 seclusion, and in contemplation of God and 

 spiritual realities tried to make vital and real 

 the philosophy he taught. 



His philosophy was derived from that of 

 Descartes and developed into a complicated 

 pantheism. It declared that God exists, and 

 that His manifestations, or attributes, are two: 

 extension (that is, the world of material things) 

 and thought. It denied any causal relation 

 between mind and matter, and so he had to 

 apply a theory of parallelism to explain what 

 was apparently interaction between the two. 

 For every idea there was a physical object; 

 for every material thing a corresponding par- 

 ticular idea. Though the physical and idea- 

 tional causal series never interact, both are 

 dependent on God, the Substance and Creator. 

 Man is not free: God alone is free. That is, 

 man is a limited manifestation of God, and 

 God alone is Cause, Effect and Purpose. Man's 

 attention must be riveted on the spiritual, for 

 whenever particulars blind him and remain his 

 ideal, harm and evil result. 



His conception of God, wholly different from 

 the Christian one, laid him open to charges of 

 atheism. As he developed it into a philosophy 

 it can better be described as an elaborate ab- 

 stract monotheism. C.H.H. 



Spinoza's occupation of lens maker should re- 

 call that in Holland the first telescope was made, 

 and Amsterdam for many years led the world in 

 the making of fine lenses. For a study of Spi- 

 noza's life, consult Joachim's A Study of the 

 Ethics of Spinoza. 



Related Subjects. The reader is referred to 

 the following articles in these volumes : 

 Atheism Pantheism 



Descartes, Rene" Philosophy 



SPIRAEA, spire' a, a genus of herbs and 

 shrubs belonging to the rose family, widely dis- 

 tributed throughout temperate and cold regions 

 of the northern hemisphere. They bear beauti- 

 ful white, pink or rose-colored flowers, and 

 many of the species are cultivated as orna- 

 mental plants. Common names of familiar 

 species are meadowsweet, or bridal wreath, 

 dropwort, hardhack and willow-leaved spiraea. 

 Meadowsweet, a familiar garden shrub in 



