Spinozism

“ And yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an answering dissolution. And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness of what has befallen it in life, "nisi durante corpore." But Spinozism is a philosophy full of surprises ”

“ Systems like Spinozism, which seem to form a third class, neither sacrificing force to thought nor thought to force, yet by their denial of final causes inevitably fall back into the Democritic or essentially materialistic standpoint, leaving us with the great antagonism of the mechanical and the organic systems of philosophy. ”

“ Thus the idea of infinite attributes is no mere collateral speculation, but forms an407 essential element of Spinozism. The known varieties of existence are, so to speak, surrounded, supported, and fixed in their places by the endless multitude of the unknown. And this conception of being as absolutely infinite, is another proof of Spinoza’s Platonic tendencies, for it involves the realisation of an abstract idea, that is to say, of Being, which the philosopher treats as something more comprehensive than the facts of consciousness whence it is derived. ”

“ The logic of Spinoza was directed to the demonstration of one substance with infinite attributes, for which one substance with infinite attributes he had as equivalent the name "God." Some who have since followed Spinoza, have agreed in his one substance, but have denied the possibility of infinite attributes. Attributes or qualities, they urge, are attributes of the finite or conditioned, and that you cannot have attributes of substance except as attributes of its modes. You have in this distinction the division line between Spinozism and Atheism. ”

“ In the first place Spinozism is asserted to be Atheism—by Jacobi, for instance (Werke, Vol. IV. Section I. p. 216) —because in it no distinction is drawn between God and the world; it makes nature the real God, or lowers God to the level of nature, so that God disappears and only nature is established. But it is not so much God and nature that Spinoza sets up in mutual opposition, as thought and extension; and God is unity, not One made up of two, but absolute Substance, in which has really disappeared the limitation of the subjectivity of thought and nature. ”

“ It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy. For as we saw above (Vol I. p. 144) , when man begins to philosophize, the soul must commence by bathing in this ether of the One Substance, in which all that man has held as true has disappeared; this negation of all that is particular, to which every philosopher must have come, is the liberation of the [258] mind and its absolute foundation. ”

“ It seems to me that the ramparts of Spinozism might be beaten down on a side which Bayle has neglected. Spinoza thinks that there can exist but one substance; and it appears throughout his book that he builds his theory on the mistake of Descartes, that "nature is a plenum." ”

“ Stewart, that this theory is the most effectual confutation of the gloomy materialism of Spinoza, "as it lays the axe to the very root from which Spinozism springs." "The cardinal principle," he says, "on which the whole of that system turns is, that all events, physical and moral, are necessarily linked together as causes and effects; from which principle all the most alarming conclusions adopted by Spinoza follow as unavoidable and manifest corollaries. ”

“ The philosophical method which Spinoza here repudiates, the interpretation of the world in moral terms, is Platonism, an independent and profoundly important movement, belonging to the same general realistic type with Eleaticism and Spinozism. Absolute being is again the fundamental conception. Here, however, it is conceived that being is primarily not affirmation or self-sufficiency, but the good or ideal. ”

“ See under Spine.
Spinode, spī′nōd, n. (geom.) a cusp or stationary point of a curve.
Spinozism, spi-nōz′izm, n. the doctrine of Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) , who taught that God is not only the creator, but also the original matter of the universe, which consists of and is a development of Himself.—n. Spinō′zist, a follower of Spinoza.—adj. Spinōzis′tic.
Spinster, spin′stėr, n. an unmarried female: an old maid: (obs.) a woman of loose character, fit for the spinning-house.—ns. Spin′sterdom, the world of old maids collectively; Spin′sterhood, Spin′stership, the state of being a spinster ”

“ The positive philosophic views which Jacobi exhibits in this treatise can be reduced to the following three principles: (1) Spinozism is fatalism and atheism. (2) Every path of philosophic demonstration leads to fatalism and atheism. (3) In order that we may not fall into these, we must set a limit to demonstrating, and recognize faith as the element of all metaphysic knowledge.
(1.) Spinozism is atheism, because, according to it, the cause of the world is no person—is no being working for an end, and endowed with reason and will—and hence is no God. ”

“ But since in this there is something superhuman, such persons are commonly esteemed in-human, without a God and without a World. People hardly know what sort of horns and claws to give them.
My confidence in Spinoza rested on the serene effect he wrought in me, and it only increased when I found my worthy mystics were accused of Spinozism, and learned that even Leibnitz himself could not escape the charge; nay, that Boerhaave, being suspected of similar sentiments, had to abandon Theology for Medicine. ”

“ The Spinozistic system, on the contrary, supposes one and the same substance as immediate cause of all various effects, which must be regarded as predicates of one and the same subject. Matter and mind are, with Spinoza, one and the same substance, which appears, now under the former, now under the latter attribute. ”

“ What is perplexing to understand in Spinoza’s system is, on the one hand, the absolute identity of thought and Being, and, on the other hand, their absolute [272] indifference to one another, because each of them is a manifestation of the whole essence of God. The unity of the body and consciousness is, according to Spinoza, this, that the individual is a mode of the absolute substance, which, as consciousness, is the representation of the manner in which the body is affected by external things; all that is in consciousness is also in extension, and conversely. ”

“ To speak of an equivalence between the two is simply to curtail, and make almost unintelligible, the Spinozistic or Leibnizian metaphysic. It is to accept this philosophy, such as it is, on the side of Extension, but to mutilate it on the side of Thought. With Spinoza, with Leibniz, we suppose the unifying synthesis of the phenomena of matter achieved, and everything in matter explained mechanically. But, for the conscious facts, we no longer push the synthesis to the end. We stop half-way. We suppose consciousness to be coextensive with a certain part of nature and not with all of it. ”

“ He now informed Spinoza that he had been received into the Church of Rome, and proceeded, to denounce with all the zeal of a proselyte the profane philosophy he had abandoned. He tells Spinoza that all his learning is merely chimerical, and laments that he should suffer himself to be so deceived by the devil. He asks, with delightful simplicity:—
How do you know that your philosophy is the best of all that are, or have been, or will be taught in the world? Have you examined all the ancient and modern systems of philosophy which are taught here, in India, and all over the face of the earth? ”

“ The Pantheism of Spinoza—The All-Inclusiveness of God. That Spinoza’s philosophy is a pantheism appears at the outset in his conception of substance; for the substance is all that really is. Descartes had conceived of three substances,—God as the absolute substance, and mind and matter as the two relative substances. But to Spinoza there can be only one substance; for if there were two or more, no one would be substance, since each would be conceived through the others. If we think at all, we must think of substance as all-inclusive. ”

“ Yet the philosophy of Spinoza attempts to explain all the phenomena of the universe by the idea of Absolute Being; it accounts for the concrete by the abstract; it represents all individual beings as mere modes or affections of one universal substance; in other words, it realises the abstract idea of thought and extension, but denies the existence of bodies and souls, otherwise than as manifestations of these eternal essences.
4. The system of Spinoza is vicious, because his whole reasoning on the subject of Creation is pervaded by a transparent fallacy. ”

“ Observation appears to acquaint us with two different systems of beings, and both Spinoza and orthodox philosophers agree, that the necessary substratum of each of these is a substance, in which the phenomena adhere, or of which they are attributes or modes.
"I observe first the universe of objects or of body; the sun, moon, and stars; the earth, seas, plants, animals, men, ships, houses, and other productions either of art or of nature. Here Spinoza appears, and tells me that these are only modifications and that the subject in which they inhere is simple, uncompounded, and indivisible. ”

“ Spinoza’s Substance, the terminus of all thought, is therefore the principle of the uniformity of Nature.
Spinoza’s discussion of the validity of knowledge is somewhat vacillating. At times he seems to hold the popular and scholastic definition of truth as the agreement of thought with its object. But when he examines the problem more closely he concludes that the perfection of knowledge consists of complete elaboration and internal consistency. He always regards error as negative, as due to the limitation of our experience and thought. ”

“ Now this notion of reciprocity or mutual determination is fundamental in Spinoza, and is that by which his system has gained its greatest influence over modern thought. It is true that it is not the only notion used by Spinoza,—in fact, the difficulties, even incomprehensibilities, of his metaphysics arise mainly from the conjunction of the notion of mutual determination with that of substance, but it is a thought which is involved in scientific procedure as such, and through it Spinoza has been brought into the closest relations with modern scientific work. ”

“ Here a step is made beyond the limits of the Eleatic philosophy. The famous theorem of Spinoza, 'Omnis determinatio est negatio,' is already contained in the 'negation is relation' of Plato's Sophist. The grand description of the philosopher in Republic VI, as the spectator of all time and all existence, may be paralleled with another famous expression of Spinoza, 'Contemplatio rerum sub specie eternitatis.' According to Spinoza finite objects are unreal, for they are conditioned by what is alien to them, and by one another. Human beings are included in the number of them. ”

“ That it pertains to the nature of substance to exist; and that all substance is necessarily infinite, we are told by Spinoza, who understood by substance that which exists in itself, and is conceived through itself; i.e. the knowledge of which does not require the knowledge of anything antecedent to it.
This substance of Spinoza is just the matter of Materialists. With him most likely, with them certainly, matter and substance are convertible terms. They have no objection to the word substance so long as it is the sign of something substantial; for substantiality implies materiality. ”

“ To explain what we mean by the neglect of the negative factor in thought, we may refer by way of illustration to the charges of Pantheism and Atheism brought against the doctrines of Spinoza. The absolute Substance of Spinoza certainly falls short of absolute spirit, and it is a right and proper requirement that God should be defined as absolute spirit. But when the definition in Spinoza is said to identify the world with God, and to confound God with nature and the finite world, it is implied that the finite world possesses a genuine actuality and affirmative reality. ”

“ The pantheism of Spinoza, however, was absolute, and excluded the notion of any but a finite subjectivity. Thus the infinite intellect of God is an unsupported chain of ideas recalling the theory at one time imagined by Plato.567 Or its existence may be merely what Aristotle would have called potential; in other words, Spinoza may mean that reasons will go on evolving themselves so long as we choose to study the dialectic of existence, always in strict parallelism with the natural series of material movements constituting the external universe ”

“ According to Spinoza, what constitutes the real essence of the human mind is the (divine) idea of a certain individual creature actually existing. [19] Here, perhaps, modern speculations about the constitution of matter may help us—if we use them with due reserve—to grasp Spinoza's notion of a "res singularis in actu"—or as it might be rendered freely, "a creature of individual functions," for what is Illustration by the Vortex Theory. called the "vortex theory," though as old as Cartesian philosophy, has recently flashed into sudden prominence. ”

“ This book, Dr Martineau’s Study of Spinoza (1882) and Dr John Caird’s Spinoza (1888) , are all admirable pieces of work, and, as regards the philosophical estimate, complement one another. H. H. Joachim’s Study of the Ethics of Spinoza (1901) and R. A. Duff’s Spinoza’s Political and Ethical Philosophy (1903) are important contributions of more recent date. Careful research by Professor Freudenthal, Dr W. Meyer and Dr K. O. Meinsma has recently brought to light a number of fresh details connected with Spinoza’s life and increased our knowledge of his Jewish and Dutch environment. ”

“ Of the possibly infinite number of attributes of eternal substance postulated by Spinoza, the human mind can apprehend only two—thought and extension, and even here thought and sensation are the fundamental facts, while "all else is an inference and is probably essentially unlike what it appears to our senses." It seems impossible to break down the fact that there is no absolute causal connection between the two primary categories of Spinoza, who has anticipated most of modern psychology. ”