Baruch de Spinoza - 1632–1677

The nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment was like a beam of light refracted through a prism into a spectral band of brilliant intellectual colors spread across Western Europe. The prism through which Jewish thought was refracted was a Jew born in Amsterdam in 1632, a Jew so modern in his thinking that the twenty-first-century has not yet caught up with him. Excommunicated by the Jews in the seventeenth century, abhorred by the Christians in the eighteenth century, acknowledged "great" in the nineteenth-century, Baruch Spinoza will perhaps not be fully understood even in the twenty-first century. But perhaps by then Spinoza's philosophy will have become the basis of a world religion for neomodern man.

The Secret to Understanding Spinoza

In "The Ethics - Part 1; Concerning God", Spinoza spells out the hypothesis that all things, animate, inanimate, and even the concept of God, are bound into one grand "Organic Interdependence of Parts". From this hypothesis it logically follows that obedience to the Golden Rule is an act of self-interest and not altruism. Remember this and all his puzzling sayings become more, if not completely, understandable.  - Professor R. H. M. Elwes

Benedictus de Spinoza

The succession of ideas of bodily states cannot be arbitrarily controlled by the mind taken as a power apart, though the mind, as the aggregate of past states, may be a more or less important factor in the direction of its course. We can, in popular phrase, direct our thoughts at will, but the will, which we speak of as spontaneous, is really determined by laws as fixed and necessary, as those which regulate the properties of a triangle or a circle. The illusion of freedom, in the sense of uncaused volition, results from the fact, that men are conscious of their actions, but unconscious of the causes whereby those actions have been determined. The chain of causes becomes, so to speak, incandescent at a particular point, and men assume that only at that point does it start into existence. They ignore the links which still remain in obscurity.

Joseph B. Yesselman on Spinoza

The biography of the philosopher supplies us in some sort with the genesis of his system. His youth had been passed in the study of Hebrew learning, of metaphysical speculations on the nature of the Deity. He was then confronted with the scientific aspect of the world as revealed by Descartes. At first the two visions seemed antagonistic, but, as he gazed, their outlines blended and commingled, he found himself in the presence not of two, but of ONE; the universe unfolded itself to him as the necessary result of the Perfect and Eternal G-D. This "unfolding itself" was to me an infinite "organic interdependence of parts" which led directly to the "Golden Rule"; not out of altruism but of enlightened self-interest.  Spinoza is a harbinger of the coming, however long it may take, of a One-World Universal Religion - the One-World that is evolving as it is being organically bound together by electronic mutations. It is for this reason that I think Spinoza is the quintessential Monotheist as is Einstein - they constantly sought unification; simplicity I conjecture that the holidays of the coming Universal Religion will be purged of literal miracles, imagery, and deified figures; all of which make fences (a different language for expressing the "Oneness" of G-D) between neighbors and peoples of the world. more ->

Will Durant---The Philosophy of Spinoza