ABSTRACT
Baruch de Spinoza has the curious distinction of being the least influential of the great philosophers. Spinoza’s Ethics is considerably shorter than Lotze’s Macrocosmos or Whitehead’s Process and Reality, but its geometrical propositions make it look even more impregnable. Friedrich Nietzsche made the same point about Spinoza in Beyond Good and Evil, in a scornfully hostile passage. For a contemporary Englishman, the background to Spinoza’s philosophy is almost impossible to grasp. The Spanish atrocities against the Protestants in the Netherlands are an equally brutal and horrifying story. Uriel Acosta was a Portuguese Jew of considerable eminence; in Lisbon, he had permitted himself to be forcibly converted, and risen to an important position in the service of the State. Probably the closest modern equivalent to Spinoza’s psychology is the ‘existential psychology’ of Sartre. Spinoza felt himself at home in a great mystical tradition that can be traced back in ancient India, China and the Middle East.
