ABSTRACT
Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew, could scarcely hope to take a full part in the political life of his time. In early manhood, he was moved by strong feelings of revolutionary extremism which, though they later receded, never vanished. In Spinoza's thought, pantheistic mysticism, the standpoint of the seventeenth-century philosophic radicals, reached its culmination of rigor and profundity. Nevertheless, some of Spinoza's daring economic proposals in the Tractatus Politicus were related to his strain of religious communism. Spinoza's early years, spent largely in association with Mennonite thinkers, were touched with the hues of their Utopian communist outlook. Spinoza's abandonment of commercial life was a pattern of behavior not uncommon among the Collegiants and Quakers. The Calvinism of Spinoza's Holland, like the Puritan orthodoxy in Massachusetts, was prepared to grant salvation only to a few, to the fortunate predestined elect of God.
