Spinoza's Political and Ethical Philosophy (Classic Reprint)

Spinoza sphilosophy which writers like Hegel andE rdmann have given, is, both in general and in its details, not tenable, and derives all its plausibility from an arbitrary selection of a few passages which had, forS pinoza, no such meaning as is extracted from them. I can say this without presumption, as my study of Spinoza was begun with an implicit belief that the lie of the country had been for ever settled by these writers, and I was only slowly and most reluctantly driven to the conclusion that one must part company either with them or withS pinoza. What this book attempts is, to furnish a connected and continuous exposition of Spinoza ssystem, and to discover how his ideas were related to one another. And perhaps I may plead the difficulty of the task in extenuation of some of the defects of this volume. The only part of Spinoza sphilosophy which gets no separate treatment is his metaphysics. Want of sqre made this at present inevitable, and on other grounds jk) not much regret it. For it can be shown thatS pinoza had no interest in metaphysics for its own sake, while he was passionately interested in moral and political problems.H ewas aM etaphysician at all only in the sense that he was resolute in thinking out the ideas, principles, and categories which are interwoven with all our practical endeavour, and the proper understanding of which is the condition of human welfare. A true Metaphysic meant to him true and adequate thinking of our own nature and our place in the universe. This exposition of Spinoza may seem to borrow from later idealistic philosophy, and put to his credit principles which were developed only at a much later date.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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