s of God's eternal Word being
divinely inscribed in the human mind: "And this is the true original
of God's covenant, stamped with His own seal, namely, the idea of
Himself, as it were, with the image of His Godhead" (iv); or, again,
"The supreme reward for keeping God's Word is that Word itself."
Spinoza knew no Greek, but, master as he was of Christian theology, he
may have studied Philo in a Latin translation, and caught some of his
phrases. With or without influence, he developed, as Philo had done, a
system of philosophy, starting from the Hebrew conception of God and
blending Jewish tradition with scientific metaphysics. The Unity of
God and His sole reality were the fundamental principles of his
thought, as they had been of Philo's. He rejected, indeed, with scorn
the notion that all philosophy must be deduced from the Bible, which
was to him a book of moral and religious worth, but free from all
philosophical doctrine. Theology, the subject of the Bible, according
to him, demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect knowledge.[345]
Both alike are saving, but the spheres of the two are distinct: and
Moses and the prophets excel in law and imagination, not in reason and
reflection. Hence Spinoza approached the Bible from the critical
standpoint; and, on the other hand, he approached philosophy with a
free mind searching for truth, independent of religious dogmatism, and
he was, therefore, the founder of modern philosophy. None the less his
view of the universe is an intellectual expression of the Hebraic
monotheism, which unites a religious with a scientific monism. He
regards God as the only reality, sees and knows all things in Him, and
deduces all things from His attributes, which are the incomplete
representations that man makes of His true nature; he explains all
thought, all movement, and all that seems material as the working of
His modes; and, finally, he places as the end of man's intellectual
progress and the culmination of his moral life the love of God. In
truth, Jewish philosophy has its unity and its special stamp, no less
than Jewish religion and tradition, from which it receives its
nurture. Thrice it has towered up in a great system: through Philo in
the classical, through Maimonides in the mediaeval, through Spinoza in
the modern world. In the Renaissance of Jewish learning during the
nineteenth century, Philo was at last studied and interpreted by scholars
of his own people. The first modern wri