out
delay, irrespective of popular prejudice--even Oldenburg began to
conceive a far from complimentary opinion of Spinoza after the
publication of the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_! So prevalent were
the groundless rumors that the Lutheran pastor, Colerus--the source of
most of our information--felt obliged in his very quaint summary
biography to defend the life and character of Spinoza. To his
everlasting credit, Colerus did this although he himself heartily
detested Spinoza's philosophy which he understood to be abhorrently
blasphemous and atheistic. Colerus' sources of information were the
best: he spoke to all who knew Spinoza at the Hague; and he himself was
intimate with the Van der Spijcks with whom Spinoza had lived the last
five years of his life, and with whom Colerus was now living--in
Spinoza's very room.

Spinoza's courage and strength of mind are as impressively manifested in
the constant daily life he lived as in the few severe crises he
resolutely faced. For the twenty years of his excommunication he lived
in comparative retirement, if not isolation. The frugality of his life
bordered on asceticism. All his free time and energy Spinoza dedicated
with unusual single-hearted devotion to the disinterested development of
a philosophy he knew would not be very acceptable to the general or even
special philosophic reader. His mode of life is all the more remarkable
because it was not determined by embittered misanthropy or passionate
abhorrence of the goods of the world. It was dictated solely by what he
understood to be, in his circumstances, the reasonable life for him.
Although he was an eager correspondent, and had many friends whom he
valued above all things that are external to one's own soul, his
interest in his own work kept him from carrying on, for any length of
time, an active social life. He believed, too, that it is part of the
wisdom of life to refresh oneself with pleasant food and drink, with
delicate perfumes and the soft beauty of growing things, with music and
the theater, literature and painting. But his own income was too slender
to allow him much of these temperate riches of a rational life. And
always, rather than exert himself to increase his income, he would
decrease his expenditure. Still, he no doubt enjoyed the little he had.
He found very palatable, most likely, the simple food he himself
prepared in later life; and he must have gained additional satisfaction
from the thought