them. Which, in a
philosophical treatise, is most unfortunate. For though it is
undoubtedly highly desirable that the philosopher should observe the
same care and precision as the scientist, admitting nothing he cannot
prove, it is nevertheless just as well for the philosopher to take
reasonable care that what he is conscientiously proving is understood.
That Spinoza did not always take such care but considerably
over-estimated the self-evidence of his definitions and axioms and the
simplicity of many of his important propositions, is an unhappy fact
conclusively established by the increasing volume of Spinozistic
literature.

II

However, in spite of the difficult, and to the literary repellent form
of the _Ethics_, the catholicity of Spinoza's influence has been
extremely remarkable. In time, his influence bids fair to equal in
range, if not in gross extent, the as yet unparalleled influence of the
artist-philosopher Plato. It took about a hundred years for Spinoza to
come into something of his own. For the _Ethics_ was condemned with the
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ as an atheistic and immoral work. Only
when the romantic philosophers of Germany, following the lead of
Lessing and Jacobi, found in Spinoza a man who was, as they thought,
after their own heart, did Spinoza's mundane fortune change. As a result
of their efforts, Spinoza ceased to be a philosopher to be execrated in
public (though furtively read in private), and became a philosopher to
be eulogized on all occasions in most rhapsodic, if bewildering, terms.
Many others too, besides professional philosophers, began to read
Spinoza with much sympathy and unbounded admiration. Goethe, Matthew
Arnold, Heine, George Eliot, Flaubert, Coleridge, and Shelley--to
mention only a few distinguished lay names--found in Spinoza a powerful,
stimulating and, in varying degrees, congenial thinker. To-day, after
having been one of the liberating thinkers of mankind who was read but
not honored, Spinoza is fast becoming one of the canonized of mankind
who are honored but not read.

The reason for Spinoza's magnificent influence is not difficult to
discover: his philosophy deals in a grand, illuminating way with all
that is of profoundest importance in human life. There is no material
the universe offers for man's life but Spinoza seeks to understand and
explain its rational function and utility. For Spinoza set before
himself the hard task of laying down the princi