SOURCE: Introduction to Ethics by Spinoza, translated by G. H. R. Parkinson, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1989, pp. vii-xx.

[In the following essay, Parkinson studies Spinoza's life in order to elucidate the philosophical questions that animate the Ethics.]

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most difficult of philosophical works. Yet it continues to exercise a peculiar fascination, and this is by no means confined to philosophers. One of Spinoza's admirers was the poet Goethe—indeed, Goethe was partly responsible for the upsurge of interest in Spinoza late in the eighteenth century, and encouraged the publication of the first complete edition of Spinoza's works. In the middle of the nineteenth century (to be exact, between 1854 and 1856) George Eliot worked on, but did not publish, a translation of the Ethics; however, another novelist, William Hale White, published a translation in 1883, and this has been widely used. It may also be significant that James Joyce's Everyman, Mr Leopold Bloom, had on his rather poorly stocked shelves a copy of Thoughts from Spinoza.

What is it, then, that makes the work so difficult? True, it deals with difficult matters. It tries to give an account of the way in which a rational human being will behave, and it does so on the basis of a theory of the nature of man and of the universe in general. Yet there have been other books on such matters that have not been found as difficult as Spinoza's Ethics. One might find the answer to the question in the distinctive form of the book—namely, in the fact that it is written in the form of a book of geometry. But that of itself, though it might make the book austere, need not make it difficult to understand. However, the book's difficulty can perhaps be explained if one looks at another aspect of the way in which the work is written. The book presents us with an orderly series of what are claimed to be true propositions. Now R. G. Collingwood has argued, and with good reason, that if we are to understand the statements that a philosopher makes, we must also know the questions to which they are answers (R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, Oxford 1939, Ch. 5). But it is precisely such questions that are lacking in the Ethics. The book contains, as it were, the answers to questions; it does not state the questions themselves.

How, then, is one to discover these questions? We can get some help from other philosophical writings of Spinoza, in which his views are presented in an informal way. But above all we need to know something about Spinoza's life; about the circles in which he moved, and the nature of his interests. The pages which follow, therefore, will offer a short biographical sketch of Spinoza; when this has been completed, we shall be better able to consider the problem of the nature of his questions.

Benedictus de Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632. His father, Michael de Spinoza, was one of a number of Sephardic Jews from Portugal, who had taken refuge in Holland from religious persecution. The family language would have been Portuguese, and the philosopher who later called himself by the Latin name ‘Benedictus’ was generally known in his youth by the Portuguese name ‘Bento’. (Incidentally the Hebrew name ‘Baruch’, which is still sometimes used to refer to Spinoza, was for ritual purposes only.) The Jews who had fled from Spain and Portugal were, by virtue of the languages they knew, well qualified to handle trade between the Iberian peninsula and Holland. Spinoza's father was one of these merchants, and carried on what seems to have been a flourishing general import business. This business was to play a part in the life of the young Spinoza.

The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam had founded in 1616 a school, the ‘Talmud Torah’ (‘Study of the Law’), and the young Spinoza would have been taught there. The school had two divisions, a junior and a senior. Instruction in the junior division continued until a boy's thirteenth year; more advanced study would have been carried on by the relatively few boys who proceeded to the senior division, and archival evidence shows that Spinoza was not one of these. It is therefore wrong to suppose (as some have done) that Spinoza was deeply read in Talmudic lore from his earliest days, and that he was intended to be a rabbi. On the contrary, it seems to have been Michael de Spinoza's wish that Bento should concentrate on a business career. And indeed, when Michael died in 1654, Bento and his brother Gabriel carried on the family business for a time.

Spinoza's departure from the Talmud Torah did not mark the end of his education in Jewish thought. He continued his studies as a member of a ‘Yeshivah’, a kind of study circle, led by the distinguished rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. It is clear, however, that Spinoza was not a compliant member of this circle, and his membership of it—and indeed, of the Jewish community of Amsterdam—came to a dramatic end on 27 July 1656, when he was excommunicated for his ‘wrong opinions’ and ‘horrible heresies’. It is not absolutely certain what these objectionable views were. Certainly, they were not the views for which Spinoza was later notorious; they were probably not even the views of Descartes, which were then being keenly discussed in Holland. However, the evidence suggests that Spinoza was already taking up a critical attitude towards the Bible, that he denied the immortality of the soul, and that he believed in a God who manifests himself only in the laws of nature.

The experience of being cut off from one's community is surely a deeply disturbing one. It is very likely that there is some connection between the events of 27 July 1656 and a famous autobiographical passage which Spinoza wrote about five years later, in a work entitled Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding). The passage, which has caught the imagination of (among others) Robert Bridges and Thornton Wilder, is valuable for the light that it throws on Spinoza's philosophical concerns. It begins as follows:

After experience taught me that all the things which occur frequently in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things on account of which I was afraid, and which I feared, had nothing good or bad in them except in so far as the mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to inquire if there was some good which was genuine and capable of communicating itself, and by which the mind would be affected even if all the others were rejected; in sum, if there is something such that, when it has been discovered and acquired, I might enjoy for eternity continuous and supreme happiness.

Spinoza goes on to say that what are commonly regarded as the highest goods—wealth, fame and sensual pleasure—are not genuine goods, and indeed are bad. So, he continues,

I saw myself to be in a position of extreme danger, and that I was compelled to seek with all my powers a remedy, however uncertain it might be, just like a sick man suffering from a fatal disease.

The remedy, Spinoza continues, can be found by thinking about the nature of the objects which we love. The search for wealth, honour or sensual pleasure leads to disputes, to the pain of loss, to envy, fear and hatred; and this comes about because the object of the search is something that can perish.

But love towards a thing which is eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, and is without sorrow of any kind; and it is this which is to be intensely desired, and sought with all our strength.

Scholars often refer to this passage when they consider Spinoza's motives for philosophising. They point out that Spinoza, unlike Descartes, did not have as his primary question, ‘What do I know?’ Certainly, he is concerned with the nature of knowledge; but the question matters to him because the answer to it bears on another question, namely ‘What is a genuinely good life for a human being?’ This often leads people to say that Spinoza's chief motives for philosophising were ethical, and indeed this is true as far as it goes. But one can go further and say that what Spinoza describes in the passage just quoted is a religious quest. This does not mean that it is not an ethical inquiry as well; but the use of phrases such as ‘love towards a thing which is eternal and infinite’ suggests that it is more than this.

We must now go back to the years immediately following 1656. After his expulsion from the synagogue, and perhaps even before it, Spinoza was on friendly terms with members of two small Christian sects, the Collegiants and the Mennonites. The former were a group of people who, weary of the squabbles of priests, tried to dispense with clergy altogether and simply met together in groups, collegia, for corporate worship. The Mennonites were followers of the Dutch Anabaptist Menno Simons (1496-1561). Many of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fiercely sectarian, and were as fiercely persecuted. However, the Mennonites were a peaceable group, holding themselves aloof from politics, and they were allowed to practise their faith undisturbed by the Dutch authorities.

One naturally asks what it was that drew Spinoza to members of these two groups. Not, it seems, an interest in the teachings of Christ, but rather an interest in the philosophy of Descartes. It was mentioned earlier that at the time at which Spinoza was expelled from the synagogue, the views of Descartes were being keenly discussed in the Netherlands. So fierce were the discussions, indeed, that in 1656 Dutch university professors were required to take an oath that they would not propound Cartesian doctrines that gave offence. The interest that Spinoza's Christian friends displayed in Descartes was not unrelated to their religious views. They saw Descartes as the philosopher who wanted to make all things new; who refused to found any opinion on mere tradition, and said that what we know is known by the ‘natural light’ of reason. This seemed to many Protestants to harmonise with what they believed about the ‘inner light’, which was described by one of Spinoza's Mennonite friends in Cartesian terms as ‘a clear and distinct knowledge of the truth, in the understanding of every man, and through which we are so convinced … that we cannot have any doubt’ (Pieter Balling, The Light on the Candlestick, 1662).

It is not known exactly when or where Spinoza first studied Descartes. There is some evidence that suggests that Spinoza may have attended philosophy lectures, on an informal basis, at the University of Leiden between 1656 and 1659; if that was so, Spinoza would almost certainly have studied Descartes there. The evidence, however, is indirect and inconclusive. What is certain is that the young Spinoza owed much to Descartes' ideas; as one of his friends remarked, when introducing Spinoza's posthumous works to the public, ‘The philosophical writings of the great and famous René Descartes were of great service to him.’ But he was by no means an uncritical student, and by the time that his surviving correspondence begins (26 August 1661), Spinoza appears as the leader of a small philosophical study group, who has already gone beyond Descartes' philosophy and is expounding his own views. His first surviving letters were sent from Rijnsburg, a village in the neighbourhood of Leiden, where Spinoza settled in 1660. It was at Rijnsburg that Spinoza wrote his first philosophical works—the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, which has already been mentioned, and the Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand (Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-being). The first-named of these was written in about 1661; a treatise on method, it was meant to be the first part of a two-part work, the second part of which was to have dealt with metaphysics. Spinoza did not complete the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, which was first published in 1677 as part of his posthumous works. The Short Treatise may be a draft of the work on metaphysics which was to follow the Tractatus. It was probably completed by 1661, but survives only in a Dutch manuscript version, and was clearly not intended for publication.

In both these works Spinoza's distinctive philosophy is already present, though in a form that is still relatively immature and in which the influences on him can be seen clearly. As one would expect, Spinoza makes much use of Descartes, but he also makes use of Dutch sources—more specifically, of the ideas and terminology of two Leiden professors, Franco Burgersdijck (d. 1636) and his successor Adrian Heereboord (d. 1651). Heereboord is particularly interesting in that he sympathised both with Cartesianism and Scholasticism. In his philosophical writings, Spinoza sometimes uses the language of the medieval Scholastics, just as Descartes did. But this does not imply (as some suppose) a close study of Scholasticism on Spinoza's part; the terms may well have been derived from Heereboord.

Despite their immaturity, the Tractatus and the Short Treatise are works in which Spinoza expounds his own philosophical views. This is true in only a very restricted sense of another work which he began during his stay at Rijnsburg, and published in Amsterdam in 1663. This is a geometrical version of the first two parts of Descartes' Principia Philosophiae, together with an appendix of ‘Metaphysical Thoughts’ (Cogitata Metaphysica). Spinoza's version of Descartes' Principia is purely expository, and his ‘Metaphysical Thoughts’ are as it were a Cartesian exercise, dealing with traditional problems of metaphysics in a Cartesian way. But although the works contain much with which Spinoza did not agree, this does not mean that he rejected them entirely, and in his later works he sometimes quotes from them.

The fact that Spinoza presented, in geometrical form, doctrines with which he did not agree has been thought to throw light on the form in which he cast the Ethics. It has been argued that he could not have meant the geometrical form of this work to be a method of proof, but that he must have thought of it as a method of exposition (L. Roth, Spinoza, London 1929, p. 24). However, this does not follow. Spinoza could have held that, in putting Descartes' philosophy in geometrical form, he was simply presenting the system in its logical order, and that this has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the system. Certainly (Spinoza might have said) if the basic premises were all true, then the conclusions drawn from them in the book must be true also; but this is not to say that all the premises are true. The Ethics, on the other hand, develops the logical consequences of premises that are true.

It was said just now that the first of Spinoza's surviving letters dates from his stay in Rijnsburg. Since our present concern is not with Spinoza's life as such, but rather with the questions to which the Ethics was meant to provide the answers, it will be convenient to leave chronology aside for the moment and consider Spinoza's correspondence as a whole, for the light that it throws on his interests. The seventeenth century saw a revolution in science. The old, Aristotelian ways of explanation, which stressed the idea of purpose, were replaced by an approach to nature which may be called mechanistic. This approach went with an emphasis on the importance of mathematics for the physicist; the new scientists, as Galileo said in a famous phrase, believed that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics. In this new science, Descartes—who was a mathematician and a scientist as well as a philosopher—played an important part, and it is not surprising that Spinoza, too, should display an interest in science. Of the eighty-six letters to or from Spinoza that have survived, nineteen touch on scientific or mathematical issues. It is well known that, once Spinoza had left the world of business, he supported himself by grinding lenses, and so it is only to be expected that some of the letters should deal with problems of optics (see nos. 36, 39, 40, 46). But other letters display an interest in science which is not purely professional. Spinoza corresponds with the eminent chemist Robert Boyle about nitre, fluidity and firmness (Letters 6, 11, 13, 16); he discusses with the Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, recent work on comets (Letters 29-32) and Descartes' theories about the planets (Letter 26); he comments on Descartes' laws of motion and asks for news of an experiment designed to test a hypothesis put forward by Huygens (Letters 32-3); he discusses the calculation of chances, and reports on an experiment of his own about pressure (Letters 38, 41). These indications of an interest in the sciences are confirmed by a list of the books from Spinoza's library that were put up for sale after his death. Of the 161 books listed, roughly a quarter are mathematical or scientific works, covering astronomy, physics, chemistry and anatomy.

Spinoza left Rijnsburg in April 1663 and moved to Voorburg, a village near The Hague. In 1670 he moved to The Hague itself, where he resided until his death from consumption on 21 February 1677. He seems to have begun work on the Ethics whilst still at Rijnsburg; certainly he sent the first propositions of what appears to be a draft of the book to his friends in Amsterdam in February 1663 (Letter 8). By June 1665 a draft of the book was near completion. However, Spinoza suspended work on the Ethics in the latter half of 1665, and did not take it up again until about 1670. His reasons for putting the work aside were weighty ones, and have to do with the political life of his epoch.

In 1579, the provinces of the Protestant Netherlands had come together in a Union, the Union of Utrecht, from which there developed the Dutch Republic. Article 13 of the Union stated that ‘The provinces are free to regulate religion, each in their own region, and no one should be persecuted or made the subject of a judicial inquiry on account of his religious beliefs.’ This declaration of tolerance did not remain a mere ideal but was actually put into practice, and it attracted to Holland many Jews who sought refuge from religious persecution. However, Article 13 was not to the taste of all Dutch Christians, but was opposed by a powerful sect, the ‘strict’ or ‘precise’ Calvinists. These people wanted just one official religion in the Netherlands—their own—and they wanted non-Calvinists excluded from public office. They won some success at the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618-19, in that Calvinism was then recognised as the official religion. However, they did not succeed in excluding all non-Calvinists from office, and the statesman Jan de Witt, who was the political leader of the Netherlands between 1653 and 1672, continued to uphold the ideals of tolerance.

We now return to Spinoza, and to his interruption of his work on the Ethics in 1665. He laid the work aside in order to write a book which, in opposition to the views of the strict Calvinists, defended the freedom of speech and thought. The book in question was the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Treatise on Theology and Politics), which was published in 1670. In this book, Spinoza defended what he called the ‘freedom to philosophise’ (libertas philosophandi). One should remember, however, that Spinoza and his contemporaries meant more by ‘philosophy’ than we now mean by the term. For them, the term covered scientific thinking as well; for example, much of the work that Descartes called ‘The Principles of Philosophy’ is a treatise on physics. Spinoza tries to show that one can ‘philosophise’ freely—i.e. without interference from the state—without doing any harm to piety, or to the public peace. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that if the freedom to philosophise is removed, then piety and the public peace go with it. What made the work intensely controversial was the fact that Spinoza's defence of freedom involved an attack. The strict Calvinists based their views on the Bible; Spinoza tried to show that the Bible is not to be regarded as containing philosophical and scientific truth. The Bible, he argues, has to be seen as the work of human beings, who wrote with a specific purpose in view. They never intended to probe deeply into the divine nature; scripture, Spinoza says (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Ch. 13, title) teaches only very simple things, and its aim is the inculcation of obedience to a certain moral code, a certain ‘way of living’ (certa vivendi ratio).

It would be an over-statement to say that modern biblical criticism begins with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. There had been Jewish scholars in the field before Spinoza; for example, it is likely that he made use of the work of one of his contemporaries, Isaac la Peyrère, a copy of whose Praeadamitae (1655) was in his library. But one may doubt whether any biblical critic before Spinoza had produced a book which had anything like the scope and boldness of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The Calvinists, it need hardly be said, were furious. In July 1670 the Synod of South Holland condemned the Tractatus as ‘an evil and blasphemous book’; two years later, the anonymous author of an attack on Jan de Witt doubtless spoke for many when he said that the book had been ‘spawned in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil’. The author added that ‘This book was published with the knowledge of Mr Jan de Witt.’ That assertion, at any rate, is probably true; it is hard to believe that the book could have been published without friends in high places.

As long as de Witt remained in power, Spinoza was fairly safe. However, in 1672 French armies invaded the Netherlands; de Witt was murdered by a mob in The Hague, and the Dutch turned to Prince William III of Orange as their leader. William found it useful to side with the Calvinists, and in July 1674 Spinoza's clerical enemies succeeded in getting the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus banned. Meanwhile, Spinoza had returned to work on the Ethics, and by July 1675 the work was complete. However, Spinoza thought it advisable to delay publication because of clerical opposition (Letter No. 68). In fact the work did not appear during his lifetime, but formed part of his Posthumous Works, which were published in December 1677. During the last few months of his life, Spinoza was working at a treatise on politics (Tractatus Politicus), but he did not live to complete this, and it too appeared as part of his Posthumous Works.

It is now time to see what light this survey of Spinoza's life and work throws on problems about the interpretation of the Ethics. At first sight, it might seem to raise problems of its own. We have seen that Spinoza was deeply interested in the science of his time, and that he also rejected the view that the Bible is an authoritative source of information about philosophical and scientific matters. This might lead one to suppose that Spinoza maintains that there is a fundamental opposition between science and religion, and that he comes down on the side of science. On the other hand, I have pointed out that a passage from the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione suggests that Spinoza's concern was in some respects a religious one. One could of course attempt to remove the contradiction by arguing that the Tractatus is an early work, and that Spinoza could have abandoned some of its doctrines when he came to write the Ethics. But in fact Spinoza finds a place for religion in that work (e.g. Part IV, Prop. 37, Note 1), and it is obvious that the book contains many references to God. The question is, whether Spinoza uses the terms ‘religion’ and ‘God’ in any generally recognised sense, or whether these and similar terms serve to camouflage views that are basically anti-religious.

In trying to answer this question, it will be useful to begin by exploring Spinoza's concept of God. The first definition that the Ethics contains is that of a ‘cause of itself’ (causa sui). Something is a cause of itself if its existence is self-explanatory; now, Spinoza goes on to argue that such a cause must exist, and also that it is what he calls ‘God’, namely an absolutely infinite being. This God is not only self-caused but is also the first cause; that is, it is the ultimate ground or explanation of everything that there is. So far, at any rate, this concept of God may not seem to differ fundamentally from that which is to be found in the Judaic or Christian tradition. Adherents of these traditions of religious thought might be hesitant about the idea of a self-caused being; nevertheless, they would agree with the idea that there is a first cause, and that this first cause is God. But this agreement is only superficial, and conceals a fundamental difference of views. The theory of God that is common to Christianity and Judaism is a theistic one. That is, God is thought of as a purposive agent, who is the first cause of the universe in the sense that he freely creates it. He creates it, moreover, in the sense that he brings it into existence out of nothing, and what he creates has an existence which is different from his own. Further, God's creative activity is the work of a being who possesses in a supreme degree many of the features which are admired in human beings, such as wisdom, power and goodness. In sum, God is regarded as a person—and not as someone who is remote from his creation, but as someone with whom human beings can and do have personal relations. Spinoza's theory of God, on the other hand, is pantheistic. God is the first cause in that everything has to be explained by reference to God; but this is not to say that the universe, in the sense of the totality of particular things, is something that is really distinct from God. Rather, ‘Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God’ (Ethics, Part I, Prop. 15). Further, this God cannot be thought of in personal terms, on the analogy of a wise and powerful monarch who freely chooses the best means to bring about his good ends. The concept of creation, as theists understand it, is for Spinoza an incoherent concept (see Ethics, Part I, Appendix).

In explaining the way in which particular things are ‘in’ God, Spinoza makes his own distinctive use of concepts which Descartes had employed—namely, the concepts of substance and mode. Roughly speaking, Descartes and Spinoza view a substance as that which exists independently of anything else; a ‘mode’ of a substance, on the other hand, is something that cannot exist independently—as, for example, the shape of a brick cannot exist in isolation from the brick. Not that either Descartes or Spinoza would say that a brick, or any other particular physical thing, is a substance. Both would say that such things are modes; however, they disagreed in their answers to the question, of what they are modes. Descartes held that they are modes of corporeal or extended substance, which he believed to be distinct from, though dependent on, God. Spinoza, on the other hand, argued that there can be only one substance, and that the one substance is God. What Descartes called ‘extended substance’, Spinoza argued, is an ‘attribute’ of substance, and physical things are modes of this attribute, the attribute of extension. Spinoza also argued that there is a corresponding situation with respect to human minds. Descartes believed that each human mind is a mental substance; Spinoza, on the other hand, argues that human minds are modes—modes of the attribute of thought.

It is not necessary, for the purposes of this introduction, to go further into Spinoza's famous (and difficult) theory of the attributes of substance. What has been said here is sufficient to show how different Spinoza's God is from the God in whom theists believe. One may indeed wonder whether it merits the name ‘God’. In a famous phrase, Spinoza spoke of the infinite being as ‘God, or Nature’ (Deus seu Natura: Ethics, Part IV, Preface), and it may be thought that he would have done better to call this being ‘Nature’ rather than ‘God’. There lies behind this the suspicion that Spinoza's concept of God seems to have no part to play in religion. Spinoza's ‘God’, it may seem, is just the final explanation, the ultimate ground of things, and no more. But if the term ‘God’ is to be properly used, then it must be usable within the context of religious language, and in this context, it must be taken to refer to a personal deity.

Spinoza, for his part, would agree that there is a connection between religion and the concept of God; however, he would deny that religion, in the genuine sense of the term, requires the concept of a personal God. Religion, as he understands it, is ‘Whatever we desire and do of which we are the cause, in so far as we … know God’ (Ethics, Part IV, Prop. 37 Note 1). To grasp the full meaning of this, one must take account of the fact that there is for Spinoza a link between one's knowledge of God and one's activity as a moral agent. This link involves what is perhaps the key concept of Spinoza's moral philosophy, namely, the concept of freedom. By ‘freedom’, in the context of his moral philosophy, Spinoza does not mean the freedom to philosophise which he defended in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, nor does he mean what is commonly called the ‘freedom of the will’. Spinoza was in fact a strict determinist; in his view, whatever happens must happen, and nothing can happen other than what does happen (Ethics, Part I, Prop. 33). A free agent, for him, is not someone whose actions are undetermined; a free agent is someone whose actions are self-determined, i.e. who is an autonomous agent. The connection between such freedom and the knowledge of God is this. Spinoza argues that to be self-determined is not to be controlled by one's passions; one is self-determined when one's reason is in control. This means that one is free when one understands oneself and, in so doing, understands that ‘God, or Nature’ of which one is a part.

Since God, by virtue of being self-caused, is self-determined, it is not surprising that Spinoza should say that God is a ‘free cause’ (Ethics, Part I, Prop. 17 Corol. 2). The problem is, how anything other than God can be called free. Spinoza insists that each particular thing is determined by another (Ethics, Part I, Prop. 28); how, then, can there be any point in finite beings such as ourselves having freedom as a goal? The answer, stripped of Spinoza's technical terminology, is this. To be a rational agent is to understand; now, Spinoza argues that when we understand something, we are not reacting to external stimuli. Rather, God is (as it were) thinking through us, or, as Spinoza says, God is ‘explained through the nature of the human mind’ (Ethics, Part II, Prop. 11 Corol.).

Just how this is to be interpreted is a matter of controversy, but perhaps enough has been said to show, in general terms, how Spinoza's moral philosophy is related to his views about God. It has been seen that the free man, the man who is the master of his passions, is the man who has understanding, and that such understanding involves a knowledge of, and indeed in a sense is the knowledge of, the ultimate and self-explanatory being. We can now return to Spinoza's use of the term ‘religion’ to refer to the desires and actions which are caused by our knowledge of such a being. The question is, whether this is a proper use of the term ‘religion’—a question the answer to which bears on the question whether Spinoza is entitled to call his self-caused being by the name ‘God’. Certainly, it is hard to see how Spinoza's concept of religion can have any place for the concept of worship, or of petitionary prayer. Some might argue, however, that these concepts are not necessary to religion. What is necessary, they would say, is the idea that human beings are part of a whole, and one which is in some way a rational whole. If one views religion in this way, then there is a case for saying that Spinoza did hold religious views, and that he had a right to use the word ‘God’ in the way that he did. One may add that it is probably this aspect of his philosophy, and not (say) his technical views about substance or about knowledge, that has proved attractive to many who are not philosophers.

What has just been said about Spinoza and religion provides an answer to another question raised earlier (p. xvii): namely, whether Spinoza is one of those who see science and religion as in conflict. The answer is that he would not recognise such a conflict—provided that ‘religion’ is taken in his sense of the term. We have seen that, for Spinoza, to speak of religion is to speak of those desires and actions that spring from a knowledge of God. Similarly, he would say that a scientific knowledge of the world depends in the last analysis on a knowledge of God, the ultimate explanation of all things. Spinoza would say, then, that in his sense of the term ‘religion’, there is no conflict between religion and science. However, he also believed that false views about God had been a major obstacle to understanding, and to those false views he was firmly opposed.