Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinozawas a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth24 November 1632
ideas true-and-false adequate
He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.
simple numbers ideas
The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.
love-is ideas joy
Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause.
philosophical self ideas
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
ideas effort mind
To comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true. Conscious analysis - which, depending on the idea, may occur almost immediately or with considerable effort - allows the mind to reject what it intially accepted as fact.
ideas order connections
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
ideas doubt ethics
He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing.
pain love-is ideas
Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
truth science ideas
Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.
popular religion respect
Popular religion may be summed up as a respect for Ecclesiastes
bad good music neither nor time
One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.
bad deaf good music neither nor
Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf
real discovery mind
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
reality men giving
But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.