Spinoza

f irreconcilable principles, as an inadequate apprehension of the meaning and results of one leading principle. One help towards the right understanding of his system we have found in Spinoza's own account of the motive of his speculations, the impulse which originated and guided the process by which he endeavoured to attain intellectual satisfaction. Another help may be found in what we know of his early studies, and of the writers who may have moulded his mind or given a special direction to his thoughts. Much ingenuity has been spent, perhaps we might say misspent, in tracing the supposed " sources" of Spin- ozism. Not only has it been regarded by many writers as the logical development of the Cartesian philosophy, but, in so far as it diverges from the latter, it has been represented as reflecting or reproducing the mystical theosophy of the Kabbala, or the ideas of MaimonidesOriginality. 37 and other medieval Jewish philosophers, or the revived Platonism of Giordano Bruno and other writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But it is to be considered that the originality of a philosophical writer is not to be determined simply by the measure in which his ideas are traceable to earlier sources, or by the suggestions he has caught up from other minds. To lend real value to any contribution to philosophy it must reproduce the past, the sole question is whether the reproduction is a dead or living reproduction, a rechauffe of old materials coll...