Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/138

132 very early conducted through a thorough course of Talmudistic study; and the thorough study of the Talmud constituted in itself a discipline that was, for those days, of no mean order.


 * It is important to remember [remarks Dr. Ginsberg in the excellent introduction prefixed to his edition of the Ethica] that the Talmud embraces all possible aspects of Jewish culture — its points of contact with the culture of other civilizations, as well as its points of difference from them. The polemical attitude of the Talmud is an occasion for bringing under consideration the whole range of speculative problems proposed or resolved by the Græco-Roman world. And if the Talmud places itself in a purely polemical attitude in regard to the different manners in which the cosmos is conceived by Platonism, Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism, yet it could not do so without imparting a considerable knowledge of the errors that it combats; and the young Talmudist became familiar with them, adopted them as part of the mechanism of his mind.

In his Talmudistic studies he was directed by the rabbin Morteira, who was, in the words of the ingeniously snappish paraphrase of Lucas, "a man celebrated amongst the Jews, and the least ignorant of all the rabbins of his time." Morteira, we are told by this writer, was struck with admiration for the genius and character of his disciple. The works of the Arabo-Hebraic philosophers of the Middle Ages, of Maimonides in particular, were studied, and at fifteen Spinoza was an accomplished Talmudist. Some such conclusion at least is what remains to us after due distillation of Lucas's somewhat unsatisfactory assertion that "before he was fifteen years old he used to propound objections that the most learned among the Jews found difficulty in resolving." Later on, Latin was studied, at first with a certain German for a master, and afterwards under the guidance of Franz Van den Ende, a physician of Amsterdam. This was an important moment in his philosophical development. Van den Ende was a man of no ordinary culture, and of no ordinary character. He fell a victim to his zeal for liberty, and was hanged for political intrigues in France: in France, not in the Netherlands as stated by Heine in his "Deutschland." Let us hope that the great poet's spirit may by this time have found consolation in the knowledge that worthy Van den Ende was not hanged in the country "where they hang worse than anywhere else in the world," but in pleasant, graceful, spirituel France, where doubtless they ordered those things better.

The horror-struck tone in which Colerus's account of him is given makes it too amusing to be passed by in silence: —


 * This man [he says] taught with much success, and gained such a reputation that the richest traders of the city entrusted him with the education of their children, until it became known that he taught his pupils other lore than Latin. For it was at length discovered that he used to sow in the minds of these young men the seeds of atheism.

A fact that good, charitable old Colerus does not state lightly; he says that he can prove it, if need be,


 * by the testimony of many pious souls, which know not how sufficiently to bless the memory of their parents who withdrew them, whilst it was still time, from the school of Satan, by removing them from the instruction of a master so pernicious and so impious.

We greatly suspect that the teaching here stigmatized as atheistical, was, in point of fact, merely the black art of physiology, in the literal sense of the term, the not yet entirely unsuspected study of natural science. The internal evidence of Spinoza's writings leaves no room for doubt that he possessed remarkably sound knowledge of nature; his whole method of thought, when he is dealing with the finite, is eminently scientific, eminently positive. Mr. Lewes has long ago pointed out that in physiological matters he never betrays ignorance. His choice of the trade of an optician is evidence of his early love for science. Colerus expressly states that, "finding himself the more strongly drawn to the investigation of natural causes and products, he abandoned theology in order to devote himself entirely to physics." All this points to the conclusion that it was to Van den Ende that he owed the stimulus that have a scientific bias to his mind.

Van den Ende had a daughter, a perfect mistress, says Colerus, of Latin and of