Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/151

Rh to a certain Bresser, the same "J. B. Med. Dr." to whom the forty-second letter of Bruder's collection is addressed, Spinoza wrote the altogether charming page published by Van Vloten at p. 303 of his "Supplementum." He gently reproaches his young friend with his neglect, and urges him to write.


 * I earnestly ask of you, nay, by our friendship I beg and beseech you, that you now turn your attention to some serious study, and henceforth devote to the culture of your mind and soul the better part of your life; now, I say, now, whilst it is yet time, and before you have cause to lament the downhill of your years. As to our correspondence, I have a word to say, in order that you may write to me with the greater freedom. Know then that I have long suspected, nay, been almost certain, that you are more diffident of your own powers than is desirable, and that you are fearful of asking or stating something that may fail to smack of learning (quod virum doctum non redoleat). I am not going to enter into praises of you, and narrate your gifts. But if you are fearful of my communicating your letters to others, so as to cause you to become a laughing-stock for them, I give you my word beforehand that I will keep them religiously for myself, and not communicate them to any soul without your leave.

Spinoza was in correspondence too with his friend Jarig Jellis, on philosophical matters, and on the attempts of one Helvetius to obtain gold by transmutation, a subject in which Spinoza seems to have been much interested.

His friends seem to have been dissatisfied with the remoteness and out-of-the-way character of the little village in which the master resided; and finally, in 1670, he yielded to their entreaties, and settled at the Hague. He there lived at first "en pension" on the Veexkaay, in the house of a certain Widow Van Velden. Finding this mode of life to be too expensive, he hired a room in the house of Henry Van der Spyck, an artist, on the Paviloengragt, "where he lived according to his fancy in a very retired manner, himself seeing to the providing of what food and drink was necessary for him."

This was an anxious year. In it, after some fourteen years of preparation, revision, and alternation of hope and despair, the "Theologico-Political Treatise" at length saw the light. Of the anxiety that must have attended its production, some idea may be formed from the precautions with which its publication was attended. It first appeared anonymously, under the title "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, continens dissertationes aliquot, quibus ostenditur, libertatem philosophandi non tantum salva pietate et reipublicæ pace posse concedi, sed eandem nisi cum pace reipublicæ ipsaque pietate tolli non posse. Hamburgi, apud Henricum Kuenrath, 1670." Henry Kuenrath of Hamburg was a fiction, designed to lead the press-controlling authorities on to a false scent, the real publisher being Christopher Conrad of Amsterdam. The epitome of the contents of the book given in the declaration of the long title, that it showed "that freedom of philosophizing may not only exist without hurt to piety and the peace of the State, but that it cannot be withheld without hurt to the peace of the State and even to private piety," reticent though it was, was imprudently honest. The book was officially proscribed, though not, indeed, immediately on its appearance; for in February, 1671, we find Spinoza writing to Jarig Jellis to beg him to do his best to prevent a threatened translation of the book into Belgic; "which to prevent," he says, "is not only my desire but that of many friends and acquaintances, who would not willingly see the book proscribed, which it certainly would be if it appeared in the Belgic tongue." The very year it appeared it was attacked by Jacobus Thomasius in a tract, "Adversus anonymum de Libertate Philosophandi;" by Fr. Rappoltus, in an "Oratio contra Naturalistas;" in 1671 by an anonymous S. M. V. D. M., in a certain "Epistola" directed against it; whilst from 1671 to 1676, that is, during the remainder nearly of the author's short life, it was copiously written against by authors whose names have now lost all interest. These attacks appear to have left Spinoza very much at his ease. Of the bulky quarto, "Adversus anonymum Theolagico-Politicum," that the professor at Utrecht, Regnerus a Mansvelt, had written against him, he writes to a friend, "I have seen exposed in the bookseller's window a book that the Utrecht professor has written against me; and from what I was able to read of it, I judged it unworthy to be read, much more to be replied to. I shall therefore leave alone book and author." Early in 1671 one Lambert van Velthuysen (or Velthusius), a writer on theology and philosophy, attacked it in a letter of thirty-five pages that he wrote to Isaak Orobius, who forwarded it to Spinoza for refutation. In his letter to Orobius, Velthuysen accuses the author of the "Tractatus" of "subverting all worship and all religion, of secretly introducing atheism, or making God such that no room is left for his