Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/102

xcvi Schuller arrived. Spinoza was up, and at midday had some chicken-broth which the doctor had ordered for him. There seemed to be no immediate danger, and the Van der Spycks went to church in the afternoon. On their way home they were informed that Spinoza was no more. He had passed away at three o clock, in the presence of Dr. Schuller.

Four days later Spinoza was buried in the New Church on the Spuy, which is quite near to the Paviljoensgragt. Six coaches followed the cortège, and many prominent people followed him to his last resting-place, which was close to that of Jan de Witt. Of wordly possessions he left very little behind him, and that chiefly in the way of books. Dr. Schuller took possession of some of the most valuable of these, and even then there still remained about 160 works (some of them quite costly), the list of which has fortunately been preserved; and copies of nearly all of them are now in the Spinoza Museum at Rijnsburg. The proceeds of these, and of some lenses which he also left behind, were just enough to defray all his debts and the cost of burial—though his grave was but a hired grave, and was used again some years after his death.

In accordance with Spinoza's instructions, his desk, containing the manuscripts of his unpublished works, was entrusted to the care of Jan Rieuwertsz, the Amsterdam bookseller. Immediate publication seemed to be dangerous for publisher and editors; and when they had the courage they had not the money to proceed with the printing. For a time they thought of selling the manuscript of the Ethica to Leibniz, intending no doubt to apply the proceeds towards the cost of printing it from one of their own copies of that work. Schuller had already communicated with Leibniz about it, but at the last moment some one at the Hague came to the rescue, and as early as November 1677 Spinoza's Opera Posthuma appeared in print. It consisted of one quarto volume, and contained the Ethics, the Political Treatise, the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding, the Letters,