Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/41

Rh ties, in so far as they turned on the narrower problems of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish ceremonial, were by no means new. They had been clearly realised, and partly dealt with, by others long before him.

As regards the wider philosophical questions, it is difficult to say what Spinoza s philosophy was like at that epoch of his life. One can scarcely suppose that his thought was already systematised into a definite philosophic theory. Most likely his views were as yet but loosely connected, and, in the main, negative rather than positive in tendency. And these views also were, in very large measure, if not exclusively, suggested to him by Jewish writers. These more philosophical problems, too, were not altogether new, they had been realised, and grappled with, by other Jews before him. The popular conception of Creation (creatio ex nihilo) had been denied by both Ibn Ezra and Gersonides, who maintained the eternity of matter. Crescas (1340-1410) had maintained that God had extension, and the Jewish Mystics taught that Nature was animated. Maimonides had denied that man was the centre of creation, maintaining that each thing exists for its own sake, and Crescas denied the validity of final causes. Maimonides also had suggested the relativity of good and evil, and Ibn Ezra and Crescas had maintained a thoroughgoing determinism.

Spinoza, however, felt the accumulated burden of all these problems, and he may already have been sufficiently influenced by Cartesian thought to refuse to accept any unproved assertions. Moreover, Spinoza lacked the power (one is almost inclined to call it a gift) which his Jewish predecessors possessed, namely, the power of detaching their theories from their practical everyday life. However advanced or heterodox their views may have been, yet they were conservative in feeling, and conservative in practice, and observed religious customs just like the most orthodox. Such an attitude may easily be accused of duplicity; but