Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/524

* SPINNING-GLAND. 452 SPINOZA. SPINNING-GLAND. One of a class of glands (q.v.) possessed by the larvae of many kinds of insects and by the majority of spiders. See Spider. SPINOLA, spS'nola, Ambrosio, Marquis de (ISOO-lOoO). A Spanish general, born in Genoa, Italy. In 1602 he led a force of 9000 vet- erans to the Netherlands against Maurice of Nassau. Made chief commander of the Span- ish army there, he forced Ostend to surrender in 1G04, after a siege of more than two years. He continued his operations against Maurice till the twelve years' truce of 1609, when he took com- mand of the Spanish troops in Germany. He took the field against the Elector Palatine Fred- erick V. and the Protestant Union in U!20, and forced the Union to disband in 1621. He captured Julich in 1C22, and Breda in 1625. Disease forced liim to give up his command, but he afterwards commanded the Spanish army in Italy. SPINOZA, spe-no'za, Baruch, or Benedict (16.32-77). A famous Dutch-Jewish philosopher, born in Amsterdam, November 24, 16.32. His father, a Portuguese merchant, had fled from Catliolic persecution to the Netherlands. Spi- noza was carefully educated in Jewish the- ology and speculation. He was, however, alien- ated from the orthodox belief by studies of physical science and of the writings of Descartes and probably those of Giordano Bruno. His here- sies resulted in threats of severe punishment from his instructors in the Talmud and the Cabala, and the relation soon became so unpleas- ant that Spinoza withdrew from the sjmagogue. The rabbis, in 16.56, excommunicated him and secured his banishment from Amsterdam. How- ever, he remained in the neighborhood of the city for five years, supporting himself, as in later years, as a lens-maker. Previous to his expulsion from the Jew'ish com- munity Spinoza is said to have fallen in love with the daughter of Van den Ende, his master in Greek and Latin, and to have been rejected by her. Possibly even before his expulsion he composed his first work, Tractatiis de Deo et Bomhie ejusqiie Felicitate (discovered in a Dutch translation in 1852, the Latin original not being e.xtant), in which the form of his developed system is foreshadowed. And the De Intellectus Emendatione and Tractatiis Theologico-politicus are also probably referable to the jjcriod of his Amsterdam residence, although the latter was not published until 1670 and the former until 1677. In 1661 Spinoza went to Rhynsburg, near Ley- den, and two or three years later to Voorburg, near The Hague. Shortly after, yielding to the solicitations of friends, he removed to The Hague itself. The Elector Palatine, Charles Louis, of- fered him a chair at the University of Heidelberg, but Spinoza declined the position in order to be free from any restrictions upon liis thinking. An oiTer of a pension, on the condition of his dedicat- ing a work to Louis XIV., he rejected with scorn. His domestic accounts, after his death, show' that he preferred to live on a few pence a day rather than be indebted to another's bounty. He died February 21, 1677. His constitution was no less undermined by consumption and overwork than his sensitive mind was wrought upon by persecu- tion and the violent severance of natural ties. But iio word of complaint ever passed his lips; simplicity and heroic forbearance, coupled with an antique stoicism and a child-like, warm, sym- pathizing heart, were the salient features of his character. His life, in its nobility and sufi'ering, is ])erhaps the most convincing plea for the vitality of the philosophy for which it served as the human context. Spinoza's philosophy finds its most adequate expression in his great work, Ethica Ordine (Ico- metrico Demonstruta (posthumously published in 1677). The basis from which it was developed was mainly Cartesianism. Certainly from Descartes he derived his empirical rationalism and his conception of exact demonstration. This latter, on the analogy of geometrical demonstra- tions, consisted of a series of axioms with corol- laries, propositions, and elucidations, designed to render bias or extraneous inference impossible, and there can be no doubt that Spinoza was one of the most conscientious of thinkers in his effort to eliminate the personal equation. Never- theless, there are few pliilosophcrs in whom the personal element is more distinctive. The very fact of Spinoza's severance from his own race and religion, together with his failure to adopt Christian thought, made the individuality of his system the more inevitable ; he was bound b_y no tradition and so followed to the fullest the instincts of his reason. He was influenced by Descartes in metliod and probably by Bruno in his pantheism, but his system is still his own to a degree seldom true in the history of philosophy. This system is a thorough-going and compli- cated pantheism. The universe is identical with God, who is the substance of all things. The conception of substance (which Spinoza inherited from the Scholastics) is not that of a material reality, but of a logical subject — the self-suffi- cient and comprehensive basis for all reality, capable of sustaining as its attributes all tem- poral existences. Spinoza recognized the possi- ble existence of an infinite number of such at- tribiites, but held that only two kinds are known to us — extension, or the world of material things, and thought. These two comprehend existence and they include all that exists in a real and pal- pable way, at least so far as human knowledge is concerned. The idea of extension as the gist of physical reality, and of thought as a non-extended reality, Spinoza derived from Descartes. But Descartes made each of these independent substances and conceded to them the power of causal interaction — mind acting upon body and vice versa. Spi- noza, as we have seen, makes both forms of reality dependent upon an ultimate substance — God — in which is their existence. Furthermore, he denies their power of causal interaction. Cause and effect in his conception are always similar; extension and thought are wholly dis- similar; therefore their causal interrelation is impossible. Causation may subsist between indi- vidual objects in the attribute extension, that is, between physical bodies, or between individual ideas in the attribute thought, but not between ideas and things. To explain the apparent causal interactions of the latter Spinoza resorted to an elaborate theory of parallelism. Every idea has a physical counterpart in the attribute exten- sion ; every physical object has its idea. This