THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SPINOZA 117
individual mind and self, and make its first argument in three words : "I
think, therefore I am" (Cogito^ ergo sum). Perhaps there was something
of Renaissance individualism in this starting-point; certainly there was in
it a whole magician's-hatful of consequences for later speculation. Now
began the great game of epistemology, 3 which in Leibniz, Locke, Berke-
ley, Hume and Kant waxed into a Three Hundred Years' War that at
once stimulated and devastated modern philosophy.
But this side of Descartes' thought did not interest Spinoza; he would
not lose himself in the labyrinths of epistemology. What attracted him
was Descartes' conception of a homogeneous "substance" underlying all
forms of matter, and another homogeneous substance underlying all forms
of mind; this separation of reality into two ultimate substances was a
challenge to the unifying passion of Spinoza, and acted like a fertilizing
sperm upon the accumulations of his thought. What attracted him again
was Descartes' desire to explain all of the world except God and the soul
by mechanical and mathematical laws, an idea going back to Leonardo
and Galileo, and perhaps reflecting the development of machinery and
industry in the cities of Italy. Given an initial push by God, said Descartes
(very much as Anaxagoras had said two thousand years before) , and the
rest of astronomic, geologic and all non-mental processes and developments
can be explained from a homogeneous substance existing at first
in a disintegrated form (the "nebular hypothesis" of Laplace and Kant) ;
is a
and every movement of every animal, and even of the human body,
mechanical movement, the circulation of the blood, for example, and
reflex action. All the world, and every body, is a machine; but outside the
world is God, and within the body is the spiritual soul.
Here Descartes stopped; but Spinoza eagerly passed on.
3. EXCOMMUNICATION
These were the mental antecedents of the externally quiet but internally
disturbed youth who in 1656 (he had been born in 1632) was summoned
before the elders of the synagogue on the charge of heresy. Was it true,
they asked him, that he had said to his friends that God might have a
body the world of matter; that angels might be hallucinations; that the
soul might be merely life; and that the Old Testament said nothing
of immortality?
We do not know what he answered. We only know that he was oft'ered
an annuity of $500 if he would consent to maintain at least an external
loyalty to his synagogue and his faith; 4 that he refused the offer; and
that on July 27, 1656, he was excommunicated with all the sombre
Epistemology means, etymologically, the logic (logos) of understanding (epi*
)
i. e., the origin, nature and validity of knowledge.
*Graetz, History of the Jews; New York, 1919; vol. v, p. 140.