chools,
_i.e._ on the later Scholasticism (Suarez[2]), especially on its Protestant
side (Jacob Martini, Combachius, Scheibler, Burgersdijck, Heereboord);
Descartes, it is true, felt the same influence. Joel,[3]: Schaarschmidt,
Sigwart,[4] R. Avenarius,[5] and Boehmer[6] = have advanced the view that
the sources of Spinoza's philosophy are not to be sought exclusively in
Cartesianism, but rather that essential elements were taken from the
Cabala, from the Jewish Scholasticism (Maimonides, 1190; Gersonides, died
1344; Chasdai Crescas, 1410), and from Giordano Bruno. In opposition
to this Kuno Fischer has defended, and in the main successfully, the
proposition that Spinoza reached, and must have reached, his fundamental
pantheism by his own reflection as a development of Descartes's principles.
The traces of his early Talmudic education, which have been noticed in
Spinoza's works, prove no dependence of his leading ideas on Jewish
theology. His pantheism is distinguished from that of the Cabalists by
its rejection of the doctrine of emanation, and from Bruno's, which
nevertheless may have influenced him, by its anti-teleological character.
When with Greek philosophers, Jewish theologians, and the Apostle Paul
he teaches the immanence of God (_Epist. 21_), when with Maimonides and
Crescas he teaches love to God as the principal of morality, and with the
latter of these, determinism also, it is not a necessary consequence that
he derived these theories from them. That which most of all separates him
from the mediaeval scholastics of his own people, is his rationalistic
conviction that God can be known. His agreement with them comes out most
clearly in the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_. But even here it holds
only in regard to undertaking a general criticism of the Scriptures and to
their figurative interpretation, while, on the other hand, the demand for
a special historical criticism, and the object which with Spinoza was
the basis of the investigation as a whole, were foreign to mediaeval
Judaism--in fact, entirely modern and original. This object was to make
science independent of religion, whose records and doctrines are to edify
the mind and to improve the character, not to instruct the understanding.
"Spinoza could not have learned the complete separation of religion and
science from Jewish literature; this was a tendency which sprang from the
spirit of his own time" (Windelband, _Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_,