"God-intoxicated"
devoutness of his Pantheism, is the desire, or rather the imperious need
increasingly realized, for a religion emancipated from theories of
creation or teleology, intolerant of any miracle, save indeed the
wonders of the spiritual life, and satisfying the heart with an ever
present God. For it is to be remembered that Spinoza was the first
Pantheist who was also a prophet, in the sense of speaking out the
divine voice of the infinite Universe to its human constituent parts.
Not that I would minimize the religious fervour of the Neo-Platonists:
it is their Pantheism that seems to have been imperfect. But in Spinoza
we have a man who, inheriting by birth the tradition--I might even say
the apostolic succession--of the Jewish prophets, and gifted with an
insight into the consummation of that tradition in Jesus Christ, was
driven by a commanding intellect to divorce the spiritual life he prized
from creeds that had become to him Impossible, and to enshrine it in the
worthier temple of an eternal Universe identical with God. It is not,
then, with his philosophy that I am so much concerned as with his
religion.[15]

[Sidenote: His Originality.]

[Sidenote: Relation to Descartes.]

It is given to no man to be absolutely original in the sense of creating
ideas of which no germs existed before his day. But short of such an
impossible independence of the past, Benedict de Spinoza had perhaps as
much originality as any man who ever lived. Yet with a modesty ever
characteristic of moral greatness, he himself was disposed, at any rate
during his earlier philosophical development, to exaggerate his
indebtedness to the philosopher Descartes, whose system he laboriously
abridged in the inappropriate form of a series of propositions supposed
to be demonstrated after the fashion of Euclid.

[Sidenote: Fundamental Differences.]

[Sidenote: Spinoza Discards Creator and Creation,]

[Sidenote: Beginning and End.]

[Sidenote: Takes the Universe as it Is.]

[Sidenote: And Worships the Static Whole as God.]

But whatever may have been the esoteric belief of Descartes about
creation out of nothing and the theological dogmas connected therewith,
he attached too much importance to the social and political functions of
established ecclesiastical institutions to declare himself independent
of them. And though his submission, signalised on his death-bed, did not
interfere with the freest working of his brilliant intellect