woman was
burnt in 1722. It can be no mere coincidence that the general decline of
this superstition belongs to the age which saw the rise of modern
science and modern philosophy.

Hobbes, who was perhaps the most brilliant English thinker of the
seventeenth century, was a freethinker and materialist. He had come
under the influence of his friend the French philosopher Gassendi, who
had revived materialism in its Epicurean shape. Yet he was a champion
not of freedom of conscience but of coercion in its most uncompromising
form. In the political theory which he expounded in Leviathan, the
sovran has autocratic power in the domain of doctrine,

[131] as in everything else, and it is the duty of subjects to conform
to the religion which the sovran imposes. Religious persecution is thus
defended, but no independent power is left to the Church. But the
principles on which Hobbes built up his theory were rationalistic. He
separated morality from religion and identified "the true moral
philosophy" with the "true doctrine of the laws of nature." What he
really thought of religion could be inferred from his remark that the
fanciful fear of things invisible (due to ignorance) is the natural seed
of that feeling which, in himself, a man calls religion, but, in those
who fear or worship the invisible power differently, superstition. In
the reign of Charles II Hobbes was silenced and his books were burned.

Spinoza, the Jewish philosopher of Holland, owed a great deal to
Descartes and (in political speculation) to Hobbes, but his philosophy
meant a far wider and more open breach with orthodox opinion than either
of his masters had ventured on. He conceived ultimate reality, which he
called God, as an absolutely perfect, impersonal Being, a substance
whose nature is constituted by two "attributes"-- thought and spatial
extension. When Spinoza speaks of love of God, in which he considered
happiness to consist, he means knowledge

[132] and contemplation of the order of nature, including human nature,
which is subject to fixed, invariable laws. He rejects free-will and the
"superstition," as he calls it, of final causes in nature. If we want to
label his philosophy, we may say that it is a form of pantheism. It has
often been described as atheism. If atheism means, as I suppose in
ordinary use it is generally taken to mean, rejection of a personal God,
Spinoza was an atheist. It should be observed that in the seventeenth
and eight