ed Scriptures. As he brilliantly shows us in the
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, the prophets' ideas about God tell us
more about the prophets than about God.

The far-reaching significance of Spinoza's propositions is one of their
most remarkable characteristics. This is due to the fact, contemporary
philological philosophers notwithstanding, that Spinoza defined the
essence, the generating principle, not the accidental qualities, of the
human mind.

Another example may not be out of place. Spinoza's proposition that
anything may be accidentally (in the philosophic sense of "accident") a
cause of pleasure, pain, or desire seems to explain the essence of all
the particular variations of the psychological phenomena known now by
all who have been aroused to the significance of their vagrant cryptic
slumbers, as the phenomena of symbolism, sublimation, and fetich
worship. Spinoza's proposition explains all the phenomena adequately
because among the fundamental human emotions, Spinoza like Freud--if we
discount the recent attempt to go beyond the pleasure-principle--reckons
only three: desire, pleasure and pain. And with Spinoza, as with the
Freudians, it sometimes seems that desire is more fundamental than the
other two, for desire expresses, in Spinoza's terminology, the essence
of man. Desire however may be stimulated by almost anything. It requires
the least sanity of mind, therefore, to prevent one from scandalously
over-emphasizing one particular class of objects--of desire.

The striking similarity, if not identity, between Spinoza's
psychological doctrines and those of contemporaries, serves to give
conclusive lie to the crass contemporary contention that Truth
instinctively shuns the philosophical study, and that she only favors
the laboratory or clinic where she freely comes and frankly discloses
herself to the cold, impersonal embrace of mechanical instruments.

It is not altogether fortuitously that Spinoza's psychology embraces so
readily contemporary psychological conceptions. Spinoza made a
psychological, if not psychoanalytical, analysis of some portions of
Scripture. And Scripture is a very rich human material. Besides having
to explain the diverse and conflicting accounts the different Scriptural
authors gave of the nature of God, Spinoza had to account for the
superstitious beliefs commonly held by men that are incorporated in the
Bible--the beliefs in omens, devils, angels, miracles, magical rites.