George Santayana described Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), the renowned Dutch philosopher and proponent of Pantheism, as "one of those great men whose eminence grows more obvious with the lapse of years. Like a mountain obscured at first by it foothills, he rises as he recedes."

So it is that Spinoza’s ideas, largely suppressed as heresy in his own time, have received appreciative treatment in several recent works, notably in Looking for Spinoza. Author Antonio Damasio, head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, links cutting edge neurobiological research with the Spinoza’s philosophy. As it turns out, they dovetail beautifully. Damasio relates how Spinoza anticipated modern findings about the biological basis of feelings and consciousness.

Although Damasio plumbs the biological underpinnings of spirituality, he strives to avoid reductionism: “By connecting spiritual experiences to the neurobiology of feelings, my purpose is not to reduce the sublime to the mechanic and by so doing reduce its dignity. The purpose is to suggest that the sublimity of the spiritual is embodied in the sublimity of biology and that we can begin to understand the process in biological terms. As for the results of the process, there is no need and no value to explaining them: The experience of the spiritual amply suffices."

"Accounting for the physiological process behind the spiritual does not explain the mystery of the life process to which that particular feeling is connected. It reveals the connection to the mystery but not the mystery itself. Spinoza and those thinkers whose ideas have Spinozian elements make feelings come full circle, from life in progress, which is where they originate, to the sources of life, toward which they point.” ( )

Well written, really insightful. ( )