Spinoza Selections

[“Instead of a Preface” to Of Human Bondage, New Edition (reset), Heinemann, 1934; reprinted in The Collected Edition, 1937:]

The first title I chose was Beauty from Ashes, a quotation from Isaiah, but this, I found, had been recently used and I had to look for another. It so happened that at that time I was reading Spinoza. When I came to the part of his great book that is called Of Human Bondage, it seemed to me that I could never find anything that so exactly suited me. I was told that it was a very forbidding title for a novel, but I insisted on my way. It was published in 1915.

[Of Human Bondage (1915), Chapter LIII:]

Sometimes great philosophers seemed to have nothing to say to him, but at others he recognised a mind with which show more he felt himself at home. He was like the explorer in Central Africa who comes suddenly upon wide uplands, with great trees in them and stretches of meadow, so that he might fancy himself in an English park. He delighted in the robust common sense of Thomas Hobbes; Spinoza filled him with awe, he had never before come in contact with a mind so noble, so unapproachable and austere; it reminded him of that statue by Rodin, L'Age d'Airain, which he passionately admired…

[The Summing Up (1938), Chapters LXIII, LXXIII & LXXIV:]

I look upon my first reading of Spinoza as one of the signal experiences of my life. It filled me with just that feeling of majesty and exulting power that one has at the sight of a great mountain range.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish; to bewail it senseless. Spinoza called pity womanish; the epithet has a harsh sound on the lips of that tender and austere spirit. I suppose he thought that it was but waste of emotion to feel strongly about what you could not alter.

Spinoza says that a free man thinks of nothing less than of death. It is unnecessary to dwell upon it, but it is foolish, as so many do, to shrink from all consideration of it. It is well to make up one's mind about it.

[A Writer’s Notebook (1949), “By way of postscript”, 1944:]

But there is one subject with which I can still occupy myself with my old excitement, and that is philosophy, not the philosophy that is disputatious and aridly technical – ‘Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man’ – but the philosophy that treats the problems that confront us all. Plato, Aristotle (who they say is dry, but in whom if you have a sense of humour you can find quite a lot to amuse you), Plotinus and Spinoza, with sundry moderns, among whom Bradley and Whitehead, never cease to entertain me and incite me to reflection. After all, they and the Greek tragedians deal with the only things that are important to man. They exalt and tranquillise. To read them is to sail with a gentle breeze in an inland sea studded with a thousand islands.

[Preface to The Partial View, Heinemann, 1954:]

Spinoza, that God intoxicated man, said that God has infinite attributes. Surely among them must be humour and common sense. If God exists and he concerns himself with the affairs of humanity, then surely he will take a lenient view, as lenient a view as a sensible man takes, of the weakness of human beings. show less