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Spinoza (BARUCH freethinking physician)

BARUCH freethinking physician Van den Ende; came under the influence of the new philosophic teaching of Descartes; ceased to attend the synagogue; refused a pension offered by the rabbis for his conformity, and was expelled from the Israelitish community; fled from Amsterdam to the suburbs to escape the دو BARUCH SPINOZA enmity of the fanatical Jews; removed from thence, after five years' seclusion, to Rynsburg, where he lived till 1663; subsequently went to Voorburg; and ultimately (1671) settled in The Hague. By his craft as a grinder of optical lenses he maintained a frugal position in the households of the friends with whom he lived. He refused a pension from the French king and a professorship in Heidelberg because their acceptance might hazard freedom of thought and conduct; but he accepted a legacy from his friend De Vries. The first result of his labor was published anonymously in 1670 under the title of "Theological-Political Tract," and because it put forth a strong plea for liberty of speech in philosophy it was placed on the "Index" by the Catholics and condemned by the authorities in Holland. Such, indeed, was the storm which this treatise occasioned that the author himself published nothing further. After his death all his unpublished writings were conveyed to Amsterdam, and there the "Posthumous Works" was published (1677). In the "Ethics," therein included, his system of philosophy was developed; each of its five books being dignified by a series of axioms and definitions after the method of Euclid in his geometry. In all there are 27 definitions, 20 axioms, and 8 postulates; and the central conception of the whole system is that God, who is Cyc-Vol. 1X