David on Baruch Spinoza

“[Spinoza] — the deepest, most original thinker to emerge from our people from the end of the Bible to the birth of Einstein.”

“He was in a certain sense the first Zionist of the last three hundred years, [...] Through keen insight into Jewish and world history he prophesied the rebirth of the State of Israel.”

“I assert, that the doctrine of the immateriality, simplicity, and indivisibility of a thinking substance is a true atheism, and will serve to justify all those sentiments, for which Spinoza is so universally infamous. From this topic, I hope at least to reap one advantage, that my adversaries will not have any pretext to render the present doctrine odious by their declamations, when they see that they can be so easily retorted on them.”

“His [Hegel's] early and decisive break with theism came in correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin, who were reading Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftslehre as Spinozism on a Kantian foundation. He later professes his own Spinozism in bold terms. “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” and “It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy. For as we saw above, when man begins to philosophize, the soul must commence by bathing in this ether of the One Substance in which all that man has held as true has disappeared”.”

“The fundamental principle of the atheism of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere. There is only one substance, says he, in the world; and that substance is perfectly simple and indivisible, and exists every where, without any local presence. Whatever we discover externally by sensation; whatever we feel internally by reflection; all these are nothing but modifications of that one, simple, and necessarily existent being, and are not possest of any separate or distinct existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere.”