Johann Gottfried Herder on Baruch Spinoza

“It is a pity that such a thinker as Spinoza had to leave our stage so soon. He could not live to see the enormous progress of science which would also have improved his system.”

“Do not be mistaken about the word “Substance.” Spinoza took it in its purest meaning, and had to take it in that way if he wanted to proceed geometrically and set down a primitive notion as a basis. What is Substance but a thing which is self-dependent, which has the cause of its existence in itself? I wish that this pure meaning of the word could have been introduced into our philosophy. In the strictest sense, nothing in the world is a Substance, because everything depends on everything else, and finally on God, who therefore is the highest and only Substance. This geometrical conception could not have become generally adopted in a philosophy which must preserve its popular character, for we, in all our dependence yet consider ourselves independent, and in a certain sense, as we shall soon see, we may so consider ourselves.”

“Descartes defined matter in terms of extension. It could just as well be defined in terms of time, for both the one and the other are external conditions of its existence in spatial and temporal relations. Thus both become also the necessary conditions of measurement for all thinking minds, which are themselves limited by place and time, but they never become the essence of matter. Spinoza struggled for a long time against this Cartesian explanation, probably because he felt that something about it was not clear. He was not satisfied with his teacher's sharp distinction between matter and spirit, but, since he lacked a unifying intermediate conception, what could he do? Unfortunately then, in his Ethics he still took matter for extension, that is space, and set it up beside thought, an entirely different kind of thing. Now he was indeed on the way to a very intricate confusion.”

“Here I am with my Spinoza, but almost more in the dark than I was before. It is plain on every page that he is no atheist. For him the idea of God is the first and last, yes, I might even say the only idea of all, for on it he bases knowledge of the world and of nature, consciousness of self and of all things around him, his ethics and his politics. Without the idea of God, his mind has no power, not even to conceive of itself. For him it is well nigh inconceivable, how men can, as it were, turn God into a mere consequence of other truths, or even of sensuous perceptions, since all truth, like all existence, follows only from eternal truth, from the eternal, infinite existence of God. This conception became so present, so immediate and intimate to him, that I certainly would rather have taken him to be an enthusiast concerning the existence of God, than a doubter or denier of it. He places all mankind's perfection, virtue and blessedness in the knowledge and love of God. And that this is not some sort of mask which he has assumed, but rather his deepest feeling, is shown by his letters, yes, I might even say, by every part of his philosophical system, by every line of his writings. Spinoza may have erred in a thousand ways about the idea of God, but how readers of his works could ever say that he denied the idea of God and proved atheism, is incomprehensible to me.”