Part 41 - Spinoza and Modern Science

In the religious sphere, the influence of Spinoza was as great as on the philosophical. The entire Protestant Church was against him. The German philosopher Wolff, though he disagreed from Spinoza, still defended him. Enlightenment, however, soon spread. Lessing's religious theorydifferentiating the religion of Christ from the Christian religion-was suggested to him by Spinoza. Kant's hostile attitude towards the Old Testament, he owed to Spinoza. Judaism to him is an example of organized religion without any moral basis to support it. To him true religion starts with Christianity and Jesus the first great religious teacher. Schleiermacher discovered salvation and beatitude in Spinoza's intellectual love of God. Religion to him was not identical with knowledge. To him, its primary purpose was to visualize the universe in its every aspect and in all its manifoldness. This renders man humble and meek. Religion thus becomes the immediate consciousness of being, the recognition that all finality is part of the infinite and that all timeliness is part of eternity. To seek, to find, and to recognize eternity in everything that moves and lives, in all action and suffering, is religion. Hence it is only a state of mind bordering on passivity and mystical vision. Schleiermacher thus makes religion a pious vision from which meekness, love, gratitude, pity and repentance must

be deduced. These phenomena are not ethical but religious in character. Religion is not thus the support of morality or ethics, but only the companion of man. It cannot be expressed in terms of law, for it is not reason but emotion. Religion thus is identical with emotion. Thus though he began with Spinoza, Schleiermacher ends with himself. He attempted to formulate an emotional rather than an intellectual love of God. But emotion divorced from reason may degenerate into wild passion which inspired the Spanish Inquisition and the witchcraft superstition in Europe. In England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, following Spinoza, endeavoured to rationalize religion. He rejected the dogmatic theories of revelation in the Christian Scriptures, though he was fully convinced of their ethical value. He was for the religion of Christ and not for the Christian Church. To Carlyle, too, religion is a matter of the heart and of the emotions, originating not in man's intellect, but in his intuition; with Spinoza and Goethe, he rejects the idea of a God who pushes and moves the world from without. He holds that God can only be found in the human heart. Though God is the central problem of religion, man's activities must also find a place in it. Both Francis Newman and Matthew Arnold came under Spinoza's influence. The personality of Spinoza so deeply impressed Arnold that he came to identify ethics with religion. He could not believe in the existence of a supermundane God or accept Biblical miracles. Newman adopted in part Spinoza's attitude towards the Bible. In France, Spinoza's influence was less because of the great personality of Descartes. Still, Victor Cousin, Ernest Renan, Taine and many others of the nineteenth century fell under his spell. More important than this, Spinoza broke through Roman Catholicism and made it yield in the matter of higher criticism. Even the greatest poets of England, France and Germany, including Goethe, Shelley and Hugo, came under Spinoza's sway. Mr. Mela. med devotes many pages in his volume to describe the new cynicism that his influence gave birth to. Not only poets but

also men of science became the votaries of Spinoza. Among these may be mentioned Albert Einstein, Reichenback, Planck. These, however, were the successors of an earlier set which includes Friedrich Wilhelm Stock, the physiologist; Holbach and Delamettrie, the vitalist Miller and the mechanist Hackel. Among psychologists may be mentioned Fechner, Wundt and Freud. Though in physics, his influence has been on the wane-both his theory of causation and his theory of substance have been subjected to adverse criticism-there is no gainsaying that he still wields considerable sway over science to-day. "As long as Spinoza's world-picture will continue to dazzle humanity,' as Mr. Melamed puts it, "so long will it continue to influence science."1189