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BSBaruch Spinoza

73 collected words

Baruch Spinoza

Life dates: 1632 AD — 1677 AD

Spinoza connects error with inadequate ideas and examines how reciprocated hatred intensifies feeling. Read these propositions through their proofs and definitions rather than as isolated promises about knowledge or relationships.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗mindpeacelearningknowledgelovefaithcharacternature

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Benedictus de Spinoza with lifetime years 1632–1677 and names R. H. M. Elwes as translator of Ethics. The linked Gutenberg author record explicitly lists Espinosa, Baruch de as an alias, supporting the connection to this existing Baruch Spinoza label without changing or merging archive identities. Tom Sharpe and Al Haines receive text and HTML credits. The catalogue HTML ISBN identifies the electronic English edition, not the original Latin work or its composition date.

Part II, Proposition XXXV defines falsity in relation to inadequate, fragmentary or confused ideas. Its proof distinguishes this account from simple ignorance and depends on earlier propositions. Part III, Proposition XLIII argues that reciprocated hatred increases hatred and that love can counter it, again within the book’s geometric demonstration. These are claims in a systematic philosophy; the second is not a guarantee that affectionate behaviour ends abuse or makes a relationship safe. Both complete selected extracts match this English translation, while other archive sayings under the name remain outside this comparison.

Reading this voice

Read each proposition together with its proof and the earlier references it invokes. Follow how definitions of ideas and affects shape the claims. Do not treat the statement about hatred as an instruction to remain in an unsafe situation.

Subjects to explore

knowledgeangermind

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

08c. 1654 AD
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
Baruch Spinoza / quote
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09c. 1654 AD
The formation of society serves not only for defensive purposes, but is also very useful, and, indeed, absolutely necessary, as rendering possible the division of labor. If men did not render mutual assistance to each other, no one would have either the skill or the time to provide for his own sustenance and preservation: for all men are not equally apt for all work, and no one would be capable of preparing all that he individually stood in need of. Strength and time, I repeat, would fail, if every one had in person to plow, to sow, to reap, to grind corn, to cook, to weave, to stitch and perform the other numerous functions required to keep life going; to say nothing of the arts and sciences which are also entirely necessary to the perfection and blessedness of human nature.
Baruch Spinoza / quote
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11c. 1654 AD
Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.
Baruch Spinoza / quote
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13c. 1654 AD
All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.
Baruch Spinoza / quote
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