It is also a very curious thing. Why should a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher whose dense and opaque writings are notoriously difficult to… - Benedictus de Spinoza

When he arrived in Amsterdam at age fifty-one , Locke had published nothing. During what was clearly a transformational period, he used his time in Holland to talk with other independent thinkers who had been hounded into exile by the governments and churches of their own countries. Although Spinoza was dead, Locke certainly met many of the philosopher's admirers and enemies. He was well acquainted with nonconformist Protestant Collegiants, and his later writings would advocate complete toleration for all forms of Protestantism. At the time of Locke's death, his library contained all of Spinoza's published works as well as many political and religious disputations, in many languages, in which Spinoza's ideas were vigorously debated. Locke, like Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume, is much more widely recognized than Spinoza in the United States as an influence upon the Enlightenment views of the American founders, but the more radical Spinoza's voice can be heard in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. It is not surprising that Thomas Jefferson's library contained Spinoza's collected works, which were more readily available at the end of the eighteenth century than in Locke's time.

Because of the specific epistemological interests of English philosophy and the dominance of Cartesianism in French thought, Spinoza's philosophical influence was centered in Germany. Of the great German figures Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was the first to come under the spell of Spinoza. He was a man of broad vision, with a hundred cultural interests and a critical disposition of mind, and would not accept any philosophical system in its totality. While he did not accept Spinozism in its entirety, he subscribed to its pantheistic doctrines. But more than he admired Spinoza's philosophy, he was attracted to him by his great earnestness of purpose, his strength of character, and his moral courage.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.