Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness. - Leo Strauss

The philosophy of Kant's great successors was consciously a synthesis of Spinoza's and Kant's philosophies. Spinoza's characteristic contribution to this synthesis was a novel conception of God. He thus showed the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of Church.

But what is the core of the political? Men killing men on the largest scale in broad daylight and with the greatest serenity.

It was not the "God-intoxicated" philosopher but the hard-headed, not to say hard-hearted, pupil of Machiavelli and philologic-historical critic of the Bible. Orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.