Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies… - Benedictus de Spinoza

...[T]he once-accepted assumption that Spinoza was considered a “dead dog” in Kant's day [i.e. before the break of the Pantheismusstreit] is no longer tenable. [...] Suffice it here to recall the well-known fact that Spinoza is the subject of the single longest entry in Bayle's Dictionnaire (1702). It is true that Bayle attempts to refute Spinoza (though some have doubted the sincerity of his intentions) but unlikely that so much space would be dedicated to refuting a neglected philosopher—unlikely, indeed, that Spinoza's relevance would wane once this high-profile entry had been published about him. J. Zedler's Grosses Universal Lexikon (1731–54) gives a similar impression, devoting to Spinoza a five-page discussion. Descartes, by comparison, is discussed in one page. Hume, Locke, Hobbes, and Plato are equally dealt with in one page (or less) each. D. Diderot and J. d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751–72) similarly dedicates to Spinoza five times more space than to most relevant thinkers in the history of philosophy. While speaking of Spinoza's metaphysics in extremely hostile terms, the Encyclopédie gives a reliable account of the Ethics definitions and axioms and discusses at length its most important demonstrations, especially E1p1–11. The Dictionnaire, the Lexikon, and the Encyclopédie were the main transmitters of Enlightenment thought. The attention they devoted to Spinoza ensured him a place at the heart of Enlightenment debate. It would be impossible for any educated reader to avoid contact with Spinoza's ideas. It would be easy for every metaphysician to get a grasp on the system of the Ethics. And it would be tempting, for every philosophically inclined thinker, to read Spinoza for themselves.

...No other thinker was considered to have systematized ‘atheism’ so as to turn it into a working philosophy to the same extent or as effectively as Spinoza. If there were, and had long been, many, philosophical ‘atheists’ publicly condemned as such, stretching back, via Vanini, to Epicurus and Lucretius, “je crois qu’il [i.e. Spinoza] est le premier,” writes Bayle in his Dictionnaire, “qui ait réduit en système l’athéisme, et qui en ait fait un corps de doctrine lié et tissu selon les manières des geomètres…”, a pronouncement that itself became immensely influential through the rest of the Enlightenment. As the Cambridge don, Brampton Gurdon (d.1741), son of a Suffolk gentleman and member of Parliament, expressed this point (following Bayle), in 1723, “Spinoza is the only person among the modern Atheists, that has pretended to give us a regular scheme of Atheism, and therefore I cannot act unfairly in making him the representative of their party, and in proving the weakness and absurdities of the atheistick scheme, by shewing the faults of his.” Criticism of the existing order of things using ‘atheistic’ ideas as a tool to demolish accepted thinking long remained the exclusive speciality of a forbidden ‘underground’ philosophy associated with Spinoza’s name rather than any other.

Spinoza would not tolerate restrictions, imposed by any political or religious system or by any moral attitude. He struggled for the ideal of free thought. Hardly any other philosopher made so many enemies. He was labelled ‘a troublemaking Jew’, banned from the synagogue and from the academic establishment. Even his pupils would acknowledge him in private. And when Karl Ludwig asked the impoverished lonely philosopher to lecture at the University of Heidelberg, he turned him down. Spinoza could not guarantee that his thinking would not threaten ‘widely accepted religious concepts’. The philosopher in him preferred the quiet retiring life to a bourgeois career.