Spinoza was the man I believed in always, as the alternative to Catholicism. And it is only in Spinoza's manner that I am a positivist at all. I beli… - Benedictus de Spinoza

My dear Tyndall—I find that in the midst of my work in Edinburgh I omitted to write to De Vrij, so I have just sent him a letter expressing my pleasure in my being able to co-operate in any plan for doing honour to old Benedict, for whom I have a most special respect.

enemigo a batir es toda forma de tiranía expresa o encubierta, y, en consecuencia, Spinoza niega protagonismo a las grandes personalidades o a los grupos de presión, de manera que la expresión del poder más cualificada — por multilateral — es la democracia.

Spinoza, then, emerged as the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe. Admittedly, historians have rarely emphasized this. It has been much more common, and still is, to claim that Spinoza was rarely understood and had very little influence, a typical example of an abiding historiographical refrain which appears to be totally untrue but nevertheless, since the nineteenth century, has exerted an enduring appeal for all manner of scholars. In fact, no one else during the century 1650–1750 remotely rivalled Spinoza's notoriety as the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority.