Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility. - Benedictus de Spinoza

The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.

It is well known that Marx was familiar with Spinoza; indeed, he hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his notebooks. Less clear is the significance of this fact, and the extent of Spinoza's influence on Marx's thought.

That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma (most recently and worst of all, Darwinism with its incomprehensibly onesided doctrine of the “struggle for existence”) is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists: In this respect they belong to the “common people”; their ancestors were poor and undistinguished people who knew the difficulties of survival only too well at firsthand.