Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens - Benedictus de Spinoza

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Marx's Spinozistic affinities were already present in the left-Hegelian milieu in which he grew and from which he took his departure. The radical young Hegelians brought man back to Spinoza's natura from what they saw as the abstract heights of Hegel's Geist, and proclaimed a unity of spirit and matter which was considered an essential Spinozistic principle and which led some of them to socialist conclusions. [...] Spinoza was a left-Hegelian hero. "The Moses of modern freethinkers and materialists"—so Ludwig Feuerbach, a major influence on the young Marx, anointed Spinoza. Unquestionably, Feuerbach thought of himself in the same terms. Spinoza appealed to left-Hegelians both in his negative and his positive philosophy.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.