الإنسان الحر لا يفكر في الموت إلا أقل القليل؛ فحكمته تسوقه إلى إمعان التفكير في الحياة، لا الموت. - Benedictus de Spinoza

"Spinoza did not seek to found a sect, and he founded none"; yet all philosophy after him is permeated with his thought.

No great philosopher has so much to offer in the way of clarification and articulation of basic ecological attitudes as Baruch Spinoza.

Spinoza formulated the problem of the socially patterned defect very clearly. He says: "Many people are seized by one and the same affect with great consistency. All his senses are so strongly affected by one object that he believes this object to be present even if it is not. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. … But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying ; generally one has contempt for them. But factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as 'illness.'" These words were written a few hundred years ago ; they still hold true, although the defects have been culturally patterned to such an extent now that they are not even generally thought any more to be annoying or contemptible.