The first thinker to introduce the purely monistic conception of substance into science and appreciate its profound importance was the great philosop… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Although during these years Rolland's chief interest was directed towards philosophy, although he was a diligent student of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, of the Cartesians, and of Spinoza,...

This monograph [George L. Kline's Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy] deals with one of the curiosities of contemporary philosophy. Spinoza is to this day highly regarded in the Soviet Union. The fact that he was a rationalist and, in some sense, an atheist in an age of religious intolerance, naturally endeared him to the Soviet authorities, particularly during their early period of militant atheism. But if these are the attributes which gain favour for thinkers one might have thought that others, Hobbes, for instance, or Gassendi, had rather better claims, as militant materialists not committed to the full-blown a priori rationalism of Spinoza. Spinoza's hitherto secure position in a Soviet Pantheon seems mainly due to the accidental fact that Plekhanov, who, by his superior learning and intellectual gifts, intimidated virtually all other Russian Marxists into some degree of conformity, took Spinoza under his special protection, and firmly laid it down that his notion of men as objects in nature made him the father of French materialism of the eighteenth century; that from his sprang Diderot, Helvétius, d'Holbach, etc. and therefore, in due course, also Feuerbach, Marx and Engels. This thesis, once enunciated, was mechanically repeated by later Russian Marxist historians of thought, none of whom seemed aware either that Diderot's essay on Spinoza is by no means an unqualified eulogy of his views, or of the vast differences between Spinoza's and Newton's universes.

In proportion as we endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason, shall we strive as much as possible to depend less on hope, to liberate ourselves from fear, to rule fortune, and to direct our actions by the sure counsels of reason.