...Yes, you must read Spinoza. Those who accuse him of atheism are asses. Goethe said, 'When I am upset or troubled I reread the Ethics.' Perhaps lik… - Benedictus de Spinoza

By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in

When you say Spinoza, however, besides being too flattering, the comparison is not biographically so true. My Spinozism is in the Life of Reason, less obviously, perhaps, yet more dominantly, than in Realms of Being. These, as you know, are not at all like Spinoza's attributes. They are not aspects or forms of the same reality, absolutely parallel and coextensive. My realms are layers: more as in Plotinus; and my moral or “spiritual” philosophy is again less Spinozistic than in the humanistic period. Spinoza's moral sentiments were plebeian, Dutch, and Jewish: perfectly happy in his corner, polishing his lenses, and saying, Great is Allah. No art, no high politics, no sympathy with greatness, no understanding of courage or of despair.

...Elsewhere I have shown that La Mettrie and Diderot – each after his own fashion – arrived at a world-outlook that was a ‘brand of Spinozism’, that is, a Spinozism without the theological appendage that distorted its true content. It would also be easy to show that, inasmuch as we are speaking of the unity of subject and object, Hobbes too stood very close to Spinoza. That, however, would be taking us too far afield, and, besides, there is no immediate need to do that. Probably of greater interest to the reader is the fact that today any naturalist who has delved even a little into the problem of the relation of thinking to being arrives at that doctrine of their unity which we have met in Feuerbach.