For many years I did not dare look into a Latin author or at anything which evoked an image of Italy. If this happened by chance, I suffered agonies.… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Perhaps then we shall take note that the eternity of substance is not, as Spinoza himself reflected, directly assimilable to the permanence of a nature already given in itself, in an abstract and static manner, according to the idea of “substance which has not yet become subject” developed by Hegel regarding Spinoza; but, to the extent that this substance is inseparable from its productivity, that it manifests itself nowhere else than in the totality of its modal realizations, in which it is absolutely immanent, it is a nature that is itself produced in a history, and under conditions that the latter necessarily attaches to it. Thus for the soul to attain the understanding of its union with the whole of nature is also to recognize historically what confers on it its own identity, and it is in a certain way, then, to respond to the question “Who am I now?”

...The rise, triumph, and victory of Spinozism in Europe are reminiscent of the power of ancient Buddhism because both are religiosity rather than philosophy. Spinozism is religion even when it operates with bizarre formulas. Its starting-point is a dead God, who is reminiscent of Buddha's Brahma. It is man's metaphysical fear and not the idea of a living God which is the driving force in religiosity. True religiosity is not an understanding of how God is correlated to man and to the world but the feeling of man's insignificance in the cosmos, giving birth to a state of meekness, humbleness, compassion, and pity. Only when man is crushed and overwhelmed by the thought of his insignificance in this vast universe does he become truly religious. These feelings are as present in Spinozism as they are in Buddhism.

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them; and, to this end, I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena, though inconvenient, are yet necessary, and have fixed causes, by means of which we endeavour to understand their nature, and the mind has just as much pleasure in viewing them aright, as in knowing such things as flatter the senses