My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were… - Benedictus de Spinoza

The philosopher John Toland, in the early 18th century, insisted that the terms 'Spinozism' and 'pantheism' are synonymous. Toland says that "Moses was, to be sure, a Pantheist, or, if you please, in more current terms, a Spinosist", while Spinoza's pantheism was taken for granted by Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Lessing and Friedrich Jacobi, in their famous Pantheismusstreit of 1785. More recently, this interpretation also appears in both the scholarly literature and popular representations of Spinoza's thought. In the recently published Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy we read that "Spinoza is the most distinguished pantheist in Western philosophy". But the problem with calling Spinoza a 'pantheist' is that pantheism is still a kind of theism.

Schelling calls Spinoza "the first philosopher who found the concepts whereby all the following centuries have grasped and fixed the two extremities of our knowing mind." For Lessing and Herder philosophy and Spinozism were identical; and the same statement was also made by Hegel, the most comprehensive and systematic, as well as the most independent and firm, among the German philosophers, who did not attempt, like Leibnitz, Fichte or Schelling, to reshape again and again his original-philosophy. And Hegel also said, "either you have Spinozism or you have no philosophy!"

that he that is strong hates no man, is angry with no man, envies no man, is indignant with no man, despises no man, and least of all things is proud.