كُلَّما زاد الخيال قلَّ الاستعداد لمعرفة الأشياء بالذِّهن الخاص، وعلى العكس من ذلك نَجِد أن مَن يَتفوَّقون في الذهن ويحرِصون على تنميته تكون قُدرتُهم على التَّخيُّل أكثر… - Benedictus de Spinoza

But of what concern is Spinoza's last will to us if what is meant by this is his explicit will? Even Spinoza was bound by the historical conditions under which he lived and thought. In his age, he had to come into conflict with Judaism, a conflict in which both sides were right: the Jewish community that had to defend the conditions of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, or as others say, the Jewish "form"; and Spinoza, who was called upon to loosen the rigidity of the content of this "form," that is, the "subterranean Judaism," and thus to initiate the rebirth of the Jewish nation. Several centuries were needed to make Spinoza's critique of the Law sufficiently flexible so that the Law could be acknowledged without believing in its revealed character. At the end of this development stood a generation that was free-spirited enough to be able to accept Spinoza's critique of the Law, and that was even freer than he inasmuch as it had moved beyond the crude alternative: divine or human? revealed or conceived by men? When properly interpreted, not only does Spinoza not stand outside Judaism, he belongs to it as one of its greatest teachers.

Spinoza's thought is completely idealistic when it is presented as negative thought, when it develops the bourgeois utopia, living it in the extreme, abstract consequences of its spiritual idyll; it is, in contrast, completely materialistic as soon as it is reassembled in a constructive way, inverting the impossibility of an ideal world in the materialistic tension of its components and embracing these in a practical project, in a violent dynamism of worldly liberation. "Benedictus maledictus": never has a philosopher been more rightly hated by his times, a bourgeois and capitalist epoch.

Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.