Spinoza redefines the problem of Modern philosophy, which is the conquest of the world and the liberation of humanity, and destroys both its multiple… - Benedictus de Spinoza

These are the prejudices which I undertook to notice here. If any others of a similar character remain, they can easily be rectified with a little thought by anyone.

From this point we glance back to the alleged atheism of Spinoza. The charge will be seen to be unfounded if we remember that his system, instead of denying God, rather recognises that he alone really is. Nor can it be maintained that the God of Spinoza, although he is described as alone true, is not the true God, and therefore as good as no God. If that were a just charge, it would only prove that all other systems, where speculation has not gone beyond a subordinate stage of the idea — that the Jews and Mohammedans who know God only as the Lord — and that even the many Christians for whom God is merely the most high, unknowable, and transcendent being, are as much atheists as Spinoza. The so-called atheism of Spinoza is merely an exaggeration of the fact that he defrauds the principle of difference or finitude of its due. Hence his system, as it holds that there is properly speaking no world, at any rate that the world has no positive being, should rather be styled Acosmism. These considerations will also show what is to be said of the charge of Pantheism. If Pantheism means, as it often does, the doctrine which takes finite things in their finitude and in the complex of them to be God, we must acquit the system of Spinoza of the crime of Pantheism. For in that system, finite things and the world as a whole are denied all truth. On the other hand, the philosophy which is Acosmism is for that reason certainly pantheistic.

...I had just finished my first semester (at the university) and had brought along Spinoza's Ethics to read during that vacation. I was never found without the small book. If we went into the woods, I carried it in the pocket of my rainproof cape; and while the others lolled around under the trees, I would search out a deer lookout, climb up to it, and then become absorbed, alternately, in deductions about the sole substance, and then in the view of sky, mountains, and woods.