Опитът твърде често ни учи, че хората над нищо не са така малко властни, както над своя език. - Benedictus de Spinoza

Twenty-some years ago, when at the age of forty I returned to the study of the Ethics, which had been 'my book' during adolescence, the theoretical climate in which I found myself immersed had changed to such an extent that it was difficult to tell if the Spinoza standing before me then was the same one who had accompanied me in my earliest studies.

[From Schopenhauer's assessments of other philosophers] Bruno and Spinoza are to be entirely excepted. Each stands by himself and alone; and they do not belong either to their age or to their part of the globe, which rewarded the one with death, and the other with persecution and ignominy. Their miserable existence and death in this Western world are like that of a tropical plant in Europe. The banks of the Ganges were their spiritual home ; there, they would have led a peaceful and honoured life among men of like mind.

Spinoza formulated the problem of the socially patterned defect very clearly. He says: "Many people are seized by one and the same affect with great consistency. All his senses are so strongly affected by one object that he believes this object to be present even if it is not. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. … But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying ; generally one has contempt for them. But factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as 'illness.'" These words were written a few hundred years ago ; they still hold true, although the defects have been culturally patterned to such an extent now that they are not even generally thought any more to be annoying or contemptible.