Note 98 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

12. As Meyer was one of the most intimate friends of Spinoza, being with him at death, and became the editor of his posthumous works, it can hardly be doubted that his treatise, which preceded Spinoza’s Tractatus by four years, influenced the great Jew, who speedily eclipsed him.98 Spinoza, however (1632–1677), was first led to rationalize by his Amsterdam friend and teacher, Van den Ende, a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion;99 and it was while under his influence that he was excommunicated by his father’s synagogue. From the first, apparently, Spinoza’s thought was shaped partly by the medieval Hebrew philosophy100 (which, as we have seen, combined Aristotelean and Saracen influences), partly by the teaching of Bruno, though he modified and corrected that at various points.101 Later he was deeply influenced by Descartes, whom he specially expounded for a pupil in a tractate.102 Here he endorses Descartes’s doctrine of freewill, which he was later to repudiate and overthrow. But he drew from Descartes his retained principle that evil is not a real existence. In a much less degree he was influenced by Bacon, whose psychology he ultimately condemned; but from Hobbes he took not only his rationalistic attitude towards “revelation,” but his doctrine of ecclesiastical subordination.103 Finally evolving his own conceptions, he produced a philosophic system which was destined to affect all European thought, remaining the while quietly occupied with the handicraft of lens-grinding by which he earned his livelihood. The Grand Pensionary of the Netherlands, John de Witt, seems to have been in full sympathy with the young heretic, on whom he conferred a small pension before he had published anything save his Cartesian Principia (1663).