The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

The second volume of Spinoza’s Works, which we now share with the learned, contains the posthumous remains, first edited under the title B. d. S. Opera Posthuma Posthumous Works of B. d. S. (1677, in quarto, 614 pages), in such a way that, after the Index of subjects, there follows a Compendium of Hebrew Grammar on 112 pages. Our first volume anticipated the collection of letters, which in that first edition fills pages 395 through 614, so that the volumes would be sufficiently equal. Everything else that remained is now carefully reprinted and brought back to light.

Among these is the Ethics, a more extensive and purer interpreter of the philosophy which, against the author's will, is called Spinozistic, especially to be pondered through the repeated meditations of wiser men. The path the author followed to discover this Ethics is seen in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, although it was not brought to an end. Having considered this, even if someone should abhor or abstain from the author's principles entirely, they still could not fail to love deeply a soul that felt it "could be nourished solely by love toward an eternal and infinite object," and who, through "assiduous meditation, arrived at the point of seeing" that by omitting the desire for wealth, lust, and honors, he would be omitting nothing but certain evils; yet in the very investigation of the "true good," he foresaw that even if he perhaps would not attain it, he would nonetheless obtain a "certain good." Fired by this desire, he seriously and, as much as possible, continuously placed at the forefront of his meditations "the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature." A divine plan, indeed, which could not but make the seeker's mind a participant in the "true good," although through his "investigation of truth" (as it is the common lot of mortals!) he does not always seem to have reached the proposed goal with equal success.