Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to Portuguese-Jewish merchants whose family had fled the Inquisition. He received a traditional Jewish education and learned Latin and Cartesian philosophy from a former Jesuit. In 1656, at twenty-three, the synagogue expelled him in the harshest terms for 'abominable heresies and monstrous deeds', never specified. He then dropped his Hebrew name Baruch for Benedict; both mean 'blessed'.

He earned his living grinding optical lenses, declined a professorship at Heidelberg to keep his freedom of thought, and lived in rented rooms in small towns with extreme simplicity. In 1670 he published anonymously the Theological-Political Treatise, arguing that the Bible is a human work, that miracles do not occur and that the purpose of the state is freedom; the book was called 'forged in hell' and banned. He did not dare publish the Ethics in his lifetime; friends printed it after his death. He died at forty-four of lung disease, perhaps aggravated by glass dust.

The Ethics is written in definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs. There is only one substance with infinitely many attributes, of which we know two, thought and extension; that substance is God, which is to say Nature. All things are its modes and all events follow by necessity. Human bondage comes from passive emotions, freedom from understanding them, and the highest happiness is 'the intellectual love of God'. Contemporaries called him an atheist, the Romantics a 'God-intoxicated man', and Einstein named him as the source of his own idea of God.