Spinoza as Educator #261000

After three and a half centuries Benedict Spinoza is more than ever an intellectual force to be reckoned with. His influence upon his own and immediately succeeding generations was of the slightest, and even when the teachings of the Jew of Amsterdam were no longer shunned, they were still misunderstood, and by none more profoundly than by Herder, Lessig, Goethe, and the others of that group of enthusiastic admirers which constitutes perhaps Spinoza's most obvious influence upon civilization. In the History of Philosophy he looms in majestic solitude, a peak but remotely joined to the adjacent heights. It is therefore not surprising to find his name conspicuously absent from the roll of philosophers who figure in the History of Education. The bibliography at the end of this essay is evidence of the interest manifested in Spinoza at the present time. Professor William James quoted him as an authority on' psychology, and in the preface to his Analytic Psychology, Dr. G. F. Stout acknowledges his pre-eminent indebtedness to Spinoza. The attempt made in the following pages to point out the educational implications of Spinoza's philosophy seemed to necessitate introductory summaries and interpretations which might have been omitted were the foundations of Spinoza's philosophy familiar to the students of education into whose hands this volume may come. The essay might then have been wholly devoted to the more practical if not more congenial task of dis cussing intensively one or another of the problems briefly treated in the final chapter. A fuller exposition of each of these topics would do much to clarify current educational thought, and it is hoped that the bearing of Spinoza's philosophy upon education will attract the labor of other hands.