Ethics
R. H. M. Elwes (1883)
Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, composed in Latin and published posthumously in 1677, is the most ambitious attempt in Western philosophy to deduce the structure of reality, mind, and human freedom from first principles in the geometrical manner of Euclid. Part I argues that there is but one substance, God or Nature, of which all finite things are modes — a pantheistic monism that drew immediate condemnation as atheism and shaped later German idealism and Romantic naturalism. The later parts turn to the emotions, human bondage, and the intellectual love of God, culminating in a secular vision of freedom as understanding.
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