The Philosophy of Spinoza

Selections usually need no justifications. Some justification, however, ofthe treatment accorded Spinoza's Ethics may be necessary in this place.The object in taking the Ethics as much as possible out of thegeometrical form, was not to improve upon the author's text; it was togive the lay reader a text of Spinoza he would find pleasanter to readand easier to understand. To the practice of popularization, Spinoza,one may confidently feel, would not be averse. He himself gave a shortpopular statement of his philosophy in the Political Treatise.The lay reader of philosophy is chiefly, if not wholly, interested ingrasping a philosophic point of view. He is not interested in highlymeticulous details, and still less is he interested in checking up theauthor's statements to see if the author is consistent with himself. Hetakes such consistency, even if unwarrantedly, for granted.A continuous reading of the original Ethics, even on a single topic, isimpossible. The subject-matter is coherent, but the propositions do nothang together. By omitting the formal statement of the propositions; byomitting many of the demonstrations and almost all cross-references; bygrouping related sections of the Ethics (with selections from the Lettersand the Improvement of the Understanding) under sectional headings,the text has been made more continuous. It is the only time, probably,dismembering a treatise actually made it more unified.