How to Improve Your Mind

By Baruch Spinoza and Dagobert D. Runes

The Enlightenment thinker asserts that mental tranquility is achieved through knowledge of God in this brief philosophical treatise.

Seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was one of the most original and important thinkers of his time. His magnum opus, Ethics, influenced generations of great minds from Karl Marx to Ludwig Wittgenstein and George Santayana. In this earlier work, Spinoza articulates his view that life is best lived with the supreme happiness of knowing God’s infinite love. By extension, all earthly pursuits—including money, fame, and sex—are mere distractions from the greater joy of the soul’s quietude.

This edition of How to Improve Your Mind is translated by the philosopher and founder of the Philosophical Library, Dagobert D. Runes. Runes also provides exclusive commentary and biographical notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philosophical Library Open Road
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781504064415

Baruch Spinoza

Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. Born Benedito de Espinosa; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677, in Amsterdam, the son of Portuguese Jewish refugees who had fled from the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Although reared in the Jewish community, he rebelled against its religious views and practices, and at the age of 24 was formally excommunicated from the Portuguese-Spanish Synagogue of Amsterdam. He was thus effectively cast out of the Jewish world and joined a group of nonconfessional Christians (although he never became a Christian), the Collegiants, who professed no creeds or practices but shared a spiritual brotherhood. He was also involved with the Quaker mission in Amsterdam. Spinoza eventually settled in The Hague, where he lived quietly, studying philosophy, science, and theology, discussing his ideas with a small circle of independent thinkers, and earning his living as a lens grinder. He corresponded with some of the leading philosophers and scientists of his time and was visited by Leibniz and many others. He is said to have refused offers to teach at Heidelberg or to be court philosopher for the Prince of Conde. During his lifetime he published only two works, The Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy (1666) and the Theological Political Tractatus (1670). In the first his own theory began to emerge as the consistent consequence of that of Descartes. In the second, he gave his reasons for rejecting the claims of religious knowledge and elaborated his theory of the independence of the state from all religious factions. It was only after his death (probably caused by consumption resulting from glass dust), that his major work, the Ethics, appeared in his Opera Posthuma. This work, in which he opposed Descartes’ mind-body dualism, presented the full metaphysical basis of his pantheistic view. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. Spinoza’s influence on the Enlightenment, on the Romantic Age, and on modern secularism has been of extreme importance. Dr. Dagobert D. Runes, the founder of the Philosophical Library, and Albert Einstein were not only close friends and colleagues; they both regarded Spinoza as the greatest of modern philosophers.

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How to Improve Your Mind

Baruch Spinoza

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PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY

New York

Contents

BARUCH SPINOZA

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR MIND

Notes

The present edition is based on the text

De Intellectus Emendatione

translated from the Latin by R. H. M. ELWES

BARUCH SPINOZA

(1632-1677)

A

MONG

the hundreds of men of greater or less importance in the history of philosophy, Baruch Spinoza holds a unique position. Abhorred and reviled for more than a hundred years by the intellectual elite of Europe, this so-called wicked little atheist had, by the end of the eighteenth century, become a symbol of sanctity. Great men like Herder, Goethe and Lessing revered this strange man and his original ideas, and as the decades went by, the light of Baruch Spinoza’s brilliant thought shone brighter and brighter.

No man can be fully understood without an adequate knowledge of his background; and if Spinoza seems to be an enigmatic figure, so were his epoch and his environment.

Spinoza was the descendant of a Jewish family which had been driven from Spain by the Inquisition, first to Portugal, then to Holland. The latter country offered only a partial refuge, for in the seventeenth century Holland had its own brands of religious and political persecution. Young Spinoza found little happiness in his step-mother’s house in Amsterdam, and we hear of him as an adolescent frequently wandering away from the Spanish-speaking ghetto, to mingle with his Christian neighbors. Amsterdam was at that time seething with Socinians, Quakers and other reformist sects, a situation which helped the young student of the Torah and the Talmud to approach scripture with an amazingly analytical and objective eye.

By his detached viewpoint, the young Spinoza brought to light indisputable discrepancies between various sections of the Canon, and confronted scholars with disturbing evidence that some of the traditionally ancient writings had been composed only a few hundred years B.C., and by entirely different hands than the orthodoxy alleged. This was the beginning of modern theological exegetics or Biblical criticism. The Jewish community of Amsterdam, most of whose members had suffered harrowing tortures at the hands of the Catholic Church, made desperate efforts to stop Spinoza from proselytizing among their people. What they especially feared was Spinoza’s thesis that the laws of the Torah were state laws designed for the tribes of Israel, and therefore had no validity for Jews living in other states. If this interpretation was accepted, it would mean the dissolution of those religious ties by which the Torah had for thousands of years held together Jews scattered to the four corners of the earth. When pleas and threats proved to be of no avail, the twenty-four-year-old Spinoza was officially expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. He spent the remainder of his life in other Dutch towns, mostly in and around The Hague.

Immediately after his excommunication, Spinoza had published in Spanish a pamphlet entitled Apologia, which explained his position. Until this day not one copy of the pamphlet has been discovered, though many years later, in the only book published during his lifetime, The Theological Political Treatise, he expounded his point of view in great detail. His main thesis is an appeal to reason, with the recommendation that the secular powers of the Church be curbed, so that every man might be granted full liberty of thought and speech.

In his philosophic method, Spinoza is a student of Déscartes, but in his findings he ranges far afield from the French mathematician. In his Ethics, which is designed after Euclid’s Geometry, he begins with a number of what he considers irrefutable premises, on which he builds a system analyzing the nature of God and man in a purely scientific manner. He identifies God with creative nature, and with Substance. Mortal man knows only two attributes, the world of the body and the world of the mind; but God (or Substance) lives through infinite attributes, each of which in turn necessarily expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.

This majestic concept of our mind-body universe, as, so to speak, only a splinter in eternity, has had profound effect upon physicists and scholars from Leibniz to Einstein. Man himself, Spinoza reasons, is, like all things, a part, a mode, of created nature and must be taken as such and no more. Like other things, he is constantly in motion and has no free will of his own. He is filled with contradictory emotions of fear and hope, love and hate, pity and remorse. The only path to freedom from such an embattled existence is to be overwhelmed by an even greater emotion: the love of God, which is, indeed, the same as the love of man. Love of God is born out of deep understanding of the nature of the universe, and it is given only to those who perceive intellectually the self-identical order of ideas and things as attributes of the all-pervading One. Whoever gains

Reviews for How to Improve Your Mind

[cody · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

How to give yourself a headache by Baruch Spinoza. Ugh