Baruch Spinoza - a name uttered with reverence

Whenever anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have a partial knowledge of things. We are ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason. What our reason pronounces bad and distasteful is not bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own nature, taken separately.

As for the terms 'good' and 'bad', they indicate nothing positive considered in themselves.....for the same thing can be at the same time good, bad and indifferent. Music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead. Bad and good are prejudices, which the eternal reality cannot recognize.

Only knowledge is power and freedom; and the only permanent happiness is the pursuit of knowledge and the joy of understanding. ----- Baruch Spinoza

In the year 1640 he was just eight years old. After his death in 1677, at the age of 45, people considered, and still considers, him as a God-intoxicated man with invaluable philosophical thoughts, mighty enough to match the mountains and the sea. To build his statue in 1880-82 at Hague in Netherlands, contributions came from every corner of the world. Never did a monument rise upon so wide a pedestal of love. He still points, from his granite pedestal, out to all men the way of blessedness which he found.

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