Thoughts of Spinoza as narrated by Sir Tschirnhaus ( a friend and follower of Spinoza)

Sir Tschirnhaus told me many things about the handwritten book of Spinoza. .. Spinoza's book will be about God, mind, happiness or the idea of the perfect man, the recovery of the mind and the recovery of the body. He asserts the demonstration of a number of things about God. That He alone is free.He supposes that freedom exists, when the action or determination originates not from an external impact, but only from the nature of the actor. In this sense he justly ascribes freedom to God alone.

According to him the mind itself is in a certain sense a part of God. He thinks that there is sense in all things to the degrees of their existence. God is defined by him as an absolutely infinite Being, which contains all perfections, i.e. affirmations or realities or what may be conceived. Likewise only God would be substance or a Being which exists in itself or which can be understood by itself ; all creatures are nothing else than modes. Man is free in so far as he is not determined by any external things. But because this is never the case, man is not free at all, although he participates more in freedom than the bodies.

The mind would be nothing but the idea of the body. He thinks that the unity of the bodies is caused by a sort of pressure.......... He thinks that we will forget most things when we die and retain only those things that we know with the kind of knowledge he calls intutive, of which only a few are conscious. Because knowledge is either sensual or imaginative or intutive. He believes a sort of Pythagorical transmigration , namely that minds go from body to body. He says that Christ is the very best philosopher. He thinks that apart from thought and extension there are an infinity of other positive attributes, but that in all of them there is thought like here in extension . How they are constituted cannot be conceived by us but every one is infinite like space here.

Leibniz   

Inner law of goodness

Have been thinking:
Have been thinking one thing: that this life
which we see around us is a movement of matter
according to fixed, well-known laws ; but that in us
we feel the presence of an altogether different law,
having nothing in common with the others and requiring
from us the fulfilment of its demands. It
can be said that we see and recognise all the other
laws only because we have in us this law. If we
did not recognise this law, we would not recognise
the others.
This law is different from all the rest, principally
in this, that those other laws are outside of us and
forces us to obey them ; but this law is in us and
more than in us; it is our very selves and therefore
it does not force us when we obey it, but on
the contrary frees us, because in following it we
become ourselves. And for this reason we are
drawn to fulfil this law and we sooner or later
will inevitably fulfil it. In this then consists the
freedom of the will. This freedom consists in
this, that we should recognise that which is
namely that this inner law is ourselves.
This inner law is what we call reason, conscience,
love, the good, God. These words have different
meanings, but all from different angles mean one
and the same thing. In our understanding of this
inner law, the son of God, consists indeed the essence
of the Christian doctrine.
The world can be looked upon in this way: a
world exists governed by certain, well-known laws,
and within this world are beings subject to the
same laws, but who at the same time bear in themselves
another law not in accord with the former
laws of the world, a higher law, and this law must
inevitably triumph within these beings and defeat
the lower law. And in this struggle and in
the gradual victory of the higher law over the
lower, in this only is life for man and the whole
world.

Tolstoy

Free love

By all means they try to hold me secure
who love me in this world.
But it is otherwise with thy love
which is greater than theirs,
and thou keepest me free.
Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone.
But day passes by after day and thou art not seen.
If I call not thee in my prayers,
if I keep not thee in my heart,
thy love for me still waits for my love.

Rabindranath

A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compasion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.


Albert Einstein