his chief work, the Ethics, to the press, the clergy and the followers of Descartes applied to the government to forbid its issue.  Soon after Spinoza’s death it was published in the Opera Posthuma, 1677, which were issued under the care of Hermann Schuller,[1] with a preface by Spinoza’s friend, the physician Ludwig Meyer, and which contained, besides the chief work, three incomplete treatises (Tractatus Politicus, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae) and a collection of Letters by and to Spinoza.  The Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, in five parts, treats (1) of God, (2) of the nature and origin of the mind, (3) of the nature and origin of the emotions, (4) of human bondage or the strength of the passions, (5) of the power of the reason or human freedom.  It has become known within recent times that Spinoza made a very early sketch of the system developed in the Ethics, the Tractatus Brevis de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate, of which a Dutch translation in two copies was discovered, though not the original Latin text.  This treatise was published by Boehmer, 1852, in excerpts, and complete by Van Vloten, 1862, and by Schaarschmidt, 1869.  It was not until our own century, and after Jacobi’s Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Moses Mendelssohn (1785) had aroused the long slumbering interest in this much misunderstood philosopher, who has been oftener despised than studied, that complete editions of his works were prepared, by Paulus 1802-03; Gfroerer, 1830; Bruder, 1843-46; Ginsberg (in Kirchmann’s Philosophische Bibliothek, 4 vols.), 1875-82; and Van Vloten and Land,[2] 2 vols., 1882-83.  B. Auerbach has worked Spinoza’s life into a romantic novel, Spinoza, ein Denkerleben, 1837; 2d ed., 1855 [English translation by C.T.  Brooks, 1882.]

[Footnote 1:  See L. Stein in the Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. i., 1888, p. 554 seq.]

[Footnote 2:  For the literature on Spinoza the reader is referred to Ueberweg and to Van der Linde’s B.  Spinoza, Bibliografie, 1871; while among recent works we shall mention only Camerer’s Die Lehre Spinozas, Stuttgart, 1877.  An English translation of The Chief Works of Spinoza has been given by Elwes, 1883-84; a translation of the Ethics by White, 1883; and one of selections from the Ethics, with notes, by Fullerton in Sneath’s Modern Philosophers, 1892.  Among the various works on Spinoza, the reader may be referred to Pollock’s Spinoza, His Life and Times, 1880 (with bibliography to same year); Martineau’s Study of Spinoza, 1883; and J. Caird’s Spinoza, Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics, 1888.—­TR.]