We shall consider Spinoza’s system as a completed whole as it is given in the Ethics; for although it is interesting for the investigator to trace out the development of his thinking by comparing this chief work with its forerunner (that Tractatus Brevis “concerning God, man, and the happiness of the latter,” whose dialogistical portions we may surmise to have been the earliest sketch of the Spinozistic position, and which was followed by the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) such a procedure is not equally valuable for the student.  In regard to Spinoza’s relations to other thinkers it cannot be doubted, since Freudenthal’s[1] proof, that he was dependent to a large degree on the predominant philosophy of the schools, i.e. on the later Scholasticism (Suarez[2]), especially on its Protestant side (Jacob Martini, Combachius, Scheibler, Burgersdijck, Heereboord); Descartes, it is true, felt the same influence.  Joel,[3]:  Schaarschmidt, Sigwart,[4] R. Avenarius,[5] and Boehmer[6] = have advanced the view that the sources of Spinoza’s philosophy are not to be sought exclusively in Cartesianism, but rather that essential elements were taken from the Cabala, from the Jewish Scholasticism (Maimonides, 1190; Gersonides, died 1344; Chasdai Crescas, 1410), and from Giordano Bruno.  In opposition to this Kuno Fischer has defended, and in the main successfully, the proposition that Spinoza reached, and must have reached, his fundamental pantheism by his own reflection as a development of Descartes’s principles.  The traces of his early Talmudic education, which have been noticed in Spinoza’s works, prove no dependence of his leading ideas on Jewish theology.  His pantheism is distinguished from that of the Cabalists by its rejection of the doctrine of emanation, and from Bruno’s, which nevertheless may have influenced him, by its anti-teleological character.  When with Greek philosophers, Jewish theologians, and the Apostle Paul he teaches the immanence of God (Epist. 21), when with Maimonides and Crescas he teaches love to God as the principal of morality, and with the latter of these, determinism also, it is not a necessary consequence that he derived these theories from them.  That which most of all separates him from the mediaeval scholastics of his own people, is his rationalistic conviction that God can be known.  His agreement with them comes out most clearly in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.  But even here it holds only in regard to undertaking a general criticism of the Scriptures and to their figurative interpretation, while, on the other hand, the demand for a special historical criticism, and the object which with Spinoza was the basis of the investigation as a whole, were foreign to mediaeval Judaism—­in fact, entirely modern and original.  This object was to make science independent of religion, whose records and doctrines are to edify the mind and to improve the character, not to instruct the understanding.  “Spinoza could not have learned the complete separation of religion and science from Jewish literature; this was a tendency which sprang from the spirit of his own time” (Windelband, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. i. p. 194).