This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza.  The actual merit of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness.  Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed.  Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will much illustrate Spinoza’s philosophy.  He himself spent the better part of his life in working the language in which he expressed it clear of ambiguities; and such earlier draughts of his system as are supposed still to be extant in Ms., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of additional difficulty.  Of Spinoza’s private history, on the contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his friends’ correspondence, we know only enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled.  It is not often that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it; but because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern times have seen.  Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world; refusing pensions, legacies, money in many forms, he maintained himself with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the endorsement of a tradesman’s bill which was sent in to his executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza of “blessed memory.”

The account which remains of him we owe not to an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman, to whom his theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his character,—­that except so far as his opinions were blameable, he had lived to all outward appearances free from fault.  We desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision with even popular prejudices, and still more with the earnest convictions of serious persons:  our business is to relate what he was, and leave others to form their own conclusions.  But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of such a man,—­a lesson deeper than any which is to be found in his philosophy,—­that