Spinoza strove before everything else for a unitary system, and yet it is interesting to see how much he has been honored from different quarters. Artists, religious devotees, poets, idealists, materialists, and scientists have found in him their truest expression. This is not only because each has found something different, but because his philosophy had actually a many-sided character. His teaching had the advantage of being thoroughly radical. Bad systems of philosophy are impossible, because they are contradictory. While no one knows that any system corresponds to fact, still it is possible that a radical system may have such correspondence. Spinoza’s system is comprehensive, and therefore has struck sympathetic chords in differing thinkers. =The Influences upon Spinoza.= =1. His Jewish Training.= Spinoza was born a Jew and remained a member of the Synagogue until he was excommunicated at the age of twenty-four. Although he was the original genius who transcends his limitations, his young mind was moulded after the Jewish type. He received the strictly religious training of the Jewish boy in the Jewish academy at Amsterdam, where he learned a trade in connection with his studies. He studied the Talmud, mediæval Jewish philosophy, especially the writings of Maimonides (twelfth century), and the Cabalistic literature. In a Jewish curriculum the classical languages had no place; and mathematics, except arithmetic, was generally overlooked. His early instruction emphasized above everything else the unity and the supremely transcendent, theistic character of God. However, his separation from the Synagogue at this early age could not but modify his theology. It made him a free Jew. He was no longer under the restraints of Jewish traditions. While he never abandoned his belief in God as a unity, he gave up his belief in the transcendent theistic God of the Hebrew prophets; and he differed from the contemporary Jewish Cabalistic teaching of emanations from God. He seems to have so modified the orthodox Hebrew conception of God that it rather resembles that of the mediæval mystic Christian. Perhaps the influence of Bruno upon his thought may account for its final shape.