=2. His Impulse from the New Science――Descartes’ Influence.= The “free thinking” for which Spinoza was excommunicated by the Synagogue was obtained first from his instruction in the school of Van der Ende, a physician of daring naturalistic tendencies. This was when he was eighteen. Spinoza had already learned Italian and French; Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hebrew were his native tongues; Van der Ende taught him German and Latin, and introduced him to the science of the time. It was then that he read Descartes, whose philosophy he made the basis of his own. Spinoza was not an inventive genius like Descartes and Leibnitz, but he was more rigidly systematic than either. He was by nature a thinker who was obliged to carry his thought through to its logical conclusions. He had already, at this early age of eighteen, begun to make independent theological excursions. Consequently the mathematical methods of Descartes furnished him a method, and Van der Ende gave him the encouragement for carrying out his independent thinking unrelentingly to its logical end. To state his modified Jewish conception of God in mathematical terms became his task, and his success in thus stating it, with Descartes as a starting point, made him the most complete representative of Rationalism. =3. His Acquaintance with the Collegiants.= After his expulsion from his kindred, he lived for seven years with a sect of Baptist Quakers called Collegiants. This was a dissenting religious body without priests or set forms of worship. The members were simple, pious people, who regarded moral living as superior to creed; and Spinoza’s life in their midst must have determined to some degree the lines of his thought. To a man of Spinoza’s simplicity of mind and kindly disposition, the Collegiants would prove to be not only congenial companions in his hours of distress, but they would confirm his own love for the ethical as an ideal. Spinoza says that the motive of his philosophy is a practical one; that he is seeking that which would “enable me to enjoy continuous and supreme and unending happiness.” He is seeking a theory of life that would aid in allaying the unrest of his time; and he is the only philosopher who has called his metaphysics _Ethics_. The humaneness of his doctrine, the practical purpose of his writings, and the ethical ideal that informed his whole life had at least their reinforcement, and perhaps their origin, in his contact with the Collegiants during this critical period. His life with this sect influenced him in his refusal to accept the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and to remain content to be the obscure grinder of optical lenses.