Spinoza, who had but few followers during his lifetime, has been almost idolized by the most celebrated savants of modern Germany. Whether this will ultimately add to the glory of Spinoza, or detract from that of his admirers, we shall leave the reader and posterity to determine. In the mean time, we shall content ourselves with a statement of the fact, in the language of M. Saisset: “Everything,” says he, “appears extraordinary in Spinoza; his person, his style, his philosophy; but that which is more strange still, is the destiny of that philosophy among men. Badly known, despised by the most illustrious of his contemporaries, Spinoza died in obscurity, and remained buried during a century. All at once his name reappeared with an extraordinary eclat; his works were read with passion; a new world was discovered in them, with a horizon unknown to our fathers; and the god of Spinoza, which the seventeenth century had broken as an idol, became the god of Lessing, of Goethe, of Novalis.” “The solitary thinker whom Malebranche called a wretch, Schleiermacher reveres and invokes as equal to a saint. That ‘systematic atheist,’ on whom Bayle lavished outrage, has been for modern Germany the most religious of men. ‘God-intoxicated,’ as Novalis said, ‘he has seen the world through a thick cloud, and man has been to his troubled eyes only a fugitive mode of Being in itself.’ In that system, in fine, so shocking and so monstrous, that ‘hideous chimera,’ Jacobi sees the last word of philosophy, Schelling the presentiment of the true philosophy.” Section IV. The views of Locke, Tucker, Hartley, Priestley, Helvetius, and Diderot, with respect to the relation between liberty and necessity. Locke, it is well known, adopted the notions of free-agency given by Hobbes. “In this,” says he, “consists freedom, viz., in our being able to act or not to act, according as we shall choose or will.”(17) And this notion of liberty, consisting in a freedom from external co-action, has received an impetus and currency from the influence of Locke which it would not otherwise have obtained. Neither Calvin nor Luther, as we have seen, pretended to hold it up as the freedom of the will. This was reserved for Hobbes and his immortal follower, John Locke, who has, in his turn, been copied by a host of illustrious disciples who would have recoiled from the more articulate and consistent development of this doctrine by the philosopher of Malmsbury. It is only because Locke has enveloped it in a cloud of inconsistencies that it has been able to secure the veneration of the great and good.