Goethe’s philosophical views were strongly influenced by Spinoza yet not so as if Spinoza had impressed his view upon Goethe. Goethe happened to read Spinoza’s “Ethics” while still immature in mind and felt himself powerfully attracted by the spirit of the book. “What I may have read out of or into that work,” he writes, “I could give no account. Yet I found a pacification of my passions. A great and free vista upon the sensual and moral world seemed to open before my eyes. That strange sentence ‘_He who loves God must not demand of God to love him in return_,’ with all its premises and conclusions filled all my thoughts. To be unselfish in everything and most so in love and friendship was my highest delight, my maxim, my practice, so that the bold expression of later years ‘If I love thee, it is none of thy business’ came right from my heart. In addition to this, it must be recognised that the most intimate combinations result from contraries. The all-pervading calmness of Spinoza contrasted with my excited aspirations, his mathematical method was a counterpart of my poetical thoughts and habits.” In Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity Goethe found comfort concerning man’s dependence upon the outer world which caused him so much pain. It is probable that the famous sentence of the liberation from passions through a clear comprehension of them was very sympathetic to Goethe, for it is a characteristic feature of his poetry that they were confessions as well as liberations of all that moved and disturbed him. As soon as Goethe was able to give to himself a clear account concerning that which had affected his soul and as soon as he could give a poetical form to it so that it became something independent and outside of him, he gained, in the sense of Spinoza’s doctrine of liberation from passions, the peace and liberty of his soul. Yet Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity was a metaphysical conception. Goethe transferred it into the domains of practical ethics, thus giving rise to his idea of resignation. Goethe writes in the beginning of the sixteenth book of “Wahrheit und Dichtung”: “Our physical as well as our social life, customs, habits, worldly wisdom, philosophy, religion, even many incidental events, everything demands of us that we should resign ourselves. So many things which most intrinsically belong to us we are not allowed to develop. That of the outer world which we want as a complement of our nature is taken away and many things which are foreign to us and disagreeable are thrown upon us. We are deprived of everything that we have with difficulty acquired, of everything that is friendly and before we fully comprehend it we find ourselves obliged _to surrender our very personality_, first piecemeal and finally in its entirety.” Professor Schneege says that Goethe’s practice of resignation gave him solace when he felt low-spirited concerning the limits of human willing and wishing and hoping, and his resignation was as a matter of principle