a total resignation. A partial resignation leads to the pessimistic outcry “All is vanity,” yet the total resignation affords an inner peace and produces that “air of peace,” _die Friedensluft_ as Goethe calls it, which surrounds us when reading Spinoza. One of Goethe’s maxims is quite Spinozistic. Goethe says (_Max. und Refl. Abth._ v.): “He who declares himself to be free will feel himself at once dependent but he who dares to declare himself dependent, feels himself free.” Goethe rejected the idea of a personal and transcendent Deity which was urged so strongly upon him by Lavater. Rejecting Lavater’s view, he says (_Wahrh. und Dicht._ xiv.): “I assured him in accord with my Realism which is inborn as well as acquired that since it had pleased God and Nature to make me as I am, I must remain so.” The expression “God and Nature” savors strongly of Spinoza’s “Deus sive natura.” According to Eckermann (_Gesp. m. G._ ii, p. 169) Holbach’s _Systéme de la nature_ had also made a strong impression upon Goethe. Nevertheless he was dissatisfied with the spirit of French materialism. He says: “How empty and hollow is this sad atheistic twilight, in which the earth with all its forms and the heaven with all its stars disappear. Matter only is said to exist, being in motion from eternity to eternity, thus producing to the right and to the left without further ado all the innumerable phenomena of being.” Goethe’s view of “God and nature,” did not deny the Deity as such, but identified both in the sense of Spinoza. In this sense Goethe interpreted the sentence: _Qui deum amat conari not potest, ut Deus ipsum contra amet—si homo id conaretur, cuperet ergo ut Deus quem amat, non esset Deus_. The latter idea, “if a man wished that God should love him in return, he would wish that God be not God” is a corollary only to the impersonal conception of Spinoza’s non-anthropomorphised Deity. We cannot and we must not think of God as a human being who like a monarch makes favorites of those who are faithful not so much to the divine laws of ethics but to God personally.