Produced by Alicia Williams and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in | | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of | | this document. | +------------------------------------------------------------+ THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA EDITED BY JOSEPH RATNER TUDOR PUBLISHING COMPANY _Printed in the United States of America_ PREFACE Selections usually need no justifications. Some justification, however, of the treatment accorded Spinoza's _Ethics_ may be necessary in this place. The object in taking the _Ethics_ as much as possible out of the geometrical form, was not to improve upon the author's text; it was to give the lay reader a text of Spinoza he would find pleasanter to read and easier to understand. To the practice of popularization, Spinoza, one may confidently feel, would not be averse. He himself gave a short popular statement of his philosophy in the _Political Treatise_. The lay reader of philosophy is chiefly, if not wholly, interested in grasping a philosophic point of view. He is not interested in highly meticulous details, and still less is he interested in checking up the author's statements to see if the author is consistent with himself. He takes such consistency, even if unwarrantedly, for granted. A continuous reading of the original _Ethics_, even on a single topic, is impossible. The subject-matter is coherent, but the propositions do not hang together. By omitting the formal statement of the propositions; by omitting many of the demonstrations and almost all cross-references; by grouping related sections of the _Ethics_ (with selections from the _Letters_ and the _Improvement of the Understanding_) under sectional headings, the text has been made more continuous. It is the only time, probably, dismembering a treatise actually made it more unified. In an Appendix, the sources of the selections from the _Ethics_ are summarily indicated. It would be a meaningless burden on the text to make full acknowledgments in footnotes. For the same reason, there has been almost no attempt made to show, by means of the conventional devices, the re-arrangements and abridgements that have been made. Every care has been taken not to distort in any way the meaning of the text. And that is all that is important in a volume of this kind.