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SPINOZA. 119 has defended, and in the main successfully, the proposition that Spinoza reached, and must have reached, his funda- mental pantheism by his own reflection as a development of Descartes's principles. The traces of his early Talmudic education, which have been noticed in Spinoza's works, prove no dependence of his leading ideas on Jewish the- ology. His pantheism is distinguished from that of the Cabalists by its rejection of the doctrine of emanation, and from Bruno's, which nevertheless may have influenced him, by its anti-teleological character. When with Greek philosophers, Jewish theologians, and the Apostle Paul he teaches the immanence of God {Epist. 21), when with Maimonides and Crescas he teaches love to God as the principal of morality, and with the latter of these, determin- ism also, it is not a necessary consequence that he derived these theories from them. That which most of all sepa- rates him from the mediaeval scholastics of his own peo- ple, is his rationalistic conviction that God can be known. His agreement with them comes out most clearly in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. But even here it holds only in regard to undertaking a general criticism of the Scriptures and to their figurative interpretation, while, on the other hand, the demand for a special historical criticism, and the object which with Spinoza was the basis of the investiga- tion as a whole, were foreign to mediaeval Judaism — in fact, entirely modern and original. This object was to make science independent of religion, whose records and doctrines are to edify the mind and to improve the charac- ter, not to instruct the understanding. " Spinoza could not have learned the complete separation of religion and science from Jewish literature ; this was a tendency which sprang from the spirit of his own time " (Windelband, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. i. p. 194). The logical presuppositions of Spinoza's philosophy lie in the fundamental ideas of Descartes, which Spinoza accentuates, transforms, and adopts. Three pairs of thoughts captivate him and incite him to think them through : first, the rationalistic belief in the power of the human spirit to possess itself of the truth by pure thought, together with confidence in the omnipotence of the mathe-