#Latin translation affectus professional#

Like all who contemplate human life without sharing its baser passions, he is oppressed by the endless strife produced by conflicting aims and unrestrained ambitions. Like many men of great independence of mind, he feels the need of something great enough to justify him in submitting to its authority. Spinoza, more than any other modern philosopher, writes always with a strong sense of the importance of philosophy in the conduct of life, and with a firm belief in the power of reason to improve men’s conduct and purify their desires. It is only in the fourth and fifth books that Spinoza’s purpose becomes obvious but the casual reader is hardly likely to persevere until he reaches them. In the first book he will find only pantheism in the second he will find antiquated physiology, with a suggestion of materialism in the third he will be tempted to regard Spinoza as a pedantic La Rochefoucauld, retaining the cynicism without the wit. The unassisted reader who opens the Ethics casually is likely to be completely misled as to Spinoza’s purpose. There is also a careful comparison of the Ethics with the Short Treatise on God, Man, and Man’s Well-Being, a sort of first draft of the Ethics, which was not discovered and printed until 1862, and was not even known to have existed until an abstract of it was found in 1851 attached to a manuscript of the life of Spinoza by his friend Colerus. Hale White rightly emphasizes, what is sometimes lost sight of, that Spinoza’s purpose, as his title indicates, was ethical, and that he only introduced metaphysics in so far as seemed essential for his ethical doctrine. There is a useful preface, giving the main facts of Spinoza’s life, together with some account of his other works, of his relations to other philosophers, and of his influence on subsequent writers. But their choice has, at least, the merit of avoiding misleading associations, and of making the reader aware that Spinoza’s meaning cannot be accurately rendered by any existing word in its common signification.

It is, perhaps, a pity that the translators have chosen the manufactured word “affect” to translate affectus rather than the word “emotion,” which is used by Sir Frederick Pollock and Mr. The translation, though not wholly devoid of errors, seems in the main accurate and careful.

Joachim, and for a wider class by Sir Frederick Pollock, there must be many who will be grateful for the chance of reading the Ethics itself, without having to work their way through Spinoza’s Latin. Although the task of interpretation has been admirably performed for the technical reader by Mr. For, although Spinoza is often so difficult that even the best philosophers cannot be sure of having understood him, the essence of his doctrine is capable of being interesting and profitable to many who cannot devote themselves to metaphysics.

#Latin translation affectus professional#

THE WORK OF the popularizer, though sometimes depreciated by professional students, is a very useful and necessary work, and in few cases more useful or more necessary than in the case of Spinoza. London, New York and Toronto Oxford University Press, 1910. Hale White and Amelia Hutchison Stirling.

Review of Ethic, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order.