Baruch Spinoza

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch-Jewish lens-grinder and philosopher, excommunicated from his community for heterodoxy, whose Ethics (published posthumously, 1677) presented a single infinite substance — Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature” — of which everything else is a mode or expression.

Mind and matter are not two substances but two attributes of this one reality, perfectly parallel: every physical event has a corresponding mental event, and the order of ideas is identical to the order of things.

This is double-aspect monism: thought and extension are two faces of one underlying whole. Spinoza is a crucial ancestor of mind-power’s pantheist and unity intuitions — that there is one universal reality of which all minds are expressions, and that thought and physical world run in lock-step.

New Thought’s “Infinite Mind / Divine Mind in which we all live and move,” the perennialist “All is One,” and the parallelism between mental and material that underlies “as within, so without” all draw, often unknowingly, on Spinoza’s monism.

His doctrine that human freedom and blessedness come from understanding our place in the necessary order also anticipates the contemplative, acceptance-based strand of practical mind-power. The honest note: Spinoza’s God is impersonal necessity, not a wish-granting will, and he is closer to Stoic acceptance than to manifestation.