Excerpt from Freedom and Purpose: An Interpretation of the Psychology of Spinoza<br><br>The following essay is an attempt to interpret Spinoza's ideas of human consciousness in terms of modern psychology. It is extremely hazardous to project the feelings and methods of one age into the mental habits of earlier thinkers. The difficulty is of a peculiar kind when we examine the shell of scholastic for mulae from which the author never wholly released himself. Nevertheless, the consensus of opinion has given him a place second to none among the progenitors of the scientific study of mind. Indeed, he is held by some, and with good reason, to be the unwitting founder of the historic school known as Parallel ism. Be this as it may, it is certain that no man before the rise of empirical methods understood as well as he the meaning and scope of psychic conation. The structural phenomena of the organism were hidden from his View, but their functional values, which we now subsume under the rubric of teleology, were grasped with an accuracy that astonishes the inquirer.<br><br>We submit the results of our study not as a complete account Of the Spinozistic philosophy - for the inquiry is limited to a particular field - but as a practical solution of a problem which has persistently vexed the reader Of the Ethics. Freedom, in whatsoever manner described, reveals a network of unexplained difficulties. The mesh grows thicker and more tangled if we treat Spinoza's problem in the cavalier fashion usually accorded it. Either freedom vanishes altogether, or its terms become tantalisingly vague. The form of argument which we have adopted allows room for the scientific verification of material. Its virtue, if any, lies here.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.