CHAPTER XI
GOETHE AND SPINOZA--_DER EWIGE JUDE_
1773-4
If we are to accept Goethe's own statement, during the years
1773-4--the distracted period, that is to say, which followed his
experiences at Wetzlar, and of which _Werther_ and _Clavigo_ are the
characteristic products--he came under the influence of a thinker who
transformed his conceptions, equally of the conduct of life and of
man's relations to the universe--the Jewish thinker, Benedict Spinoza.
The passage in which he expresses his debt to Spinoza is one of the
best known in all his writings, and is, moreover, a _locus classicus_
in the histories of speculative philosophy. "After looking around me
in vain for a means of disciplining my peculiar nature, I at last
chanced upon the _Ethica_ of this man. To say exactly how much I
gained from that work was due to Spinoza or to my own reading of him
would be impossible; enough that I found in him a sedative for my
passions and that he appeared to me to open up a large and free
outlook on the material and moral world. But what specially attached
me to him was the boundless disinterestedness which shone forth from
every sentence.
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