Skeptics

"I relish the fact that we New Yorkers talk funny, and that art deco skyscrapers symbolize our city. […] But we must set boundaries to this love of variety. I accept the need, even the blessings, of standardization in practical matters: we require a worldwide telephone dialing system and a network of national highways […]. We need domains of standardization, and realms of regionalism, each in its appropriate place, and linked in mutual respect and recognition. I accept and even want McDonalds at the highway interchange—but not in my little neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, and not next to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota."

"Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of “traditional values” and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form."

"[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete."

"I kept reading things like, "The purpose of such-and-such a behavior is so-and-so"-in other words, the assumption that every behavior has a purpose important to survival. Let's face it, some behaviors don't; if they're genetic at all, they only have to stay out of the way of survival to continue. Then, just a year or so ago, I read one of Stephen Jay Gould's books in which he says much the same thing. I was relieved to see a biologist write that some things-physical characteristics or behaviors-don't kill you or save you; they may be riding along with some important genetic characteristic, though they don't have to be."

"In all my years of teaching with Steve, I have never seen him flustered or at a loss for words—except once. In our course entitled "Thinking About Thinking," he had been presenting a lecture on the randomness of nature and referred to Einstein's famous dictum "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." I responded by walking up to the blackboard and writing, "Gould or God?" I then argued that if God does not play dice with the universe, as Einstein said, and if the universe is as random as the throws of honest dice, as Gould says, then there could not be a God. Hence, Gould or God? (Or at the very least, Gould or Einstein?) Then I sat down, leaving it to Steve to answer the challenge. He stood up and looked at the words on the blackboard. He hesitated, gathered his thoughts, and then launched into a defense of God so brilliant that even William Jennings Bryan would have been proud. It was then that I realized what a great lawyer Gould would make. As for God... ?"

"Steve was one of seven or eight second-year students in Columbia University's graduate program in paleontology. I was a senior at the college, eager to hang out—and glad to be included in the mix. We had a ball, eating Southern food at an extravaganza of a church cookout and collecting some of the most gorgeous fossils on Earth. But Steve, at least in my eyes, totally stole the show: of the thousands of specimens of the snail Turritella plebeia lying around, he found the only aberrant specimen—one that was to figure in one of his earliest papers. The guy had eyes. My usual rap on Steve is that I have never met a smarter person who works as hard as he does. That's as true now as it was back in the late 1960s, when my wife and I went up to Cambridge to visit the Goulds and the fabulous collection of trilobites that Steve's predecessor, Harry Whittington, had left in Steve's Harvard office. Dinner over, the evening getting late, we went to bed, but as I was dropping off, I heard the sound of Steve's by-now-famous manual typewriter as he wrote a review (I think it was of a new publication of the letters of Charles Lyell). Man, that guy could put the time in."

"Steve is extremely bright, inventive. He thoroughly understands paleontology; he thoroughly understands evolutionary biology. He has performed an enormous service in getting people to think about punctuated equilibrium, because you see the process of stasis/sudden change, which is a puzzle. It's the cessation of change for long periods of time. Since you always have mutations, why don't things continue changing? You either have to say that the particular form is highly adapted, optimal, and exists in a stable environment, or you have to be very puzzled. Steve has been enormously important in that sense. Talking with Steve, or listening to him give a talk, is a bit like playing tennis with someone who's better than you are. It makes you play a better game than you can play. For years, Steve has wanted to find, in effect, what accounts for the order in biology, without having to appeal to selection to explain everything—that is, to the evolutionary "just-so stories." You can come up with some cockamamie account about why anything you look at was formed in evolution because it was useful for something. There is no way of checking such things. We're natural allies, because I'm trying to find sources of that natural order without appealing to selection, and yet we all know that selection is important."

"many evolutionary biologists consider Gould’s writings a serious impediment to popular understanding of Darwinian thought."

"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about—not just the answers, but even the questions—are consistently misleading."

"Most of the subjects Steve dealt with were meant to be illustrative precisely of the complexity and diversity of the processes and products of evolution. Despite the immense diversity of matters on which he wrote there was, underneath, a unifying theme: that the complexity of the living world cannot be treated as a manifestation of some grand general principle, but that each case must be understood by examining it from the ground up and as the realization of one out of many material paths of causation."

"What is particularly delightful about Steve's writing is the virtuosity with which he connects seemingly unrelated subjects to illuminate and strengthen his arguments. Whether right or wrong, Steve is always stimulating, and this is perhaps where he has made his greatest contribution—in awakening in thousands, if not millions, of his readers an enthusiasm for the secrets of this wonderful world of ours."

"I first met Stephen Jay Gould in the sixth grade in Queens, New York, when we were the only two geeks in the school interested in natural history and particularly in dinosaurs—decades before the advent of worldwide dinomania. In junior high school, our schoolmates nicknamed me "Dino" and Gould "Fossilface." We spent many afternoons at the American Museum of Natural History, where such curators as Edwin Colbert and Norman Newell fanned the flames of our hobby. We lost touch for twenty-five years, and I was delighted one day to discover Steve's columns in Natural History. At the time, both my life and my career had wandered far away from natural history, and I was working as an editor of what used to be called pulp magazines. I wrote to him, "You have inherited Thomas Huxley's mantle in explaining evolution to a new generation," and I asked if he remembered me. He wrote back, "Blood may be thicker than water, but junior high school friendships are thicker than anything." Steve encouraged me to return to the fold and take up my boyhood interests once again. But where to begin, with no credentials and no umbrella institution? He urged me to pursue the history of science as an independent scholar, to make a pilgrimage to Darwin's home in England, and to buy antiquarian natural history books in the shops around the British Museum. He gave me letters of introduction to top scholars. Eventually he encouraged me to write my Encyclopedia of Evolution, to which he generously contributed a foreword. Soon after it was published, in 1990, I was hired by Natural History, and among my duties is seeing "This View of Life" through to press each month (one does not really edit Stephen Jay Gould). My reconnection with the man, and with the passions and ideas that we both enjoy, has transformed my life immeasurably for the better. Thanks, Fossilface!"

"Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals... very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity."

"I can't say much about Gould’s strengths as a scientist, but for a long time I've regarded him as the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn)."

"My introduction to Stephen Jay Gould's work came in the 1970s, when I avidly read all his articles in Natural History (as I still do today). In 1990, when I was asked by a London newspaper to name my favorite book, I selected Wonderful Life; this led to my receiving a letter from Stephen and to the beginning of a frequent and voluminous correspondence between us. Many subjects close to both our hearts have been discussed in letters: from the place of contingency (in evolution but also in the often unpredictable reactions of patients to illnesses and drugs) to our shared love for museums (especially the old "cabinet" type—we both spoke out for the preservation of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia). In 1993 I wrote of ways of joining particulars with generalities—in my own case, clinical narratives with neuroscience—and he replied: "I have long experienced exactly the same tension, trying to assuage my delight in individual things through my essays and my interest in generality through my more technical writing. I loved the Burgess Shale work so much because it allowed me to integrate the two." I often wrote excited letters to Stephen the moment I had read his columns: in 1995, about his article on Sacculina, a meditation on whether such a life-form could be called degenerate; and in 1996, about some just-published research of his on microevolutionary processes and hybridization effects. I was especially fascinated by his 1998 article on Buffon's trajectory from his early Platonic thinking to a historical viewpoint—partly because of a similar evolution in my own thinking. Stephen is now a good friend as well as a colleague—we dine together, walk the streets together (only someone as intensely sensitive to architecture as he is would introduce spandrels as an evolutionary metaphor), celebrate birthdays together (when Stephen often exercises his talent for composing verses on the spot), go to museums and botanical gardens together. He is an enchanting companion as well as a major intellectual force, and both aspects of him come together in his unique essays."

"Although Haldane accepted the earlier and incorrect paleontological interpretation of the fossil record of Gryphaea, in his overall belief that the pace of evolution was rapid and seemingly discontinuous, rather than slow and continuous, he anticipated, at least in part and by three decades, the model of punctuated equilibria, which was proposed by... Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould."

"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on this side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."

"According to Gould and Eldredge, the reason why so many links are missing is that they simply do not exist. They take the view that biological evolution proceeds in successive stages of "punctuated equilibrium." Living species would remain unchanged for extremely long stretches of time, and then undergo profound changes in relatively short periods. To borrow a term from the quantum theory of atoms, evolution would occur in "quantum jumps." It is very likely that the spark of life appeared during the first such "jump.""

"a masterpiece of deception"

"How can one trust a person so prejudiced as to neglect overwhelming evidence?"

"S. J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is a paleontologist's distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science. Gould is one of a number of politically motivated scientists who have consistently misled the public about what psychologists are doing in the field of intelligence, what they have discovered and what conclusions they have come to. Gould simply refuses to mention unquestionable facts that do not fit into his politically correct version; he shamelessly attacks the reputations of eminent scientists of whom he disapproves, on completely nonfactual grounds, and he misrepresents the views of scientists."

"Gould's argument on reification purports to get at the philosophical foundation of the field. He claims that general intelligence, defined as the factor common to different cognitive abilities, is merely a mathematical abstraction; hence if we consider it a measurable attribute we are reifying it, falsely converting an abstraction into an “entity” or a “thing”—variously referred to as “a hard, quantifiable thing,” “a quantifiable fundamental particle,” “a thing in the most direct, material sense.” Here he has dug himself a deep hole.… Indeed, this whole argument is fantastic. The scientist does not measure “material things”: He measures properties (such as length or mass), sometimes of a single “thing” (however defined), and sometimes of an organized collection of things, such as a machine, a biological organ, or an organism. In a particularly complex collection, the brain, some properties (i.e., specific functions) have been traced to narrowly-localized regions (such as the sensory or motor nuclei connected to particular parts of the body)."

"[Gould's] historical account is highly selective; he asserts the non-objectivity of science so that he can test for scientific truth, flagrantly, by the standards of his own social and political convictions; and by linking his critique to the quest for fairness and justice, he exploits the generous instincts of his readers.… In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma."

"In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message."

"Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose."

"I just didn't trust Gould... I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of 'The Mismeasure of Man' came and he never even bothered to mention Michael's [John S. Michael] study, I just felt he was a charlatan."

"When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this [second] edition Dr. Gould traces the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays, in a separate section at the end, on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the claim of this book to be “a major contribution toward deflating pseudobiological ‘explanations’ of our present social woes.”"

"He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearman—and demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract. It is this sort of performance that makes the book's eventual refutation of Arthur Jensen seem incidental, for it is far more absorbing to have our powers of reason challenged than it is to have our social consciences shaken."

"A rare book—at once of great importance and wonderful to read.… Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology, recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.… A major addition to the scientific literature."

"The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do."

"The power of Gould's analysis lies in his focus on particulars. Rather than attempt a grand critique of all “scientific” efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims."

"...But no matter how enamoured one may be with Postmodernist instability of meanings and signification slippage, absolutely nothing can make spinozisme as employed in Diderot's Promenade and the Encyclopédie, or in High Enlightenment literature, compatible with Revelation, divine providence, religious authority, theism, mysticism, fideism, eclecticism, moral relativism, Aristotelian substances, Platonic ideals, Prisca theologia (natural religion), Cartesian dualism, Lockean dualism based on supra rationem, double truth, fixity of species, Epicurean swerves, La Mettrie's materialism, or skepticism. ‘Spinozists’ a term already in very wide use, in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, as well as Holland well before 1700, and ‘spinozisme’ as used in eighteenth-century France, can never mean, or ever be blended with, any of these trends. It may not always be a rigorous philosophical-theological category."

"Is Spinoza baroque? No, but if we find, through this line of thinking, a spurious and worn-out figure that rejects the crisis, that repeats the utopia in its ingenuous Renaissance form, what we have found is merely Spinozism. When classical idealism takes up Spinoza, in effect it only takes up (or invents?) Spinozism, a Renaissance philosophy of the bourgeois revolution of the capitalist market!"

"In Spinoza, at the origin of the Modern world, metaphysical theory and the theory of science are given in complete agreement for the first time. They represent the alternative to the entire subsequent path of metaphysics and of the bourgeois theory of science. Spinoza lives as an alternative: Today this alternative is real. The Spinozian analytic of full space and open time are becoming an ethics of liberation in all the dimensions that this discourse constructs and makes available."

"And therefore we can see just how constructive this Spinozian difference is, just how constructive this negativity really is! The organic interweaving of these two motifs is fundamental in the history of European philosophy. Spinoza is the first to mold this logical mechanism that bourgeois philosophy would constantly and continually try to abrogate during its subsequent development. In Kantianism, as in classical idealism, Spinoza continually remains the object of opposition and polemic: What is destroyed is precisely the intersection between the negation of the ideology and the construction of the world, the inherence of the limit, of the materiality, to the infinite."

"Spinoza's thought is completely idealistic when it is presented as negative thought, when it develops the bourgeois utopia, living it in the extreme, abstract consequences of its spiritual idyll; it is, in contrast, completely materialistic as soon as it is reassembled in a constructive way, inverting the impossibility of an ideal world in the materialistic tension of its components and embracing these in a practical project, in a violent dynamism of worldly liberation. "Benedictus maledictus": never has a philosopher been more rightly hated by his times, a bourgeois and capitalist epoch."

"To us it seems that this difference, which Spinoza's thought constitutes in the history of Western metaphysics, represents an extremely high point of the theoretical development of modern thought. In other words, Spinoza's thought seems to us to represent a strategy for superseding the antinomies of bourgeois thought. But because bourgeois ideology is essentially based on antinomies, this supersession is a supersession tout court of the ideology. Spinoza gives us being in its immediateness. He destroys the homology between the mediations of articulations of being and the mediations and articulations of bourgeois Power. He presents us with the world as a territory of a joyous construction of immediate human needs."

"Spinoza redefines the problem of Modern philosophy, which is the conquest of the world and the liberation of humanity, and destroys both its multiple antinomies and the continually resurgent separation (dualistic, transcendental, etc.) in the theory of knowledge and history, in the same way that criticism has always destroyed Zenonian sophism: moving forward, putting reality in motion. Spinoza's philosophy is born from the radicalization of the ontological paradox of being: in the recognition that the hypostasis, the only possible hypostasis, is that of the world and of the development of its necessity from physics to practice. It is a conception of the world that immediately produces, as if from its own basis, a completely modern conception of science and worldly knowledge, both technical and liberatory. It is a radically materialistic conception of being and of the world."

"Spinoza accomplishes the synthesis of traditional philosophical components by means of breaking and shattering. It is useless to pursue the presuppositions of Spinozian philosophy if we do not look for them in the qualitative leap determined by his philosophy. The continuity of Spinozian thought with respect to the preceding course of the history of metaphysics consists of a radical discontinuity, one that exalts the utopia of consciousness and freedom (a patrimony of Western thought) in a project of liberation. The perspective of the world is not a utopia, the immanentism is not aesthetic, and the liberation is no longer artisanal, but all of this is presupposed, it is taken as a basis."

"Some have spoken of a liberal Spinoza, and others, of a democratic Spinoza. By the same standard one could also speak of an artistocratic Spinoza or a monarchical Spinoza — and it has been done. Perhaps also an anarchic Spinoza? No one has ever said that."

"Spinoza's true politics is his metaphysics. Against the potentialities of this metaphysics, the polemic of bourgeois thought and all the mystificatory attempts that go under the emblem of "Spinozism" discharge their weapons. But Spinoza's metaphysics is articulated in his political discourse, and some of its potentialities are developed specifically in this field. Here we must try to identify them."

"Spinoza, when confronting political themes (and politics is one of the fundamental axes of his thought), founds a nonmystified form of democracy. In other words, he poses the problem of democracy on the terrain of materialism and therefore as a critique of every juridical mystification of the State. The materialist foundation of democratic constitutionalism in Spinoza is posed within the problematic of production. Spinozian thought squeezes the constitution-production relationship into a unitary nexus; it is not possible to have a correct conception of politics without weaving together these two terms from the very beginning. It is impracticable and despicable to speak of politics outside of this nexus: We know this well. However, Spinoza has too often been thrown into that mixed-up "democratic" soup of normative Hobbesian transcendentalism, Rousseauian general will, and Hegelian Aufhebung — functioning, in effect, to fortify the separation between production and constitution, between society and the State."

"Spinoza shows that the history of metaphysics comprehends radical alternatives. Metaphysics, as the highest form of the organization of Modern thought, is not a unitary whole. It comprehends the alternatives that the history of class struggle produces. There exists an "other" history of metaphysics, the blessed history against the damned. And we should not forget that it is still only in the complexity of metaphysics that the Modern age can be read."

"Spinoza founds Modern materialism in its highest form, determining the horizons of both Modern and contemporary philosophical speculation within an immanent and given philosophy of being and an atheism defined as the negation of every presupposed ordering of either the constitution of being or human behavior. However, even in its productive and living form, Spinozian metaphysics does not succeed in superseding the limits of a purely "spatial" (or Galilean-physical) conception of the world. It certainly pushes on this conception and tries to destroy its limits, but it does not reach a solution. Rather, it leaves unresolved the problem of the relationship between the spatial dimensions and the temporal, creative, and dynamic dimensions of being. The imagination, that spiritual faculty running throughout the Spinozian system, constitutes being in an order that is only allusively temporal. As such, the problem remains intact, in terms that are unresolved but pure and forceful: Being (before the invention of the dialectic) evades the tangle of dialectical materialism. In fact, the readings of Spinoza by socialist and Soviet authors have not enriched dialectical materialism but have, rather, only diminished the potentialities that Spinozian metaphysics offers for superseding the purely spatial and objectivistic dimension of materialism."

"...Kant is Spinoza's only adversary in the realm of occidental culture. Constantin Bruner has aptly stated that everyone must be either a Spinozist or a Kantian. The modern intellectual world, however, is overwhelmingly Spinozistic. Kant created only a school of thought, but Spinoza gave birth to a new culture and religion. Kant was long forgotten in his own fatherland until he was revived by Hermann Cohen. Spinoza has always lived in the centers of modern culture. Although at first he was maligned, calumniated, and even damned, he came to be later blessed and admired. He was always a subject of discussion in religious, philosophical, and scientific circles, because he dangled before man's eye the picture of a world without contradictions or abuses. Kant has accomplished only a special task. He examined and described the mechanism of the human mind rather than the mechanism of the world. He can be compared to Aristotle, as Spinoza can be likened to Plato. Kant is the very embodiment of idealism, while Spinoza is the representative of extreme naturalism."

"...Kant's famous Categorical Imperative smacked of the Prussian military drill, and it was felt to be too prosaic and sober. Therefore, many of the so-called Kantians, particularly those with deep religious interests, turned from their master to acclaim Spinoza. Solomon Maimon, who destroyed the basis of Kant's metaphysics thereby, paved the way for a critical examination of his ethics. Professor Paulus of Jena University, himself a Kantian, became the first translator and editor of Spinoza's works in German. He thereby became instrumental in furthering the cause of Spinozism in Germany. Many other eminent Kantian theologians of the time, particularly the more learned, became active in spreading Spinoza's gospel. So completely did they come under his spell that they considered it their duty not only to defend Spinoza against accusations of atheism but to represent him as a true theist."

"...Of the Weimarian trio, Herder theologian, poet, historian, critic, philosopher, and metrician was the first to apply Spinozism to historiography and to literary history. He was also the only one to recognize in Spinoza the renovator of a form of ancient theism. Living under the shadow of Goethe and his personality cult, he conceived pantheism under the aspect of personality."

"...The rise, triumph, and victory of Spinozism in Europe are reminiscent of the power of ancient Buddhism because both are religiosity rather than philosophy. Spinozism is religion even when it operates with bizarre formulas. Its starting-point is a dead God, who is reminiscent of Buddha's Brahma. It is man's metaphysical fear and not the idea of a living God which is the driving force in religiosity. True religiosity is not an understanding of how God is correlated to man and to the world but the feeling of man's insignificance in the cosmos, giving birth to a state of meekness, humbleness, compassion, and pity. Only when man is crushed and overwhelmed by the thought of his insignificance in this vast universe does he become truly religious. These feelings are as present in Spinozism as they are in Buddhism."

"However, his contemporary, Leibnitz, the father of the German enlightenment, who created an optimistic world-picture, always remained only a philosopher for philosophers. Even Immanuel Kant, although always famous, was never popular. In his own fatherland he was all but forgotten for most of the nineteenth century until revived by Hermann Cohen and his school. Spinoza, however, was never exhumed because he was never buried. Kant, because of his exclusive intellectuality, has influenced only his students, while Spinoza, because of his emotional appeal, has ruled even those who have never heard his name."

"...The influence of Spinozism attained its height in Germany when it overwhelmed Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, the mental giants of Weimar. Weimar was the cradle of modern German culture. It is to the new Germany what Athens was to ancient Hellas, or Jerusalem to ancient Judea, a sea of light and the center of creative genius. From Weimar emanated all the great cultural traditions of the Fatherland, which secured for Germany her proud position in the realm of European culture. Over this spirit of Weimar hovered the genius of Baruch Spinoza. It was here that Spinozism became a dominating influence in the life of the new German culture. But in this process of expansion it was transformed into something different from the original doctrine of the philosopher. The creative geniuses of Weimar could not possibly become reconciled to the mechanistic world-picture from which personality was banished. To Goethe personality was the highest gift of the Gods to man and enjoyed an even higher place in his affections than did Spinozism. The same can be said of many other poets who later embraced some form of Spinozism."