"As is well known, a great flowering of Neo-Spinozism occurred in German philosophy and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lessing, Herder, and Goethe; Hölderlin; the German Romantics Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis; the German Idealists Schelling and Hegel — all of them subscribed to one or another version of Spinoza's monistic, deterministic metaphysics."