Some of Spinoza's writing were translated from Latin and published together in 1901. Robert Harvey Monro Elwes rendered into English the Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics, and Correspondence of Benedict de Spinoza.
We mention some of Spinoza's psychological insights:
As devotion springs from wonder at a thing which we love, so does Derision spring from contempt of a thing which we hate or fear, and Scorn from contempt of folly, as veneration from wonder at prudence. ...
The essence of the mind only affirms that which the mind is, or can do; in other words, it is the mind's nature to conceive only such things as assert its power of activity ...
No one envies the virtue of anyone who is not his equal...
...Envy is a species of hatred... pain ...., a modification whereby a man's power of activity, or endeavor toward activity, is checked. But a man does not endeavor or desire to do anything, which cannot follow from his nature as it is given; therefore a man will not desire any power of activity or virtue (which is the same thing) to be attributed to him, that is .... foreign to his own; hence his desire cannot be checked, nor he himself pained by the contemplation of virtue in some one unlike himself, consequently he cannot envy such ...a one. But he can envy his equal, who is assumed to have the same nature as himself. ....
...[When] we venerate a man, through wonder at his prudence, fortitude, etc., we do so, because we conceive those qualities to be peculiar to him, and not as common to our nature; we, therefore, no more envy their possessor, than we envy trees for being tall, or lions for being courageous.
Spinoza was not as is commonly said, a "rationalist." He describes the mind to outline the limitations of human knowledge.
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