had been the Portuguese base for the Jesuit philosophers Molina and Suarez. In
1624 da Costa interpreted religion as a human creation. For this he was excom-
municated by the Jews and his books burned by the Dutch; he committed suicide
in 1640.- On the gradual development of Spinoza’s monism; see Funkenstein (1986: 81–87).
- Brown (1984: 15–31); Funkenstein (1986: 118–123). The intellectual energy gen-
erated by this Leipzig milieu is shown in Figure 10.1: Leibniz’s teacher Weigel had
previously taught Pufendorf, who became a famous legal philosopher and, like
Leibniz, proponent of universal law. Another of Leibniz’s teachers was the father
of the other notable German philosopher of this generation; this was Thomasius,
who began as a natural lawyer, converted to Pietism in 1694, and produced a
philosophy of mystical vitalism. Again there was a structural rivalry; the Pietists,
who were the equivalent of the Catholic fideists in the context of Protestant
Germany, became the main opponents of Leibniz’s lineage, including Wolff and his
followers. - Broad (1975: 43); Mahoney (1990). Leibniz was publishing his “calculus of tran-
scendent qualities” and his new dynamics between 1684 and 1694, just the years
in which he worked out his philosophical system: Discourse on Metaphysics
(1684–85); correspondence with Arnauld (1686–1690); New System (1695). - “Space is nothing but the order of co-existing things and time the order of
successive things” (quoted in Brown, 1984: 147; see also 115). In keeping with
this point, Leibniz criticizes Newton’s physics for assuming a frame of empty space,
just as he rejects his theory of gravity as action-at-a-distance, since a vacuum does
not exist in Leibniz’s metaphysics. - Hobbes’s important works were all produced at a rather advanced age: his contri-
bution to Descartes’s Meditations on the First Philosophy in 1641 (age 53); De
Cive, his first published treatise on political power, 1642 (54); Leviathan 1651
(63); De Corpore, containing his most thorough scientific materialism, 1655 (67).
As in other cases, creativity had nothing to do with age, but with the moment of
contact with the central intellectual networks. On Hobbes’s career trajectory, see
Macpherson (1968); Shapin and Schaffer (1985); Lynch (1991). - Locke took over some of Cudworth’s arguments straightforwardly. His argument
in the Essay (4.10) for the existence of God is identical to Cudworth’s: that nothing
can come from nothing, and the existence of something implies the existence of
an eternal creator (Copleston, 1950–1977: 5:58; Locke, [1690] 1959: bk. 4.10).
This is the only point, along with the self-evident existence of the self, on which
Locke admits knowledge derived other than from the senses. - Juan de Prado, who had been excommunicated from the synagogue in 1656 along
with Spinoza, supported natural religion and was attacked by Orobio de Castro,
who defended Jewish orthodoxy with Cartesian and Spinozaist weapons, a geo-
metric sequence of proofs. Orobio wielded the same weapons against Christianity,
and Locke was present at a debate in Amsterdam in 1684 on this topic, which he
reviewed in one of his earliest publications (EP, 1967: 5:552). Bayle, not yet famous
at the time when Locke met him, was similarly stimulated by the milieu of Jewish
controversies over natural religion.
1000 •^ Notes to Pages 590–599