The present work is intended once again to draw the attention of readers to the resources opened up by Spinoza for the elucidation of the classical problems of philosophy. Today these problems are too often taken to be merely verbal, so that answers to them so far as these are metaphysical are confidently claimed to be "nonsense. " My labours will, therefore, seem to minds thus committed to have been untimely and funda- mentally futile. Untimely they may have been, but unless also fu- tile their untimeliness may render them the more exigent; and to judge them as futile is to claim a certainty...