De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

Whether one shuns or avoids it, one cannot help but deeply love a soul that felt it could "feed itself solely on love for an eternal and infinite thing," and who, "through assiduous meditation, arrived at the point of seeing that" by omitting the desire for wealth, lust, and honors, he would be omitting nothing but certain evils; yet in the very investigation of the true good, even if he might perhaps not attain it, he foresaw that "a certain good" could nonetheless be obtained. Finally, inflamed by this zeal, he seriously and, as much as was possible, continuously set before his meditations "the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature." Truly a divine counsel, which could not but make the seeker's soul a participant in the verum bonum true good, however much his investigation of truth (as far as that is common to the fate of mortals!) might appear not to have always reached the proposed goal with equal success.

Although there are indeed two things in Benedict referring to Benedict de Spinoza above all that I shall never cease to admire and love—first, that ingenuous purity of soul with which he pursued the true good, superior to any superstition whether by hope or fear through internal strength; second, the marvelous simplicity of the system he devised and the unbroken connection in his total thinking—yet, as far as I can grasp, two things seem to have hindered him, preventing this architect of a system that is in itself most brilliantly coherent from sufficiently guarding himself against the human proclivity for error when laying its foundations.