(SPINOZA, BENEDICTUS DE).

This biography of Spinoza in Dutch by Jean Colerus, Minister of the Luheran Church at the Hague, was first printed in Amsterdam in 1705 and is very scarce (only two copies were known to Pollock.) It was immediately followed and supplanted by a French version (The Hague, 1706). Our own biography is a mixture of an anonymous manuscript, La vie et l'esprit de Mr. Benoit de Spinosa (before 1712), which was in the possession of the Count of Boullainvilliers, together with Colerus' biography "into a not very coherent whole… in his book called a refutation of Spinoza, but really a popular exposition" (F. Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy [1880], Introduction, p. xxiv). Ishak Orobio's Refutation of Bredenburg & Spinoza was first printed in Amsterdam in 1684. A second edition appeared in Amsterdam in 1703, making our edition the third edition. Johannes Bredenburg (1643-1691) of Rotterdam, in 1675 penned a rebuttal of Spinoza's philosophy (see next lot), but in the end he himself became a Spinozist. This Refutation of Bredenburg and Spinoza, is the only one of Orobio's many works to be published. The others remained in manuscript - (his anti-Christian polemics were too vitriolic to see the light of print). (See Lot 332)