SPINOLA, AMBROSIO, MARQUIS OF, great Spanish general under Philip II. of Spain, born at Genoa, with a following of 9000, maintained at his own expense, took Ostend after a resistance of 3 years, in consequence of which feat he was appointed commander-in-chief, in which capacity maintained and again maintained a long struggle with Prince Maurice of Nassau, terminated only with the death of the latter; his services on behalf of Spain, in the interest of which he spent his fortune, were never acknowledged, and he died with poignant grief (1571-1630).

SPINOZA, BENEDICT, great modern philosopher, born in Amsterdam, of Jews of Portuguese extraction in well-to-do circumstances, and had been trained as a scholar; began with the study of the Bible and the Talmud, but soon exchanged the study of theology in these for that of physics and the works of Descartes, in which study he drifted farther and farther from the Jewish creed, and at length openly abandoned it; this exposed him to a persecution which threatened his life, so that he left Amsterdam and finally settled at The Hague, where, absorbed in philosophic study, he lived in seclusion, earning a livelihood by polishing optical glasses, which his friends disposed of for him; his days were short; he suffered from ill-health, and died of consumption when he was only 44; he was a man of tranquil temper, moderate desires, purity of motive, and kindly in heart; his great work, his “Ethica,” was published a year after his death; he had held it back during his lifetime because he foresaw it would procure him the name of atheist, which he shrank from with horror; Spinoza’s doctrine is summed up by Dr. Stirling thus, “Whatever is, is; and that is extension and thought.  These two are all that is; and besides these there is nought.  But these two are one; they are attributes of the single substance (that which, for its existence, stands in need of nothing else), very God, in whom, then, all individual things and all individual ideas (modes of extension those, of thought these) are comprehended and take place”; thus we see Spinoza includes under the term extension all individual objects, and under thought all individual ideas, and these two he includes in God, as He in whom they live and move and have their being,—­a great conception and a pregnant, being the speculative ground of the being of all that lives and is; not without good reason does Novalis call him “Der Gott-getrunkene Mensch,” the God-intoxicated man (1632-1677).

SPINOZISM, the pantheism of SPINOZA (q. v.), which regards God as the one self-subsistent substance, and both matter and thought attributes of Him.

SPIRES or SPEYER, an old German town on the left bank of the Rhine, in the Palatinate, 14 m.  SW. of Heidelberg, the seat of a bishop and with a cathedral, of its kind one of the finest in Europe, and the remains of the Retscher, or imperial palace, where in 1529 the Diet of the Empire was held at which the Reformers first got the name of Protestants, because of their protestation against the imperial decree issued at Worms prohibiting any further innovations in religion.