“But if in any case I did find error in that which I have collected from my natural understanding, I should count it good fortune, since I”

—  Baruch Spinoza

Context: If you find the light of Scripture clearer than the light of reason (which also is given us by divine wisdom), you are doubtless right in your own conscience in making your reason yield. For my part, since I plainly confess that I do not understand the Scriptures, though I have spent many years upon them, and since I know that when once I have a firm proof I cannot by any course of thought come to doubt of it, I rest wholly upon that which my understanding commends to me, without any suspicion that I am deceived therein, or that the Scriptures, even though I do not search them, can speak against it. For one truth cannot conflict with another, as I have already clearly shown in my Appendix to the "Principles of Descartes"... But if in any case I did find error in that which I have collected from my natural understanding, I should count it good fortune, since I enjoy life, and endeavour to pass it not in weeping and sighing, but in peace, joy, and cheerfulness, and from time to time climb thereby a step higher. I know, meanwhile (which is the highest pleasure of all), that all things happen by the power and unchangeable decree of the most perfect Being.

Letter to William van Blyenbergh (1665) as quoted by Sir Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy https://books.google.com/books?id=82R9rMALJfQC (1880) pp. 50-51.

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Dutch philosopher 1632–1677

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