Author
Baruch Spinoza (Benedict de) is documented in Fuller’s letters, books, journals, and manuscripts (1834–1845). 2 distinct works are named, most often in Letter to James F. Clarke, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “excerpted”.
Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had Baruch Spinoza (Benedict de)’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.
“The following extract from Spinoza is worthy of attention... SPINOZA. TRACTATUS POLITICI, DE DEMOCRATIA, CAPUT XI. "Perhaps some one will here ask, whether the supremacy of man over woman is attributable to nature or custom?”
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Massive excerpted Spinoza text (~200-line span) explicitly labeled as an extract.
“p13: 'Now comes / Spinoza, and Goethe now / if ever found his teacher / or rather one who could / answer with some adequacy / to his extensive queries. / Spinoza next to Shakes- / peare taught him most / of any mind.'; p16–17: 'He is again drawn to the study of Spinoza, one of those men / who disdaining illusion, and / seeing that life is a tissue / of renunciations renounce / once for all... Speaks of what he got he got from Spinoza, not of what / Spinoza had for what man / can understand any other man”
This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.
Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.
“Goethe admired Spinoza. _ Jacobi thought Nature concealed God_”
Fuller, Margaret. "Fragmentary Reading Notes and Autobiographical Reflections." Houghton Library, Harvard University.
“It seemed to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other mind, with which I ought to be acquainted, in order to know him well,—perhaps Spinoza's.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
“It was A sublime thought of Spinoza that every true virtue is a part of the love, with which God loveth himself.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal December 1836." Houghton Library, Harvard University; MS Am 1086; Box 3.
Inferred Coleridge quotes 'It was a sublime thought of Spinoza that every true virtue is a part of the love, with which God loveth himself.' The work is the Ethics (Ethica, 1677), Part V, Proposition 36, Scholium — Coleridge's paraphrase of a well-known Spinoza aphorism from the Ethics. II) quotes Spinoza's famous formulation.
“When I meet a thought of his it gives me the same feeling of greatness and depth as do Spinoza's I need not analyze them, for they breathe upon me and renovate my life”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal 1840." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (85); Box 5 (85).
“SPINOZA. TRACTATUS POLITICI, DE DEMOCRATIA, CAPUT XI. "Perhaps some one will here ask, whether the supremacy of man over woman is attributable to nature or custom?...”
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.
Explicitly titled and attributed.
Undated
Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.
“p13: 'Now comes / Spinoza, and Goethe now / if ever found his teacher / or rather one who could / answer with some adequacy / to his extensive queries.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Notes toward The Life of Goethe." Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Passages surviving only in the posthumous Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, compiled by Emerson, Channing, and Clarke.
“episodes on War, Bonaparte, Goethe, and Spinoza, were mingled.”
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.
Inferred Though no specific text is identified, Spinoza himself emerges as an "episode" within these dialogues, signaling his significant presence in Fuller's intellectual landscape and influencing her thought on a diverse range of subjects.