Ethics is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to apply the method of Euclid in philosophy. Spinoza puts forward a small number of definitions and axioms from which he attempts to derive hundreds of propositions and corollaries, such as "When the Mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it"; "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death"; and "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal."

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a prominent Dutch philosopher and along with René Descartes, he was a leading philosophical figure of the Dutch Golden Age. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, Spinoza came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy.