Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a family of Portuguese Jewish refugees, was expelled from the community at twenty-three, and supported himself grinding optical lenses — precision work, and probably what killed him, since the glass dust would not have helped the lung disease he died of at forty-four. He declined a professorship at Heidelberg in 1673 on the grounds that it came with limits on what he could teach. Only one book appeared under his name in his lifetime; the Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously and promptly banned, and the Ethics came out in the months after his death in 1677. He is placed here as a teacher rather than an ultimate because pantheism has no founder and does not venerate him — but no pantheist page can be written without him.