New Realism, which emerged with the critique of correlationism—a stance said to be dominantly shaped by Kant and subsequent thought—is increasingly becoming a noteworthy contemporary school. This philosophical intervention places at its center the discussion of the existence, nature, and most crucially, the accessibility of an autonomous reality independent of human cognition. Central to this debate is the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, who introduced the term “correlationism” and delineated the core axes of this discourse. However, Meillassoux’s new realist perspective, particularly developed in his seminal work After Finitude, seems to distance itself from certain thinkers who, historically, could be seen as offering significant preparatory frameworks for his approach. Chief among these thinkers is Spinoza. What justifies this apparent distance? The primary rationale appears to be as follows: Meillassoux’s philosophical program inevitably pits the “metaphysics of necessity” against the “metaphysics of contingency,” whereby Spinoza is positioned within the former and Meillassoux within the latter. In this paper, I argue that this presupposed distance is unfounded. I aim to demonstrate that Spinoza, in nearly every respect, can and should be considered a pivotal initial catalyst for realism in general, and for Meillassouxian speculative materialism in particular.