Of course, the main tendency of Judaism has been in another direction. Fascinating though Philo’s picture of the community of Therapeutae is, yet it cannot be felt to be a model for ordinary men and women. From time to time, indeed, Jews (like the disciples of Isaac Luria) followed much the same course of life. But most have been unwilling or unable to accept such an ideal as worthy of imitation. It is not at all certain that Philo meant it to be a model; anyhow, as we have seen, he was not always in the same mood. Judah ha-Levi opens the third part of his _Khazari_ with just this distinction between the ideal circumstances, under which the ascetic life may be admirable, and the normal conditions, under which it is culpable. “When the Divine Presence was still in the Holy Land among the people capable of prophecy, some few persons lived an ascetic life in deserts” with good results. But nowadays, continues Judah ha-Levi, “he who in our time and place and people, ‘whilst no open vision exists’ (I Samuel 3. 1), the desire for study being small, and persons with a natural talent for it absent, would like to retire into ascetic solitude, only courts distress and sickness for soul and body.” The real pietist, he concludes, is not the man who ignores his senses, but the man who rules over them. And this was really the view of Philo also, as we find it in his other works. “The bad man,” he says, “treats pleasure as the _summum bonum_, the good man as a necessity, for without pleasure nothing happens among mortals.” And so he counsels men to follow the avocations of ordinary life, and not to disdain ambition. “In fine, it is necessary that they who would concern themselves with things divine should, first of all, have discharged the duties of man. It is a great folly to think we can reach a comprehension of the greater when we are unable to overcome the less. Be first known by your excellence in things human, in order that you may apply yourselves to excellence in things divine.” (I take these quotations from C. G. Montefiore’s brilliant _Florilegium Philonis_, which he ought to reprint.) Philo undoubtedly thought more highly of the contemplative than of the practical life. But in this last passage he gets very near the truth when he treats the former as only noble when it is based on the latter. It is another aspect of the rabbinic truth that “not study but conduct” is the end of virtue. Philo does not contradict this truth; he offers to our inspection the reverse side of the same shield.