While the philosophy of his day appeared to him thus vague and illusory, he considered the foundations of Judaism unassailable, and set himself to show the futility of the criticisms of the former. The acknowledgment of Divine omniscience led him to the daring statement that man in his actions is not quite free, that everything is the necessary result of a preceding occurrence, and that every cause, back to the very first, is bound to determine the character of the final action. The human will does not follow blind choice, but is controlled by a chain of antecedent circumstances and causes. To what extent can the doctrine of reward and punishment be admitted, if the will is not free? Chasdaï Crescas' answer to this is that reward and punishment wait on intentions, not on actions. He who, in purity of heart, wishes to accomplish good--which must, of course, necessarily follow-- deserves to be rewarded, as the man who willingly promotes evil, deserves punishment. The highest good to which man can aspire, and the end of all creation, is spiritual perfection, or bliss everlasting, not to be obtained, as the philosophers imagine, by filling the mind with metaphysical theories, but only through the active love of God. This is the substance of all religion and particularly of Judaism. From this point of view it may with justice be said that "the world was created for the sake of the Torah," for the aim of the Law is to lead to immortality by means of ideas and commandments and the guidance of thoughts and actions. Chasdaï Crescas, the first to distinguish between universal religion and specific forms, such as Judaism and Christianity, propounded, deviating from Maimuni's system, only eight peculiarly Jewish tenets. His just objection to Maimuni's thirteen articles of faith was that they were either too many or too few, inasmuch as they blended indiscriminately fundamental truths common to all religions, and teachings peculiar to Judaism. Together with Profiat Duran and Chasdaï Crescas, Don Meïr Alguades, the Castilian chief rabbi, appeared, in the brief interval between two bloody persecutions in Spain, as a writer of philosophic works. He was not an independent inquirer; he merely translated the ethics of Aristotle (1405, in collaboration with Benveniste Ibn-Labi) into Hebrew, making the work accessible to Jews, who, in practical life, lived up to its principles better than the Greeks, who produced them, or the Christians, who, in the pride of faith and church doctrine, considered themselves above the necessity of conforming to the requirements of morality.