deepest and boldest of thinkers that our modern world has seen. When the two goddesses appeared to Spinoza, as they do to every one of us once in our lives: the one plump and proud and persuasively fair, the other modest of look, reverent, and unadorned; and they offered to the young Jew of Amsterdam the momentous option of paths, he did not long hesitate in his choice. Turning his back upon the world, and a deaf ear to its Siren songs of success, he chose to earn a modest livelihood by making lenses. Too honest to accept the Synagogue’s price for hypocrisy, he was too proud even to accept the gifts of disinterested friendship and admiration, and too fond of his freedom to accept even a professorial chair of Philosophy. Like his great contemporary and compatriot Rembrandt, Spinoza was incapable of complying with the world’s behests or of adapting himself to its standards. The public did not inspire him, and its applause left him profoundly unmoved. He scorned the smiles as much as the frowns of Fortune, and calmly pursued his own path, undaunted by obloquy, unseduced by temptation: a veritable Socrates of a man, voluntarily and wholly devoted to the humble service of Truth. In meditation he found his heart’s delight, and, while grinding glasses for optical instruments in his solitary attic, he excogitated other aids for the eye of man. A quiet pipe of tobacco, a friendly chat with his landlord or his fellow-lodgers and their children, and, when bent on more violent dissipation, a single-combat between two spiders, or the antics of a foolish fly entangled in their toils, furnished the cheerful ascetic with abundant diversion. On those last occasions, his biographer tells us, “he would sometimes break into laughter.” ♦1677♦ And having lived his own life, Spinoza died as those die whom the Olympians love: in the meridian of manhood and intellectual vigour, leaving behind him the memory of a blameless character to his friends, and the fruits of a mighty genius to the world at large. For the goddess to whom he had dedicated his whole life did not despise the sacrifice.