that has been afforded by the keenest critic among Jewish philosophers, Hasdai Crescas. Too deeply enmeshed in the Aristotelian system, Maimonides found the happiness and immortality of man solely in the acquired intellectual power which becomes part of the divine intellect, and the mere knowledge of God is to him tantamount to the blissful enjoyment of the pious in the radiance of God’s majesty. Consequently those who strive and soar heavenward through their moral conduct and noble aspirations, without at the same time being thinkers, receive no reward. Against this Aristotelian one-sidedness Crescas emphasizes God’s love and goodness for which the righteous yearn, and in whose pursuit man finds perfection and happiness. Not for the sake of attaining bliss shall we love God and practice virtue and truth, but to love God and practice virtue is itself true bliss. This is the nearness of God referred to by the Psalmist and declared to be man’s highest good.(980) There is no need of any other reward than this, and there is no greater punishment than to be deprived of this boon forever.(981) 11. In the face of these two great thinkers, to whom Spinoza owes the fundamental ideas of his ethics,(982) the question considered by Albo, whether the eternal duration of the tortures of hell is reconcilable with the divine mercy,(983) a question which still plays an important rôle in Christian theology, and which was probably suggested to Albo through his disputations with representatives of the Church,—is for us superfluous and superseded. Our modern conceptions of time and space admit neither a place or a world-period for the reward and punishment of souls, nor the intolerable conception of eternal joy without useful action and eternal agony without any moral purpose. Modern man knows that he bears heaven and hell within his own bosom. Indeed, so much more difficult is the life of duty which knows of no other reward than happiness through harmony with God, the Father of the immortal soul, and of no other punishment than the soul’s distress at its inner discord with the primal Source and the divine Ideal of all morality. All the more powerfully is modern man controlled by the thought that the universe permits no stagnation, no barren enjoyment or barren suffering, but that every death marks the transition to a higher goal for greater accomplishment. This yearning of the soul finds expression in the Talmudic maxim, “The righteous find rest neither in this world, nor in the world to come, as it is said, ‘They go from strength to strength, until they appear before God on Zion.’ ”(984) Chapter XLVI. The Individual and the Race