Desirous of completing his knowledge of Latin, he took lessons from a certain doctor of medicine, one Van den Ende, who eked out his income by taking pupils. Whether the worthy Van den Ende employed his spare time by inoculating Spinoza with what Hume afterwards called his “hideous atheistical doctrines” is not apparently known; but it seems certain that Spinoza thus early came under the influence of that series of ideas which so many people have complained of as “medical materialism,” whatever that may mean. Ignorant people have, from the very earliest times, complained that doctors have no religion; that we only look upon the materialist side of man; that we are blind to ethical truth and to the eternal verities of Plato. This, of course, is sheer nonsense. It is quite true that few, if any, doctors have been burned at the stake for a point of belief; but that is simply because the medical profession has always preferred, if burning were in the question, to be burned for something that could be proved objectively, such as the difference between scarlet fever and cancer, for instance, and not because of an opinion that apparently depends upon a state of mind or upon the education that any given man has received, or upon the surroundings in which he grew up. It is said that Van den Ende had a daughter with whom Spinoza fell in love; but the critics have cast so many doubts upon the pretty romance that has been woven between them that nowadays it is not generally believed. Some rash words of Spinoza’s having come to the ears of the authorities of the synagogue, they summoned him before them to explain; but, seeing that he had already parted in very truth from the conventional Hebrew worship, and not wishing to have any public scandal among the community, the Chief Rabbi offered him a pension of 1,000 florins if he would outwardly conform and appear occasionally in the synagogue; that is to say, if Spinoza would turn hypocrite. But this was not at all in accordance with Spinoza’s character, so, since he refused to be coerced, it became necessary to excommunicate him from the synagogue after an unavailing attempt had been made by some footpad to assassinate him. Spinoza drew up a protest against his excommunication, but did not publish it. He dropped the name of Baruch and took the name of Benedict; in this possibly there may have been a shimmer of irony at his excommunication, for both names mean “blessed.” Such irony would be in accordance with what one might expect from a pupil of Van den Ende, who in truth seems to have been an ironical man. Later, he fell into trouble with the French authorities in Paris, and was hanged for a conspirator. Van den Ende seems to have been a very undoctor-like sort of doctor, for it is seldom indeed that any of our profession conspire with anybody; least of all for a religious or political purpose. Marat, of course, was a brilliant exception, but he came to an untimely end.