But if Spinoza was the greatest of philosophers we must also remember that he was one of the first, if not the very first, of the critics of the Bible who endeavoured to see that wonderful book through clear glasses, through spectacles that were properly ground, because he had ground them himself. He had not the advantage of modern physiology and psychology, whereby we know that a book, written by men in a state of semi-savagery, such as Moses and the other supposed authors of the Pentateuch, must reflect their semi-savage minds and the thickened cerebral arteries which must have been theirs if they were so old as tradition states. None the less he came to very much the same conclusions as have been reached by the most learned and scientific of modern commentators. As the doctrine of evolution has cast a doubt amounting to certainty upon the story of creation, so Spinoza, by reason of his intellectual love of God, has cast a doubt upon the theory of a personal God, of an all-wise and all-loving Father. The existence of evil in the world, so ever-present, so clamant, so insistent, by itself disproves the existence of such a personality. Where was the fatherly God of the deists when the late war broke out? Perchance he slept or was gone on a journey. Such an absentee God is no God for modern man. By recognising that evil, if, and so far as it exists, must be part of God himself, Spinoza fell in absolutely with modern thought, only he lived three hundred years too soon. But the discovery, or hypothesis, of the unconscious mind, has had still more startling effects upon philosophy; for who can now say that he is not unconsciously listening to the voice of his grandmother when he is formulating his most earnest conclusions? Those sanguine persons, mostly politicians who state proudly that they are satisfied to remain undisturbed with the beliefs that they have learned at their mother’s knee, are probably unconsciously retailing the beliefs that she in her turn learned from her mother, and she from hers. Beliefs acquired in very early youth remain till the end of life as if they were divine; Gibbon has shown the debt that the early Church owed to women, who were doubtless the contemporary mothers and grandmothers and had the maternal mind; dear, amiable, credulous, superstitious creatures they were, though perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. Undoubtedly these women were not persons of critical and scientific mind, though to every one of their sons and grandsons they must have seemed to speak with awful “respectability,” just as old ladies do to this very day. It has been very well said that whenever one feels a conviction of absolute certainty approximating to the divine, one is probably listening to the still small voice of the “herd” speaking through one’s unconscious memory; and common experience is that the herd generally speaks most emphatically through the dulcet tones of that dear old lady, that real transmitter of the herd ideas of