Moses and the prophets excel in law and imagination, not in reason and reflection. Hence Spinoza approached the Bible from the critical standpoint; and, on the other hand, he approached philosophy with a free mind searching for truth, independent of religious dogmatism, and he was, therefore, the founder of modern philosophy. None the less his view of the universe is an intellectual expression of the Hebraic monotheism, which unites a religious with a scientific monism. He regards God as the only reality, sees and knows all things in Him, and deduces all things from His attributes, which are the incomplete representations that man makes of His true nature; he explains all thought, all movement, and all that seems material as the working of His modes; and, finally, he places as the end of man's intellectual progress and the culmination of his moral life the love of God. In truth, Jewish philosophy has its unity and its special stamp, no less than Jewish religion and tradition, from which it receives its nurture. Thrice it has towered up in a great system: through Philo in the classical, through Maimonides in the mediæval, through Spinoza in the modern world. In the Renaissance of Jewish learning during the nineteenth century, Philo was at last studied and interpreted by scholars of his own people. The first modern writer to reveal the philosophy of Jewish history was Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), and his posthumous Hebrew book, "The Guide of the Perplexed of the Time," edited by Zunz, contained the first critical appreciation of the Hellenistic Jewish culture by a rabbinic scholar. He knew no Greek, but he studied the works of German writers, and in his account of Philo gives a summary of the remarks of the theologian Neander, himself a baptized Jew. In his own criticism he discerns the weakness and strength of Philo from the Jewish aspect. "There are," he says, "many strange things in Philo's exegesis, not only because he draws far-fetched allegories from the text, but also because he interprets single words without a sure foundation in Hebrew philology. He uses Scripture as a sort of clay which he moulds to convey his philosophical ideas. Yet we must be grateful to him because many of his interpretations are beautiful ornaments to the text; and we may apply to them what Ibn Ezra said of the teachings of the Haggadah, 'Some of them are fine silks, others as heavy as sack-cloth.'" Krochmal translated into Hebrew examples of Philo's allegories and gave parallels and contrasts from the Talmud. The relation between the Palestinian and the Alexandrian exegesis was more elaborately considered by a greater master of Hellenistic literature, Zacharias Frankel (1801-1875), who has been followed by a band of Jewish scholars. Yearly our understanding of the Alexandrian culture becomes fuller. Philo, too, has in part been translated into Hebrew. Indirect in the past, his influence on Jewish thought in the future bids fair to be direct and increasing.