[26] Much of their finest prose is of lyrical character, personal, fervent, mystic. As to philosophy proper the greatest if not the only Portuguese philosopher, Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew, left Portugal as a child, and Francisco Sanchez (_c._ 1550-_c._ 1620), although probably born at Braga, not at _a soberba_ Tuy, lived in France and wrote in Latin. He tells us that he in 1574 finished his celebrated treatise _Quod nihil scitur_, published at Lyon in 1581, in which, at a time of great intolerance, he revived and gave acute and curious expression to the old theory that nothing can be known. To modern philosophy Dr. Leonardo Coimbra (born in 1883) has contributed a notable but somewhat abstruse work entitled _O Criacionismo_ (Porto, 1912). [27] Or political, or anticlerical, or anything except literary. The critics seem to have forgotten that an _auto-da-fé_ does not necessarily make its victim a good poet, and that even a priest may have literary talent. A few literary critics, as Dias in the eighteenth, Guilherme Moniz Barreto in the nineteenth century, are only exceptions to the rule. It has been the weakness of Portuguese criticism, more lenient than the gods and booksellers of ancient Rome, to suffer _mediocres_ gladly. [28] _C. da Vat._ 979 (cf. Jorge Ferreira, _Eufrosina_, v. 5: _como dizia o Galego: de longas vias longas mentiras_). [29] _Poesias, Sat._ 2. The remark of Garrett still holds good: _Em Portugal ha mais talento e menos cultivação que em paiz nenhum da Europa_. I 1185-1325 § 1 _The Cossantes_