It is at this point that Maimonides’ task becomes difficult. Armed with this _a priori_ judgment, he comes to close quarters with the _Torah_: and he finds that in many matters, both of theory and of practice, it is, if taken at its face value, diametrically opposed to what his pre-conceived ideas would lead him to expect. The beliefs embodied in the _Torah_ seem to be directly opposed to the most fundamental philosophical truths of Maimonides’ system; the actions prescribed in the _Torah_ contain much that it is difficult to reconcile with the social purpose of the divine religion as conceived by that system. What course, then, was open to Maimonides? To compromise between philosophical and religious truth, as many had done before, was for him impossible. For every compromise means simply that both sides give way; and how could Maimonides, with his conviction that the attainment of truth by means of proof is the end of human existence and the only way to eternal happiness, give up one jot of this truth for the sake of another truth, of inferior value inasmuch as it has come to us only through tradition? Thus he has but one possible course. Necessity compels him to subdue religion absolutely to the demands of philosophy: in other words, to explain the words of the _Torah_ throughout in conformity with the truth of philosophy, and to make the _Torah_ fulfil in every part the function which philosophy imposes on it. This necessity worked wonders. By dint of enormous labour Maimonides discovered various extraordinary ways of interpreting the _Torah_; with wonderful skill he found support for his interpretations in words and phrases scattered about the Scriptures and the Talmud; until at last he succeeded in making religion what it had to be according to his belief. This is not the place to explain Maimonides’ methods of exegesis in detail. For us to-day they are but a sort of monument to the weakness of the written word in the face of a living psychological force which demands that “yes” shall become “no” and “no” be turned into “yes.” This psychological force led Maimonides to turn the “living God” of the _Torah_ into an abstract philosophical conception, empty of all content except a collection of negations; to make the “Righteous Man” of Judaism a philosopher blessed with “acquired intellect”; to transform the “future world” of the Talmud into the union of the acquired intellect with the “active intellect”; to metamorphose the Biblical penalty of “cutting off” into the disappearance of the form when the matter is resolved: and so forth. All this he did in conformity with his “philosophic truth,” of which he refused to change one atom.[123]