No doubt some Jewish teachers before Maimonides had tried to introduce into Judaism more rational principles, which they had derived from Arabic philosophy. But these attempts only affected details; the cardinal principle remained untouched. Reason remained subordinate to the written word; its truths were still discarded for the higher truth of religion. The Gaon Saadiah, the greatest of the earlier Jewish religious philosophers, explains the relation of reason to religion by the following simile: “A man weighs his money, and finds that he has a thousand pieces.” He gives different sums to a number of people, and then, “wishing to show them quickly how much he has left, he says that he has five hundred pieces, and offers to prove it by weighing his money. When he weighs the money—which takes little time—and finds that it amounts to five hundred pieces they are bound to believe what he told them.” But there may be among them a particularly cautious man, who wants to find the amount left over by the method of calculation—that is, by adding together the various amounts distributed and subtracting their sum from the original amount.[134] Religion, of course, is the weighing process, which gives us the truth at once, by a method which is direct and cannot be questioned. Reason corresponds to calculation: a cautious man with plenty of time may use it to establish a truth which has already been proved to him by the short and certain method of weighing. But obviously calculation cannot change the result which weighing has already given; and if there is any difference in the results, the weighed money will neither be increased nor diminished, and the mistake must be in the calculation. This way of regarding reason and its relation to religion was common to all the Jewish thinkers who laboured, before Maimonides, to reconcile religion and philosophy. They regarded their labour only as a necessary evil. They shouldered the burden because they saw that it had to be done; but in their heart of hearts they were wholly on the side of religion, and it never occurred to them to give reason precedence.[135] In this respect they were like the Arabic religious philosophers; and like them they chose the philosophical views which confirmed their religious faith rather than those which were confirmed by reason. “They did not investigate,” writes Maimonides, jeering at “philosophers” of this kind, “the real properties of things; first of all they considered what must be the properties of the things which should yield proof for or against a certain creed.” They forgot “that the properties of things cannot adapt themselves to our opinions, but our opinions must be adapted to the existing properties.”[136]