Strangely enough, Maimonides himself was perplexed over the question of resurrection, and could not explain why he clung to a belief which it was not easy to combine with his own theory of the soul and the future life. When he formulates the dogmas in his Commentary on the Mishnah, he passes hurriedly over this one, and dismisses it in a few words, as though he were afraid that if he lingered at this point logic would catch him up and ask awkward questions. In the _Mishneh Torah_, again, he does not explain this dogma at all, either at the beginning of the book, where he deals with the Foundations of the Law, or at the end, where he discusses the Messianic Age. This omission led some of his critics to suspect that he did not really believe in a literal resurrection of the body, but explained it in the sense of the rebirth of the soul hereafter (on which he enlarges very often). This suspicion made him very indignant, and he wrote a whole treatise to prove that he had never intended to take resurrection in any but its literal sense. On the contrary, he maintained that the belief must be accepted literally, and that it was in no way inconsistent with what he had written or with his general view.[163] But the arguments in this treatise are all very weak, and the general impression which it leaves is that he did not clearly understand his own mind. He felt instinctively that he could not give up this belief, though it was foreign to his system; but it was only with great difficulty that he could explain why he allowed it such importance. It was, of course, impossible for a man like Maimonides to admit to himself that he was following feeling rather than reason. He tried therefore to justify his standpoint on rational grounds, but without success.[164]