The subjects of which they treated and many of the words they used have lost all meaning to our modern ears. But somehow or other these moldy compilations served a very useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing else, they at least cleared the air. For they either settled the questions they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned, or they convinced their readers that those particular problems could not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic and argument and might therefore just as well be dropped right then and there. This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I hope that critics of the thirtieth century shall be just as charitable when they wade through the remains of our own literary and scientific achievements. * * * * * Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow the fashion of his time in the matter of quantity. His assembled works consist of three or four small volumes and a few bundles of letters. But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical solution of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy would have staggered any normally healthy man. It killed the poor consumptive who had undertaken to reach God by way of the table of multiplication. Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered the indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had settled down in the Spanish peninsula when that part of the world was a Moorish province. After the reconquest and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for the Spaniard” which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy, the Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They had sailed for the Netherlands, had bought a small house in Amsterdam, had worked hard, had saved their money and soon were known as one of the most respectable families of the “Portuguese colony.” If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewish origin, this was due more to the training he received in his Talmud school than to the gibes of his little neighbors. For the Dutch Republic was so chock full of class prejudice that there was little room left for mere race prejudice and therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all the alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the North and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic bits of Dutch life which contemporary travelers never failed to omit from their “Souvenirs de Voyage” and with good reason.