He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to marry. His wishes were few. He anticipated a quiet and happy life and he had it. Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not know. But it was a country full of printers and publishers and bookshops and as long as one did not openly attack the established form of government or religion, the existing law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore, as he never learned a single word of the language of his adopted country (a trick not difficult to a true Frenchman), Descartes was able to avoid undesirable company and futile conversations and could give all of his time (some twenty hours per day) to his own work. This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been a soldier. But Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems that he was perfectly contented with his self-inflicted exile. He had during the course of years become convinced that the world was still plunged in a profound gloom of abysmal ignorance; that what was then being called science had not even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no general progress would be possible until the whole ancient fabric of error and falsehood had first of all been razed to the ground. No small order, this. Descartes however was possessed of endless patience and at the age of thirty he set to work to give us an entirely new system of philosophy. Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomy and physics to his original program and he performed his task with such noble impartiality of mind that the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and the Calvinists cursed him for an atheist. This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him in the least. He quietly continued his researches and died peacefully in the city of Stockholm, whither he had gone to talk philosophy with the Queen of Sweden. Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism (the name under which his philosophies became known) made quite as much of a stir as Darwinism was to make among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be a Cartesian in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something almost indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the established order of society, a Socinian, a low fellow who by his own confession had set himself apart from the companionship of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting Cartesianism as readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers accepted Darwinism. But among the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam, such subjects were never even mentioned. Cartesianism was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah. Hence it did not exist. And when it became apparent that it existed just the same in the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza, it was a foregone conclusion that said Baruch de Spinoza would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities of the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and take official action.