whose highest joy comes from
the expression of his thought?

Deprive a thinker of the privilege to think and you take from him his
life. The joy of existence lies in self-expression. What if we should
order the painter to quit his canvas, the sculptor to lay aside his
tools, the farmer to leave the soil? Do these things, and you do no more
than you do when you force a thinker to follow in the groove that dead
men have furrowed. The thirst for knowledge must be slaked or the soul
sickens and slow death follows.

In Spinoza's time the literature of Greece and Rome was locked in the
Latin language, which the Jews were forbidden to acquire. Young Spinoza
longed to know what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Vergil had
taught, but these authors were considered anathema by the rabbinical
councils. Spinoza desired to be honest, and so asked for a special
dispensation in his favor, as he was to be a teacher--could he study the
Latin language?

And the answer was, "Read your Joshua, first chapter and eighth verse,
'This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt
meditate therein day and night.'"

From this time on Spinoza was more or less under the ban, and rumors of
his heresy were rife. It is possible, if it had not been for one
person, that the growing desire for knowledge, the reaching out for
better things, the dissatisfaction with his environment, might have
passed in safety and the restless young rabbi slipped back into the
conventional Jew. Youth always has its periods of unrest--sometimes
more, sometimes less.

Spinoza had made the acquaintance of Van den Ende, a teacher of Greek
and Latin, an erratic, argumentative rationalist, who had his say on all
topics of the time, and fixed his place in history by being shot as a
revolutionary, just outside the walls of the Bastile.

But at this time Van den Ende was fairly prosperous and Amsterdam was
the freest city in Christendom.

Van den Ende had a daughter, Clara Maria, a little younger than Spinoza,
who surely was a most superior woman. She was the companion of her
father in his studies. It speaks well for the father and it speaks well
for the daughter that they were comrades and that his highest thought
was expressed to her. I can conceive of no finer joy coming to a man
than, as his hair whitens, to have a daughter who understands him at his
best, who enters into his life, sympathizes with his ideals, ministers
to his mental needs, who