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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
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