" says Maimonides, "that my book in connection
with the Bible will enable a student to dispense with the Talmud." From
whatever point of view this work may be regarded, it must be admitted
that Maimonides carried out his plan with signal success, and that it is
the only one by which method could have been introduced into the
manifold departments of Jewish religious lore. But it is obvious that
the thinker had not yet reached the goal of his desires. In consonance
with his fundamental principle, a scientific systemization of religious
laws had to be followed up by an explanation of revealed religion and
Greek-Arabic philosophy, and by the attempt to bring about a
reconciliation between them.

Before we enter upon this his greatest book, it is well to dispose of
the second phase of his work, his activity as a medical writer.
Maimonides treated medicine as a science, a view not usual in those
days. The body of facts relating to medicine he classified, as he had
systematized the religious laws of the Talmud. In his methodical way, he
also edited the writings of Galen, the medical oracle of the middle
ages, and his own medical aphorisms and treatises are marked by the same
love of system. It seems that he had the intention to prepare a medical
codex to serve a purpose similar to that of his religious code. How
great a reputation he enjoyed among Mohammedan physicians is shown by
the extravagantly enthusiastic verses of an Arabic poet:

"Of body's ills doth Galen's art relieve,
Maimonides cures mind and body both,--
His wisdom heals disease and ignorance.
And should the moon invoke his skill and art,
Her spots, when full her orb, would disappear;
He'd fill her breach, when time doth inroads make,
And cure her, too, of pallor caused by earth."

Maimonides' real greatness, however, must be sought in his philosophic
work. Despite the wide gap between our intellectual attitude and the
philosophic views to which Maimonides gave fullest expression, we can
properly appreciate his achievements and his intellectual grasp by
judging him with reference to his own time. When we realize that he
absorbed all the thought-currents of his time, that he was their
faithful expounder, and that, at the same time, he was gifted with an
accurate, historic instinct, making him wholly objective, we shall
recognize in him "the genius of his peculiar epoch become incarnate."
The work containing Maimonides' deepest though