speaks in the highest terms.  He cannot bestow too much praise on their care for the poor and the sick, and he always hoped once more to see his native land, to whose king he dedicated his Transcendental Philosophy.  “For,” says he, “the Polish Jews are, indeed, for the most part not enlightened by science; their manners and way of life are still rude, but they are loyal to the religion of their fathers and to the laws of their country."[27]

It is because I regard him as the greatest Maskil of his time that I have dwelt on Maimon at such length.  Mendelssohn’s philosophy, if he had an original system, has long since passed into oblivion; Maimon’s will be studied as long as Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant are in vogue.  His importance to us does not lie in the circumstance that his autobiography—­“that wonderful bit of Autobiography,” as George Eliot speaks of it, or “that curious and rare book,” as Dean Milman calls it—­and the pictures drawn of him by Berthold Auerbach and Israel Zangwill[28] have made him the hero of some of the world’s best biographies and novels.  Over and above this, he is the prototype of his unfortunate countrymen during the days of transition.  He embodied the aspiration, courage, and disappointments of them all, and if, as Carlyle said, “the history of the world is the history of its great men,” Maimon’s life should be studied by all interested in the Kulturkampf of the Russo-Polish and of the German Jews in the eighteenth century.

What could he not have accomplished, he to whom Kant and Goethe, Schiller and Koerner paid tributes of unstinted praise, had he not been doomed to suffer and to starve.  Only at the last moment, before he was silenced forever, was he able to say, Ich bin ruhig ("I am at peace").  Yet, in spite of the difficulties and impediments besetting him at every step, his promise of greatness and usefulness was not belied.  In the Introduction to his commentary on Maimuni’s Guide to the Perplexed (Gibe’at ha-Moreh), in which he attempted to reconcile his master’s system with that of modern philosophy—­even as the master had tried to reconcile Judaism with Aristotelianism—­he gave a brief sketch of the development of modern thought.  This part of his work was assiduously studied by his compatriots.  Among his unpublished writings was found a work on mathematical physics, Ta’alumot Hokmah, and in his Talmudic treatise, Heshek Shelomoh, he inserted a dissertation, Ma’aseh Hosheb, on arithmetic, like a skilful physician putting a healing, though to some it may appear a repelling, balm into a delicious, attractive capsule.