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 Körner 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