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 and higher flights of righteousness. He fills the way of the wrong-doer with all kinds of obstacles to the Good and the True. In this way the true performer of the precepts of the Torah (which is the highest kind of virtue) attains the highest state of perfection. He reaches the type of the perfect man. When man is thus perfected he does right and eschews wrong, not because he entertains any hopes or fears about Paradise or Gehinnom, or the Days of the Messiah or the World to come, but simply because he is MAN. It is his perfected manhood that of itself leads him on to the complete understanding and performance of the word of God. His soul, after the death of the body, can then enter the state that befits it, viz. the world to come. In the Maimonidean conception, then, the "'world to come" is a synonym for the highest-developed state of the soul of the self-perfected man.

(f) Maimonides' view of the Immortality of the Soul. According to him, it is only the intellectual element in the soul that can secure immortality. It follows from this that the simple-minded man, be he ever so virtuous, is excluded from future existence, which will only be the lot of the thinkers whose acquired intelligence, according to the Aristotelians, becomes part of the "active divine intelligence" and thus attains perfection and permanence. This view met with strong opposition-notably by Chisdai Crescas in his Or Adonoi who also had much fault to find with Maimonides' Thirteen Articles of Faith.

(g) The interesting fulness with which Maimonides in his seventh Article of Faith speaks of the prophetic faculty possessed by Moses, and the four ways in which the nature of his prophecy differed from and ranked higher than that of all other prophets.

I have based my translation upon the edition (Arabic and Hebrew in parallel columns) of J. Holzer's Mose Mairnuni's Einleitung zw Chelek,Berlin, 190o.