Note 26 — INTRODUCTION

Much of their finest prose is of lyrical character, personal, fervent, mystic. As to philosophy proper the greatest if not the only Portuguese philosopher, Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew, left Portugal as a child, and Francisco Sanchez (c. 1550-c. 1620), although probably born at Braga, not at a soberba Tuy, lived in France and wrote in Latin. He tells us that he in 1574 finished his celebrated treatise Quod nihil scitur, published at Lyon in 1581, in which, at a time of great intolerance, he revived and gave acute and curious expression to the old theory that nothing can be known. To modern philosophy Dr. Leonardo Coimbra (born in 1883) has contributed a notable but somewhat abstruse work entitled O Criacionismo (Porto, 1912).