The philosopher Baruch Spinoza proposed in his "Ethics" (1677) that a man can die before his body stops moving. As an example he mentioned "a Spanish poet who suffered an illness; though he recovered, he was left so oblivious to his past life that he did not believe the tales and tragedies he had written were his own". The historian Carl Gebhardt wrote that "this was probably Góngora, whose works Spinoza possessed, and who lost his memory a year before his death".