 The three inspirations Althusser gave for this interpretive method were those provided by Spinoza, Freud by way of Lacan, and that provided by Marx himself. In addition, he added to these examples insights from the French tradition of historical epistemology about the way in which sciences come to be constituted. One of the ideas borrowed from Spinoza was the contention that texts and authors are the products of their times and that the thoughts authors set down on the page cannot help but be a part of, and be affected by, the ideological currents that accompany and allow for the satisfaction of needs in a specific era. So then, similar to the way in which Spinoza argued in the Theological Political-Treatise that by engaging in a materialist historical study of the Bible one could disentangle those prophetic laws and commands which were merely the result of temporal exigencies and the prophet’s imagination from those which represented the true word of God, so Althusser argued that one could disentangle those concepts which were merely ideological in Marx’s texts from those which comprised his true philosophy.