the magicians." Philosophical and spiritual views Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G. E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality. Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism. Investments Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies and despite his ethical reluctance to sell on a falling market in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump. Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium-size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the