Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/24

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ARABIC THOUGHT IN HISTORY

philosophy becomes more theological in its speculations, though no doubt in his case this was largely due to the religion he professed. He expressed the doctrine of a One God, eternal, unchanging, and passionless, far removed above the world of phenomena, as the First Cause of all that exists, a philosophical monotheism which can be fitted in with the Old Testament but does not naturally proceed from it. The doctrine of an Absolute Reality as the necessary cause of all that is variable, something like the fulcrum which Archimedes needed to move the world, was one to which all philosophy, and especially the Plantonic school, was tending. But, as causation to some extent implies change, this First Cause could not be regarded as directly creating the world, but only as the eternal source of an eternally proceeding emanation by means of which the power of the First Cause is projected so as to produce the universe and all it contains. The essential features of this teaching are, the absolute unity of the First Cause, its absolute reality, its eternity, and its invariability, all of which necessarily removes it above the plane of things knowable to man; and the operative emanation ceaselessly issuing forth, eternal like its source, yet acting in time and space, an emanation which Philo terms the Logos or "Word." Although these theories are to a large extent only an expression of logical conclusions towards which the Platonists were then advancing, Philo had curiously little influence. No doubt there was a tendency to regard his teaching as mainly an