of refuge for Muslim philosophy as it had already become the nursery of Jewish speculation. Ibn Bajja, known to the Latin schoolmen as "Avempace," found in Murabit Spain the freedom and toleration which Asia no longer afforded. He continues the work of al-Farabi, not, it will be noted, of Ibn Sina, and develops the neo-Platonic interpretation of Aristotle on sober and conservative lines. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Physics, de generatione et corruptione, and the Meteora; he produced original works on mathematics, on "the soul," and a treatise which he called "The Hermit's Guide," which was used by Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and by the Jewish writer Moses of Narbonne in the 14th cent. A.D. In this last work he makes a distinction between "animal activity," in which action is due to the prompting of the emotions, passions, etc., and "human activity," which is suggested and directed by abstract reason, and from this distinction draws a rule of life and conduct. He is chiefly cited by the Latin schoolmen with reference to the doctrine of "separate substances." "Avempace held that, by the study of the speculative sciences, we are able by means of the images which we know from these ideas to attain to the knowledge of separate substances" (St. Thomas Aq. c. Gentiles, 3, 41). This question as to the possibility of knowing substances separated, i.e. abstracted, from the concrete bodies in which they exist in combination—and the "separate substances" were regarded as spiritual things—was prominent in
