theory of the process of knowledge is an interesting part of his doctrine. Man has a rational soul, one face of which is turned towards the body, and, by the help of the higher aspect, acts as practical understanding; the other face lies open to the reception and acquisition of the intelligible forms, and its aim is to become a reasonable world, reproducing the forms of the universe and their intelligible order. In man there is only the susceptibility to reason, which is sustained and helped by the light of the active intellect. Man may prepare himself for this influx by removing the obstacles which prevent the union of the intellect with the human vessel destined for its reception. The stages of this process to the acquisition of mind are generally enumerated by Avicenna as four; in this part he follows not Aristotle, but the Greek commentator. The first stage is that of the hylic or material intellect, a state of mere potentiality, like that of a child for writing, before he has ever put pen to paper. The second stage is called in habitu; it is compared to the case of a child that has learned the elements of writing, when the bare possibility is on the way to be developed, and is seen to be real. In this period of half-trained reason, it appears as happy conjecture, not yet transformed into art or science proper. When the power of writing has been actualized, we have a parallel to the intellectus in actu—the way of science and demonstration is entered. And when writing has been made a permanent accomplishment, or lasting property of the subject, to be taken up at will, it corresponds to the intellectus adeptus—the complete mastery of science. The whole process may be compared to the gradual illumination of a body naturally capable of receiving light. There are, however, grades of susceptibility to the active intellect, i.e. in theological language, to communication with God and his angels. Sometimes the receptivity is so vigorous in its affinity, that without teaching it rises at one step to the vision of truth, by a certain “holy force” above ordinary measure. (In this way philosophy tried to account for the phenomenon of prophecy, one of the ruling ideas of Islam.) But the active intellect is not merely influential on human souls. It is the universal giver of forms in the world.
In several points Avicenna endeavoured to give a rationale of theological dogmas, particularly of prophetic rule, of miracles, divine providence and immortality. The permanence of individual souls he supports by arguments borrowed from those of Plato. The existence of a prophet is shown to be a corollary from a belief in God as a moral governor, and the phenomena of miracles are required to evidence the genuineness of the prophetic mission. Thus Avicenna, like his predecessors, tried to harmonize the abstract forms of philosophy with the religious faith of his nation. But his arguments are generally vitiated by the fallacy of assuming what they profess to prove. His failure is made obvious by the attack of Ghazālī on the tendencies and results of speculation.
To Ghazālī (q.v.) it seemed that the study of secular philosophy had resulted in a general indifference to religion, and that the scepticism which concealed itself under a pretence of piety was destroying the life and purity of the nation. With these views he carried into the fields of philosophy the aims Ghazālī.and spirit of the Moslem theologian. His restless life was the reflex of a mental history disturbed by prolonged agitation. Revolting, in the height of his success, against the current creed, he began to examine the foundations of knowledge. The senses are contradicted by one another, and disproved by reason. Reason, indeed, professes to furnish us with necessary truths; but what assurance have we that the verdicts of reason may not be reversed by some higher authority? Ghazālī then interrogated all the sects in succession to learn their criterion of truth. He first applied to the theological schoolmen, who grounded their religion on reason; but their aim was only to preserve the faith from heresy. He turned to the philosophers, and examined the accepted Aristotelianism in a treatise which has come down to us—The Destruction of the Philosophers. He assails them on twenty points of their mixed physical and metaphysical peripateticism, from the statement of which, in spite of his pretended scepticism, we can deduce some very positive metaphysical opinions of his own. He claims to have shown that the dogmas of the eternity of matter and the permanence of the world are false; that their description of the Deity as the demiurgos is unspiritual; that they fail to prove the existence, the unity, the simplicity, the incorporeality or the knowledge (both of species and accidents) of God; that their ascription of souls to the celestial spheres is unproved; that their theory of causation, which attributes effects to the very natures of the causes, is false, for that all actions and events are to be ascribed to the Deity; and, finally, that they cannot establish the spirituality of the soul, nor prove its mortality. These criticisms disclose nothing like a sceptical state of mind, but rather a reversion from the metaphysical to the theological stage of thought. He denies the intrinsic tendencies, or souls, by which the Aristotelians explained the motion of the spheres, because he ascribes their motion to God. The sceptic would have denied both. G. H. Lewes censures Renan for asserting of Ghazālī’s theory of causation—“Hume n’a rien dit plus.” It is true that Ghazālī maintains that the natural law according to which effects proceed inevitably from their causes is only custom, and that there is no necessary connexion between them. But while Hume absolutely denies the necessity, Ghazālī merely removes it one stage farther back, and plants it in the mind of the Deity. This, of course, is not metaphysics, but theology. Having, as he believed, refuted the opinions of the philosophers, he next investigated the pretensions of the Allegorists, who derived their doctrines from an imam. These Arabian ultramontanes had no word for the doubter. They could not, he says, even understand the problems they sought to resolve by the assumption of infallibility, and he turned again, in his despair, to the instructors of his youth—the Sūfīs. In their mystical intuition of the laws of life, and absorption in the immanent Deity, he at last found peace. This shows the true character of the treatise which, alike in medieval and modern times, has been quoted as containing an exposition of his opinions. The work called The Tendencies of the Philosophers, translated in 1506, with the title Logica et Philosophia Algazelis Arabis, contains neither the logic nor the philosophy of Ghazālī. It is a mere abstract or statement of the Peripatetic systems, and was made preliminary to that Destruction of which we have already spoken.
This indictment against liberal thought from the standpoint of the theological school was afterwards answered in Spain by Averroes; but in Bagdad it heralded the extinction of the light of philosophy. Moderate and compliant with the popular religion as Alfarabius and Avicenna had always been, as compared with their Spanish successor, they had equally failed to conciliate the popular spirit, and were classed in the same category with the heretic or the member of an immoral sect. The 12th century exhibits the decay of liberal intellectual activity in the Caliphate, and the gradual ascendancy of Turkish races animated with all the intolerance of semi-barbarian proselytes to the Mahommedan faith. Philosophy, which had only sprung up when the purely Arabian influences ceased to predominate, came to an end when the sceptre of the Moslem world passed away from the dynasty of Persia. Even in 1150 Bagdad had seen a library of philosophical books burned by command of the caliph Mostanjid; and in 1192 the same place might have witnessed a strange scene, in which the books of a physician were first publicly cursed, and then committed to the flames, while their owner was incarcerated. Thus, while the Latin church showed a marvellous receptivity for ethnic philosophy, and assimilated doctrines which it had at an earlier date declared impious, in Islam the theological system entrenched itself towards the end of the 12th century in the narrow orthodoxy of the Asharites, and reduced the votaries of Greek philosophy to silence.
The same phenomena were repeated in Spain under the Mahommedan rulers of Andalusia and Morocco, with this difference, that the time of philosophical development was shorter, and the heights to which Spanish thinkers soared were greater. The reign of al-Hakam the Second (961–976) In Spain.inaugurated in Andalusia those scientific and philosophical
