De Lacy O'Leary

“ Under the head of Physics Ibn Sina considers the forces observed in nature, including all that are in the soul, save only that which is peculiar to the rational soul of man. These forces are of three kinds: some, such as weight, are an essential part of the body in which they occur; others are external to the body on which they act, and are such as cause movement or rest; and others, again, are such as the faculties possessed by the non-rational souls of the spheres, which produce movement directly without external impulse. No force is infinite ”

“ Al-Farabi expresses his theory of causality in the treatise called "the gems of wisdom." Everything which exists after having not existed, he says, must be brought into being by a cause which itself may be the result of some preceding cause, and so on, until we reach a First Cause, which is and always has been, its eternity being necessary because there is no other cause to precede it, and Aristotle has shown that the chain of causes cannot be infinite. ”

“ Comparing it with Sufism the superficial resemblances are very close, the more so as Sufism borrows a great deal of philosophical, i.e., neo-Platonic terminology, but in fact there is an essential divergence: the Epistles of the brethren represent the emancipation of the soul from matter as the aim of life, and the final result is re-absorption in the Universal Soul, but they represent this emancipation as due to an intellectual force, so that the soul's salvation lies in wisdom and knowledge; it is a cult of intellect. ”

“ Assured of the conformity of the teaching of Aristotle with the teaching of revelation al-Farabi denies that Aristotle teaches the eternity of matter, and so is inconsistent with the dogma of creation. The whole question depends on what is meant by "creation." God, he supposes, created all things in an instant in unmeasured eternity, not directly, but by the intermediary operation of the 'aql or Agent Intelligence. In this sense Aristotle held that the universe existed in eternity, but it so existed as a created thing. ”

“ Place is by some supposed to be a body, but this is refuted by Aristotle: it is rather the surface which surrounds the body. When the body is taken away the place does not cease to exist, for the vacant space is instantly filled by some other body, air, water, etc., which has the same surrounding surface. Admittedly al-Kindi shows a crude treatment of these ideas, but he was the first to direct Arabic thought in this direction, and from these arose a new attitude towards the revealed doctrine of creation on the part of those who came after him. ”

“ The objects studied in physical science are only "possible being," which may or may not become "actual being." God alone is necessarily existent through all eternity: He is the truth in the sense that He alone is true absolutely, all other reality is so only in so far as it is derived from God. From God by emanation comes the 'aql or "Agent Intellect," and from this proceeds the intellect or reason which differentiates the rational soul in man from the soul in other creatures. ”

“ Thus both Qur'an and Aristotle are right, but each uses "creation" to denote a different thing.
It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of al-Farabi. Practically all we afterwards meet in Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd is already to be found in substance in his teaching, only that these later philosophers have realized that the Aristotelian system cannot be reconciled with the traditional theology, and so, having given up all attempt at formal reconciliation, are able to express themselves more clearly and to press home their tenets to their logical conclusions. ”

“ It is futile to maintain that the history of Arabic philosophy shows a lack of originality in the Semitic mind; for one thing not one of the philosophers of first rank after al-Kindi was of Arab birth, very few could be described as Semitic. It would be more correct to say that the Greek philosophers stood alone, until quite modern times, in attempting anything which could be described as a scientific psychology. ”

“ As first presented this system must have seemed fully consistent with the teaching of the Qur'an, indeed it would appear as complementary to it. In man was an animal soul which he shared with the lower creation, but added to it was a rational soul or spirit which proceeded directly from God and was immortal because it was not dependent on the body. The possible conclusions which proved to be inconsistent with the teachings of revelation were not as yet fully worked out.
We need not linger over al-Kindi's logical teaching which carried on and corrected Arabic study of the Aristotelian logic. ”

“ In the Analytica Aristotle uses "intelligence" for the faculty by which man attains directly to the certain knowledge of axioms and general abstract truths without the need of proof; this faculty al-Farabi explains as being the part of the soul in which intuition exists, and which is thereby able to lay hold of the premises of speculative science, i.e., the reason of intelligence proper as the term is employed in the de anima, the rational soul which Alexander of Aphrodisias takes as an emanation from God. ”

“ Al-Farabi appears throughout as a devout Muslim, and evidently does not appreciate the bearing of the Aristotelian psychology on the doctrine of the Qur'an. The earlier belief of Islam, as of most religions, was a heritage from primitive animism, which regarded life as due to the presence of a perfectly substantial, though invisible, thing called the soul: a thing is alive so long as the soul is present, it dies when the soul goes away. ”

“ Creation was therefore complete before God, acting through the 'aql, introduced movement, at which time commenced; as movement and time came into existence simultaneously, forthwith creation already existing in the timeless came out of its concealment and entered into reality. The term "creation" is sometimes used as applying to this emergence from timeless quiescence, but more properly may be taken as denoting the causation, which, as it preceded time, came into unmeasured eternity, which is what Aristotle means when he speaks of the world as eternal. ”

“ The faculties of perception are partly external and partly internal: of these the external faculties exist in the body wherein the soul dwells and are the eight senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, perception of heat and cold, perception of dry and moist, perception of resistance as by hard and soft, and perception of rough and smooth. ”

“ In this treatment al-Farabi is mingling the teaching of philosophy proper with mysticism, in his days rapidly developing in Asiatic Islam, and especially in the Shi'ite community with which he was in contact. From the philosophical point of view God is unknowable but necessary, just as eternity and infinity are unknowable but necessary, because God is above all knowledge: but in another sense God is beneath all knowledge, as the ultimate reality must underlie all existing things, and every result is a manifesting of the cause. ”

“ The agent intelligence or 'aql fa''al is the external power, the emanation from God which is able to awaken the latent power in man and arouse it to activity, and the acquired intelligence or 'aql mustafad is the intelligence aroused to activity and developed under the inspiration of the agent intelligence. Thus the intelligence in action is related to the potential intellect as form is to matter, but the agent intelligence enters from outside, and by its operation the intelligence receives new powers, so that its highest activity is "acquired." ”

“ In itself it possesses wisdom, life, insight, will, power, beauty and goodness, not as acquired or external qualities, but as aspects of its own essence. It is the first will and the first willing, and also the first object of will. ”

“ In common language "a man of intelligence" denotes a man of reliable judgment, who uses his judgment in an upright way to discern between good and evil, and thus is distinguished from a crafty man who employs his mind in devising evil expedients. ”

“ Further, the Qur'an regards that future life as incomplete until the spirit is re-united with the body, a possibility which the Aristotelians could hardly contemplate. The Aristotelian doctrine showed the animal soul not as an invisible being but merely as a form of energy in the body: so far as it was concerned, death did not mean the going away of this soul, but the cessation of the functions of the bodily faculties, just as combustion ceases when a candle is blown out, the flame not going away and continuing to exist apart ”

“ The proof of the existence of God is founded upon the argument in Plato, Timaeus 28, and Aristotle, Metaphysics 12. 7, and was later on used by Albertus Magnus and others. In the first place a distinction is made between the possible, which may be only potential, and the real. For the possible to become real it is necessary that there should be an effective cause. The world is evidently composite, and so cannot itself be the first cause, for the first cause must be single and not multiple: therefore the world evidently proceeds from a cause other than itself. ”

“ This involves no belief in the immortality of the soul, nor is the soul invested with any distinct personality, all that comes later; it is simply that life is regarded as a kind of substance, very light and impalpable but perfectly self-existent. What may be described as the "ghost" theory marks a later stage of evolution, when the departed soul is believed to retain a distinct personality and still to possess the form and some at least of the sensations associated with the being in which it formerly dwelt. Such was the stage reached by Arab psychology at the time of the preaching of Islam. ”

“ Every living creature perceives that it has only one ego or soul in itself, and this soul, says Ibn Sina, did not exist prior to the body but was created, that is to say, proceeded by emanation from the Agent Intellect at the time when the body was generated. ”

“ The generic belongs only to the realm of thought, and such abstract ideas have no objective existence, although they may be used as real in logic.
The soul is treated as a collection of faculties (kowa) or forces acting on the body: all activity of any sort, in bodies animal or vegetable, as well as human, proceeds either from such forces added to the body or from the mixture of elements from which the body is formed. The simplest soul condition is that of the vegetable whose activity is limited to nutrition and generation and accretion by growth (Najat, p. 43) . ”

“ God, we read, is above all knowledge and above all the categories of human thought. From God proceeds the 'aql or intelligence, a complete spiritual emanation which contains in itself the forms of all things, and from the 'aql proceeds the Universal Soul, and from that Soul comes primal matter: when this primal matter becomes capable of receiving dimensions it becomes secondary matter, and from that the universe proceeds. The Universal Soul permeates all matter and is itself sustained by the perpetual emanation of itself from the 'aql. This Universal Soul permeating all things yet remains one ”

“ The external faculty is the "Agent Intellect" ('aql fa''al) which proceeds from God by way of emanation and which, though acting on the faculties in the body, is independent of the body, as its knowledge is not based upon perceptions obtained through the senses. ”

“ Time is regarded as essentially dependent on movement; although it is not itself a form of movement, so far as the idea of time is concerned, it is measured and made known by the movements of the heavenly bodies. Following al-Kindi place is defined as "the limit of the container which touches the contained." Vacuum is "only a name", in fact it is impossible, for all space can be increased, diminished, or divided into parts, and so must contain something capable of increase, etc. ”

“ Al-Kindi, developing the doctrine as presented by the neo-Platonic commentators, describes the faculties or degrees of intelligence in the soul as four, of which three are actually and necessarily in the human soul, but one enters from outside and is independent of the soul. ”

“ In dealing with the universal and the particular he considers that the universal exists only in the human mind: the abstract idea of the genus is formed in the mind of the observer when he compares individuals and makes note of their points of similarity, but this abstract idea exists only as a mental concept and has no objective reality. ”

“ In psychology, as we have seen, al-Kindi introduced a system already fully developed by Alexander and the neo-Platonic commentators on Aristotle, kept alive amongst the Syriac students of philosophy, and then further developed from this point by his successors. In metaphysics the circumstances were different. Al-Kindi apparently was the one who introduced the problems of metaphysics to the Muslim world, but it is obvious that he did not clearly understand Aristotle's treatment of these problems. ”