Sir Muhammad Iqbal

“ In His absolute existence He is beyond the limitation of names and attributes, but when He externalises Himself, when He leaves His absoluteness, when nature is born, names and attributes appear sealed on her very fabric. ”

“ In each of these undifferentiated, simple centres of consciousness, there is hidden a ray of the Absolute Light itself, and the perfection of the spirit consists in gradually actualising, by contact with the individualising principle—matter, its emotional and intellectual possibilities, and thus discovering its own deep being—the ray of eternal Love which is concealed by its union with consciousness. The essence of man, therefore, is not reason or consciousness; it is this ray of Love—the source of all impulse to noble and unselfish action, which constitutes the real man. ”

“ Now when we examine the nature of perception, we see that there is a principle in man which, in so far as it is able to know more than one thing at a time, can assume, so to say, many different forms simultaneously. This principle cannot be matter, since it lacks the fundamental property of matter. The essence of the soul consists in the power of perceiving a number of objects at one and the same moment of time. But it may be objected that the soul-principle may be either material in its essence, or a function of matter. ”

“ This Primordial Light is the source of all motion. But its motion is not change of place; it is due to the love of illumination which constitutes its very essence, and stirs it up, as it were, to quicken all things into life, by pouring out its own rays into their being. The number of illuminations which proceed from it is infinite. Illuminations of intenser brightness become, in their turn, the sources of other illuminations; and the scale of brightness gradually descends to illuminations too faint to beget other illuminations. ”

“ Our relation with the objects of our knowledge is not merely a passive relation; the individual soul, being itself an illumination, illuminates the object in the act of knowledge. The Universe to him is one great process of active illumination; but, from a purely intellectual standpoint, this illumination is only a partial expression of the infinitude of the Primal Light, which may illuminate according to other laws not known to us. The categories of thought are infinite; our intellect works with a few only. ”

“ The relation between the abstract illumination, or soul and body, is not that of cause and effect; the bond of union between them is love. The body which longs for illumination, receives it through the soul; since its nature does not permit a direct communication between the source of light and itself. But the soul cannot transmit the directly received light to the dark solid body which, considering its attributes, stands on the opposite pole of being. ”

“ The existence of colour, for instance, is contingent in comparison to that of the ray, which manifests colour when a dark body is brought before an illuminating body. The Universe, therefore, though contingent as manifestation, is eternal by the eternal character of its source. Those who hold the non-eternity of the Universe argue on the assumption of the possibility of a complete induction. ”

“ The mind in the act of predicating whiteness of snow is working on a purely ideal existence—the quality of whiteness—and not on an objectively real essence of which the qualities are mere facets or aspects. ”

“ If the knowledge of the existent is not immediate, the fact of its perception would require a process of thought which, as we know, it does not. The Ash‘arite Al-Rāzī admits that the concept of existence is immediate; but he regards the judgment—"The concept of existence is immediate"—as merely a matter of acquisition. Muḥammad ibn Mubārak Bukhārī, on the other hand, says that the whole argument of the realist proceeds on the assumption that the concept of my existence is something immediate—a position which can be controverted. ”

“ Kant's Ding an sich to him is a pure nonentity; there is nothing behind the collection of attributes. The attributes are the real things, the material world is but the objectification of the Absolute Being; it is the other self of the Absolute—another which owes its existence to the principle of difference in the nature of the Absolute itself. Nature is the idea of God, a something necessary for His knowledge of Himself. While Hegel calls his doctrine the identity of thought and being, Al-Jīlī calls it the identity of attribute and reality. ”

“ The ultimate principle of all existence is "Nūr-i-Qāhir"—the Primal Absolute Light whose essential nature consists in perpetual illumination. "Nothing is more visible than light, and visibility does not stand in need of any definition." [127:1] The essence of Light, therefore, is manifestation. For if manifestation is an attribute superadded to light, it would follow that in itself light possesses no visibility, and becomes visible only through something else visible in itself ”

“ The ancient Philosophers of Persia were not dualists like the Zoroastrian priests who, on the ground of the principle that the one cannot cause to emanate from itself more than one, assigned two independent sources to Light and Darkness. The relation between them is not that of contrariety, but of existence and non-existence. The affirmation of Light necessarily posits its own negation—Darkness which it must illuminate in order to be itself. ”

“ Thus from Mulla Ṣadrā's identity of the known and the knower, he passes to his conception of the Real as Will and Love. This Primal Love, which he regards as the essence of the Real, is the cause of the manifestation of the Universe which is nothing more than the self-expansion of Love. The word creation, with him, does not mean creation out of nothing; since, as the Shaikhīs maintain, the word creator is not peculiarly applicable to God alone. ”

“ The soul, according to Al-Ghazālī, perceives things. But perception as an attribute can exist only in a substance or essence which is absolutely free from all the attributes of body. In his Al-Madnūn [75:2] , he explains why the prophet declined to reveal the nature of the soul. There are, he says, two kinds of men; ordinary [Pg 76] men and thinkers. The former who look upon materiality as a condition of existence, cannot conceive an immaterial substance. The latter are led, by their logic, to a conception of the soul which sweeps away all difference between God and the individual soul. ”

“ Forms of light and darkness both owe their existence to the Abstract Light. The third element of a material body—the obscure atom or essence—is nothing but a necessary aspect of the affirmation of light. The body as a whole, therefore, is completely dependent on the Primal Light. The whole Universe is really a continuous series of circles of existence, all depending on the original Light. Those nearer to the source receive more illumination than those more distant. ”

“ With the study of Greek thought, the spirit which was almost lost in the concrete, begins to reflect and realise itself as the arbiter of truth. Subjectivity asserts itself, and endeavours to supplant all outward authority. Such [Pg 46] a period, in the intellectual history of a people, must be the epoch of rationalism, scepticism, mysticism, heresy—forms in which the human mind, swayed by the growing force of subjectivity, rejects all external standards of truth. ”

“ This illumination makes the perfect man receive the attributes of God in their real nature in proportion to the power of receptivity possessed by him—a fact which classifies men according to the magnitude of this light resulting from the illumination. Some men receive illumination from the divine attribute of Life, and thus participate in the soul of the Universe. ”

“ If the movement of the ray is an attribute of its nature, there is no reason why its movement should be peculiar to one direction, and not to all. The ray of light, therefore, cannot be regarded as coming out of the eye. ”

“ In his psychology he follows Avicenna, but his treatment of this branch of study is more systematic and more empirical. As an ethical philosopher, he is a follower of Aristotle whose doctrine of the mean he explains and illustrates with great thoroughness. Above all he modifies and transforms the traditional Neo-Platonism, into a thoroughly Persian system of thought which, not only approaches Plato, but also spiritualises the old Persian Dualism. No Persian thinker is more alive to the necessity of explaining all the aspects of objective existence in reference to his fundamental principles. ”

“ Long before Leibniz he taught that the Universe is a combination of what he called "Afrād"—essential units, or simple atoms which have existed from all eternity, and are endowed with life. The law of the Universe is an ascending perfection of elemental matter, continually passing from lower to higher forms determined by the kind of food which the fundamental units assimilate. ”

“ All the phenomena of nature—rain, clouds, thunder, meteor—are the various workings of this immanent principle of motion, and are explained by the direct or indirect operation of the Primal Light on things, which differ from one another in their capacity of receiving more or less illumination. The Universe, in one word, is a petrified desire ”

“ All human knowledge begins from sensations which are gradually transformed into perceptions. The earlier stages of intellection are completely conditioned by the presence of external reality. But the progress of knowledge means to be able to think without being conditioned by matter. Thought begins with matter, but its object is to gradually free itself from the primary condition of its own possibility. ”

“ There is a certain power in us which rules over physical organs, corrects sense-errors, and unifies all knowledge. This unifying principle which reflects over the material brought before it through the sense-channel, and, weighing the evidence of each sense, decides the character of rival statements, must itself stand above the sphere of matter.
The combined force of these considerations, says Ibn Maskawaih, conclusively establishes the truth of the proposition—that the soul is essentially immaterial. The immateriality of the soul signifies its immortality ”

“ In many fundamental points he differs from Plato, and freely criticises Aristotle whose philosophy he looks upon as a mere preparation for his own system of thought. Nothing escapes his criticism. Even the logic of Aristotle, he subjects to a searching examination, and shows the hollowness of some of its doctrines. Definition, for instance, is genus plus differentia, according to Aristotle. But Al-Ishrāqī holds that the distinctive attribute of the thing defined, which cannot be predicated of any other thing, will bring us no knowledge of the thing. We define "horse" as a neighing animal. ”

“ The followers of Aristotle, true to their position as to the independent objective reality of the essence, define knowledge as "receiving images of external things". [91:1] It is possible to conceive, they argue, an object which is externally unreal, and to which other qualities can be attributed. But when we attribute to it the quality of existence, actual existence is necessitated; since the affirmation of the quality of a thing is a part of the affirmation of that thing. ”