William Wallace

“ Averroes, at the same time, condemns the attempts of those who tried to give demonstrative science where the mind was not capable of more than rhetoric : they harm religion by their mere negations, destroying an old sensuous creed, but can not build up a higher and intellectual faith. In this spirit Averroes does not allow the fancied needs of theological reasoning to interfere with his study of Aristotle, whom he simply interprets as a truth-seeker. ”

“ Many things then become visible as by a lightning flash in the darkness, and are apprehended by the vigorous grasp of pure intuition. But more generally the imagination throws itself on these intuitions, and presents them to the lower soul under the semblance of forms and sounds the angelic beauty which the seer beholds, and the harmonious speech which a heavenly voice seems to utter in his ear. ”

“ The allegorical interpretations and metaphysics which had been imported into religion had taken men s minds away from the plain sense of the Koran, and destroyed the force of those appeals which had been spoken to the hearts and understandings of our common humanity, not to the wisdom of the " people of demonstration." God had declared a truth meet for all men, which needed no intellectual superiority to understand, in a tongue which each human soul could apprehend according to its powers and feelings. ”

“ Alfarabius had pointed out that the universal and individual are not distinguished from each other as understanding from the senses, but that both universal and individual are in one respect intel lectual, just as in another connection they play a part in perception. He had distinguished the universal essence in its abstract nature, from the universal considered in relation to a number of singulars. These suggestions formed the basis of Avicenna s doctrine. ”

“ On three points Averroes, like other Moslem thinkers, came specially into relation, real or supposed, with the religious creed, viz., the creation of the world, the divine knowledge of particular things, and the future of the human soul. But the collision was rather with the laboured ratiocinations by which the Asharite and Motazelite theologians aimed at rationalising dogma than with the doctrine of religion in its simplicity. True philosophy is the foster sister of religion, but is the critic of scholastic subtleties. ”

“ He is thought or intellect, the actuality, of which movement is but the fragmentary attainment in successive instants of time. Such a mind is not in the theological sense a creator, yet the onward movement is not the same as what some modern thinkers seem to mean by development. ”

“ But beyond these, Averroes claims as the highest bliss of the soul a union in this life with the actual intellect. The intellect, therefore, is one and continuous in all individuals, who differ only in the degree which their illumination has attained. Such was the Averroist doctrine of the unity of intellect ths eternal and universal nature of true intellectual life. ”

“ The Samanides were well-known patrons of scholarship and scholars, and stood conspicuous amid the fashion of the period, which made a library and a learned retinue an indispensable accompaniment of an emir, even in the days of campaign. In such a library Avicenna could inspect works of great rarity, and study the progress of science. When the library was destroyed by fire not long thereafter, the enemies of Avicenna accused him of burning it, in order for ever to conceal the sources of his knowledge. ”

“ The ceaseless movement of growth and change, which presents matter in form after form as a continual search after a finality which in time and movement is not, and cannot be reached, represents only the aspect the world shows to the physicist and to the senses. ”

“ Its first appearance, and the only manifestation of it which Anaxagoras describes, is Motion. Reason originated a rotatory movement in the mass (a movement far exceeding the most rapid in this present scene) , which, arising in one corner or point, gradually extended till it gave distinctness and reality to the aggregates of like parts. But even after it has done its best, the original intermixing of things is not wholly overcome. No one thing in the world is ever absolutely separated, as by the blow of an axe, from the rest of things. ”

“ 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 ratio nale of theological dogmas, particularly of prophetic rule, of miracles, divine providence, and immortality. ”

“ The weal of humanity demands the revelation from God, and, to certify his office, the prophet must work miracles. Just as in ordinary states the soul influences the bodily organs, so in exalted conditions it may attain the level of those high immaterial spirits, whose energy is strong enough to permeate the whole passive world. ”

“ When an act of thought employs it as a schema to unify several species, it acquires its logical aspect (respectus) of generality ; and the various living beings qualified to have the name animal applied to them constitute the natural class or kind. Avicenna s view of the universal may be compared with that of Abelard, which calls it " that whose nature it is to be predicated of several," as if the generality became explicit only in the act of predication, in the sermo or proposition, and not in the abstract, unrelated form or essence. ”

“ For man, in order to his well-being and the permanence of his kind, requires in the first place a clear vision of right and truth, and must, secondly, depend upon some power capable of carrying out these discoveries of moral law. ”

“ His system is in the main a codification of Aristotle modified by fundamental views of Neo-Platonist origin, and it tends to be a compromise with theology. In order, for example, to maintain the necessity of creation, he taught that all things except God were admissible or possible in their ov,~n nature, but that certain of them were rendered necessary by the act of the creative first agent, in other words, that the possible could be transformed into the necessary. Avicenna s theory of the process of knowledge is an interesting part of his doctrine. ”

“ Accordingly, the expositors of religious metaphysics, Algazali included, are the enemies of true religion, because they make it a mere matter of syllogism. Averroes maintains that a return must be made to the words and teaching of the prophet ; that science must not expend itself in dogmatising on the metaphysical consequences of fragments of doctrine for popular acceptance, but must proceed to reflect upon and examine the existing things of the world. ”

“ Such an intellect, named active or productive, as being the author of the development of reason in man, is the permanent, eternal thought, which is the truth of the cosmic and physical movement. It is in man that the physical or sensible passes most evidently into the metaphysical and rational. Humanity is the chosen vessel in which the light of tho intellect is revealed ”

“ There must of necessity always be some philo sopher in the race of man." What seems from the material point of view to be the acquisition of learning, study, and a moral life, is from the higher point of view the manifest tation of the transcendent intellect in the individual. The preparation of the heart and faculties gives rise to a series of grades between the original predisposition and the full acquisition of actual intellect. ”

“ 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 hdbitu ; it is com pared 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. ”

“ If pro vidence has so arranged that the eyelids and the hair of the eyebrows shall grow to protect the eye, much more is it needful for a prophet to arise who shall preach the truth of God s unity, prescribe laws for men, and exhort them to well-doing by the promise of recompense to come. ”

“ For the perfect and absolute, the con summation of movement is not generated at any point in the process ; it is an ideal end, which guides the operations of nature, and does not wait upon them for its achieve ment. God is the unchanging essence of the movement, and therefore its eternal cause. A special application of this relation between the prior perfect, and the imperfect, which it influences, is found in the doctrine of the connection of the abstract (transcendent) intellect with man. ”

“ In works of contemporary art Averroes is at one time the comrade of Mahomet and Antichrist; at another he lies with Arius and Sabellius, vanquished by the lance of St Thomas. It was in the universities of North Italy that Averroism finally settled, and there for three centuries it continued as a stronghold of Scholasticism to resist the efforts of revived antiquity and of advancing science. Padua became the seat of Averroist Aristotelianism ; and, when Padua was conquered by Venice in 1405, the printers of the republic spread abroad the teaching of the professors in the university. ”

“ Avicenna was put in charge of a tutor, and his precocity soon made him the marvel of his neighbours, as a boy of ten who knew by rote the Koran and much Arabic poetry besides. From a greengrocer he learnt arithmetic ; and higher branches were begun under one of those wandering scholars, who gained a livelihood by cures for the sick and lessons for the young. Under him Avicenna read the Isagoge of Porphyry, and the first pro positions of Euclid. But the pupil soon found his teacher to be but a charlatan, and betook himself, aided by com mentaries, to master logic, geometry, and the Almagest. ”

“ His work is not essentially different from that of his predecessors Rhazes and Ali; all present the doctrine of Galen, and through Galen the doctrine of Hippocrates, modified by the system of Aristotle. But the Canon of Avicenna is distinguished from the El-Hawi (Contintns) or Summary of Rhazes by its greater method, due perhaps to the logical studies of the former, and entitling him to his surname of Prince of the Physicians. The work has been variously appreciated in subsequent ages, some regarding it as a treasury of wisdom, and others, like Avenzoar, holding it useful only as waste paper. ”

“ Thus Avicenna, like his predecessors, tried to harmonise 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 Algazali on the tendencies and results of speculation. Upwards of 100 treatises are ascribed to Avicenna. Some of them are tracts of a few pages, others are works extending through several volumes. The best-known amongst them, and that "to which Avicenna owed his European reputation, is the Canon of Medicine ”

“ 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 understandiag ; the other face lies open to the reception and acquisition of the intelligible forms, and its aim is to become a reason- able world, reproducing the forms of the universe and their intelligible order. ”

“ When the power of writing has bssn actualised, we have a parallel to the intellectus in actit the way of science and demonstra tion 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 intel lectus 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. ”