William Wallace and Griffithes Wheeler Thatcher

“ The highest point, beyond which strictly philosophical inquirers did not penetrate, was the active intellect,—a sort of soul of the world in Aristotelian garb—the principle which inspires and regulates the development of humanity, and in which lies the goal of perfection for the human spirit. In theological language the active intellect is described as an angel. The inspirations which the prophet receives by angelic messengers are compared with the irradiation of intellectual light, which the philosopher wins by contemplation of truth and increasing purity of life. ”

“ Avicenna’s 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. ”

“ It describes the process by which an isolated truth-seeker detaches himself from his lower passions, and raises himself above the material earth and the orbs of heaven to the forms which are the source of their movement, until he arrives at a union with the supreme intellect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The allegorical interpretations and metaphysics which had been imported into religion had taken men’s minds away from the plain sense of the Koran. 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. Accordingly, the expositors of religious metaphysics, Ghazālī 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 dogmatizing 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. 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 cannot build up a higher and intellectual faith. ”

“ His object is to discover the highest end of human life, and with this view he classifies the various activities of the human soul, rejects such as are material or animal, and then analyses the various spiritual forms to which the activities may be directed. He points out the graduated scale of such forms, through which the soul may rise, and shows that none are final or complete in themselves, except the pure intelligible forms, the ideas of ideas. These the intellect can grasp, and in so doing it becomes what he calls intellectus acquisitus, and is in a measure divine. ”

“ The real grandeur of Averroes is seen in his resolute prosecution of the standpoint of science in matters of this world, and in his recognition that religion is not a branch of knowledge to be reduced to propositions and systems of dogma, but a personal and inward power, an individual truth which stands distinct from, but not contradictory to, the universalities of scientific law. ”

“ When the fire burns, or the water moistens, these terms merely express the habitual connexion which our senses perceive between one thing and another. It is not the man that throws a stone who is its real mover: the supreme agent has for the moment created motion. If a living being die, it is because God has created the attribute of death ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY. What is known as “Arabian” philosophy owed to Arabia little more than its name and its language. It was a system of Greek thought, expressed in a Semitic tongue, and modified by Oriental influences, called into existence amongst the Moslem people by the patronage of their more liberal princes, and kept alive by the intrepidity and zeal of a small band of thinkers, who stood suspected and disliked in the eyes of their nation. ”

“ In order, for example, to maintain the necessity of creation, he taught that all things except God were admissible or possible in their own 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. ”

“ This self-consciousness of pure reason is the highest object of human activity, and is to be attained by the speculative method. The intellect has in itself power to know ultimate truth and intelligence, and does not require a mystical illumination as Ghazālī taught. Avempace’s principles, it is clear, lead directly to the Averroistic doctrine of the unity of intellect, but the obscurity and incompleteness of the Régime do not permit us to judge how far he anticipated the later thinker. ”

“ Arabian philosophy, whilst it promoted the exegesis of Aristotle and increased his authority, was not less notable as the source of the separation between theology and philosophy. Speculation fell on irreligious paths. In many cases the heretical movement was due less to foreign example than to the indwelling tendencies of the dominant school of realism. But it is not less certain that the very considerable freedom of the Arabians from theological bias prepared the time when philosophy shook off its ecclesiastical vestments. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A special application of this relation between the prior perfect, and the imperfect, which it influences, is found in the doctrine of the connexion of the abstract (transcendent) intellect with man. This transcendent mind is sometimes connected with the moon, according to the theory of Aristotle, who assigned an imperishable matter to the sphere beyond the sublunary, and in general looked upon the celestial orbs as living and intelligent. ”

“ The materials of the work come chiefly from Aristotle, but they are conceived in a Platonizing spirit, which places as the bond of all things a universal soul of the world with its partial or fragmentary souls. Contemporary with this semi-religious and semi-philosophical society lived Alfarabius (see Fārābī) , who died in 950. His paraphrases of Aristotle formed the basis on which Avicenna constructed his system, and his logical treatises produced a permanent effect on the logic of the Latin scholars. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When thus considered as the common features derived by examination from singular instances, it becomes a universal or common term strictly so called. It is intellect which first makes the abstract idea a true universal. ”

“ Meanwhile, in 1497, Aristotle was for the first time expounded in Greek at Padua. Plato had long been the favourite study at Florence; and Humanists, like Erasmus, Ludovicus Vives and Nizolius, enamoured of the popular philosophy of Cicero and Quintilian, poured out the vials of their Summary.contempt on scholastic barbarism with its “impious and thrice-accursed Averroes.” The editors of Averroes complain that the popular taste had forsaken them for the Greek. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Then was inaugurated the period of Persian supremacy, during which Islam was laid open to the full current of alien ideas and culture. The incitement came, however, not from the people, but from the prince: it was in the light of court favour that the colleges of Bagdad and Nishapur first came to attract students from every quarter, from the valleys of Andalusia as well as the upland plains of Transoxiana. Mansūr, the second of the Abbasids, encouraged the appropriation of Greek science ”

“ Space they looked upon as pervaded by atoms possessing no quality or extension, and time was similarly divided into innumerable instants. Each change in the constitution of the atoms is a direct act of the Almighty. ”

“ But about 1195 the old distrust of philosophy revived; the philosophers were banished in disgrace; works on philosophical topics were ordered to be confiscated and burned; and the son of Almansūr condemned a certain Ibn-Habīb to death for the crime of philosophizing.
Arabian speculation in Spain was heralded by Avicebron or Ibn Gabirol (q.v.) , a Jewish philosopher (1021–1058) . About a generation later the rank of Moslem thinkers was introduced by Abū-Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya, surnamed Ibn-Bājja, and known to the Latin world as Avempace. ”