Islam had, it is true, a philosophy of its own. There were Schoolmen amongst the believers in the Koran, not less than amongst the Latin Christians. At the very moment when Mahometanism came into contact with the older civilisations of Persia, Babylonia, and Syria, the intellectual habits of the new converts created difficulties with regard to its very basis, and showed themselves a prolific source of diversity in the details of interpretation. The radical questions on which these disputes turned were two. The first dealt with the possibility of ascribing manifold attributes to God—to a Being who was absolute unity. The other referred to the bearing of God’s omnipotence upon the freedom of the human will. Ere the second century of the Hegira, sturdy adherents of the literal truth of the Koran taught a gross anthropomorphism, applying to the Creator the very bodily attributes of his creatures. These were the Sefatites, or partisans of the attributes. Another sect represented Mahomet as the teacher of an unqualified fatalism. Opposed to these narrow-minded exponents stood the comparatively liberal sect of the Motazalites, the Dissidents, who first appeared about 750. As they maintained, on one hand, that man was in some degree a free agent, and on another, elevated the unity of the divine nature far above the diversity of attributes, they came to be styled the partisans of justice and unity. It was with them that the Mussulman theology—the science of the word (Calâin) — first came into existence. Its professors, the Motecallemin (known in Hebrew as Medabberim, and as Loqy,entes in the Latin versions) may be compared with the scholastic doctors of the Catholic Church. Driven in the first instance to speculation in theology by the needs of their natural reason, they came, in after days, when Greek philosophy had been naturalised in the Caliphate, to adapt its methods and doctrines to the support of their views. They employed a quasi-philosophical method, by which, according to Mauno-nides they first reflected how things ought to be in order to support, or at least not contradict, their opinions, and then, when their minds were made up with regard to this imaginary system, declared that the world was no otherwise constituted. The dogmas of creation and providence, of divine omnipotence, chiefly exercised them; and they sought to assert for God an immediate action in the making and°the keeping of the world. 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. When the fire burns, or the water moistens, these terms merely express the habitual connection 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; and the body remains dead, only because that attribute is unceasingly created. Thus, on the one hand, the object called the cause is denied to have any efficient power to produce the so-called effect; and, on the other hand, the regularities or laws of nature are explained to be direct interferences by the Deity. God is the sole cause or agent in the universe: it is He who, directly, or by the mediation of His ministering angels, brings everything to pass. The supposed uniformity and necessity of causation is only an effect of custom, and may be at any moment rescinded. In this way, by a theory which, according to Averroes, involves the negation of science, the Moslem theologians believed that they had exalted God beyond the limits of the metaphysical and scientific conceptions of law, form, and matter; whilst they at the same time stood aloof from the vulgar doctrines, attributing a causality to things. Making the uniformity of nature a mere phantom due to our human customary experience, they deemed they had left a clear ground for the possibility of miracles.

But at least one point was common to the theological and the philosophical doctrine. Carrying out, it may be, the principles of the Neo-Platonists, they kept the sanctuary of the Deity securely guarded, and interposed between him and his creatures a spiritual order of potent principles, from the Intelligence, which is the first-born image of the great unity, to the Soul and Nature, which come later in the spiritual rank. Of God the philosophers said we could not tell what He is, but only what He is not. 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. But while the theologian incessantly postulated the agency of that God, whose nature he deemed beyond the pale of science, the philosopher, following a purely human and natural aim, directed his efforts to the gradual elevation of his part of reason from its unformed state, and to its final union with the controlling intellect which moves and draws to itself the spirits of those who prepare themselves for its influences. The philosophers in their way, like the mystics of Persia (the Su fites) in another, tended towards a theory of the communion of man with the spiritual world, which may be considered a protest against the practical and almost prosaic definiteness of the creed of Mahomet.

Arabian philosophy, at the outset of its career in the 9th century, was able without difficulty to take possession of those resources for speculative thought, which the Latins had barely achieved at the close of the 12th century by the slow process of rediscovering the Aristotelian logic from the commentaries and versions of Boethius. What the Latins painfully accomplished, amid many senseless disputations and blind gropings after light, owing to their fragmentary and unintelligent acquaintance with ancient philosophy, was already done for the Arabians by the scholars of Syria. In the early centuries of the Christian era, both within and without the ranks of the church, the Platonic tone and method were paramount throughout the East. Their influence was felt in the creeds which formulated the orthodox dogmas in regard to the Trinity and the Incarnation. But in its later days the Neo-Platonist school came more and more to find in Aristotle the best exponent and interpreter of the philosopher whom they thought divine. It was in this spirit that Porphyry, Themistius, and Joannes Philoponus composed their commentaries on the treatises of the Peripatetic system which, modified often unconsciously by the dominant ideas of its expositors, became in the 6th and 7th centuries the philosophy of the Eastern Church. But the instrument which, in the hands of John of Damascus, was made subservient to theological interests, became in,the hands of others a dissolvent of the doctrines which had been reduced to shape under the prevalence of the elder Platonism. Peripatetic studies became the source of heresies; and conversely, the heretical sects prosecuted the study of Aristotle with peculiar zeal. The church of the Nestorians, and that of the Monophysites, in their several schools and monasteries, carried on from the 5th to the 8th century the study of the earlier part of the Organon, with almost the same means, purposes, and results as were found among the Latin schoolmen of the earlier centuries. Up to the time when the religious zeal of the Emperor Zeno put a stop to the Nestorian school at Edessa, this “Athens of Syria” was active in translating and popularising the Aristotelian logic. Their banishment from Edessa in 489 drove the Nestorian scholars to Persia, where the Sassanidae gave them a welcome; and there they continued their labours on the Organon. A new seminary of logic and theology sprung up at Nisibis, not far from the old locality; and at Gandisapora (orNisabur) in the east of Persia, there arose a medical school, whence Greek medicine, and in its company Greek science and philosophy, ere long spread over the lands of Iran. Meanwhile the Monophysites had followed in the steps of the Nestorians, multiplying Syriac versions of the logical and medical science of the Greeks. Their school at B,esaina is known from the name of Sergius, one of the first of these translators, in the days of Justinian; and from their monasteries at Kinnesrin (Chalcis) issued numerous versions of the introductory treatises of the Aristotelian logic. To the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Categories and the Herme-neutica of Aristotle, the labours of· these Syrian schoolmen were confined: these they expounded, translated, epitomised, and made the basis of their compilations; and the few who were bold enough to attempt the Analytics, seem to have laid down the pen with their task unaccomplished.

The energy of the Monophysites, however, began to sink with the rise of the Moslem empire; and when philosophy revived amongst them in the 13th century, in the person of Gregorius Barhebraeus (1226-1286), the revival was due to the example and influence of the Arabian thinkers. It was otherwise with the Nestorians. Gaining by means of their professional skill as physicians a high rank in the society of the Moslem world, the Nestorian scholars soon made Baghdad familiar with the knowledge of Greek philosophy and science which they possessed. But the narrow limits of the Syrian studies, which added to a scanty knowledge of Aristotle some acquaintance with his Syrian commentators, were soon passed by the curiosity and zeal of the students in the Caliphate. During the 8th and 9th centuries, rough but generally faithful versions of Aristotle’s principal works were made into Syriac, and then from the Syriac into Arabic. The names of some of these translators, such as Johannitius (Honein ibn-Ishak), were heard even in the Latin schools. By the labours of Honein and his family the great body of Greek science, medical, astronomical, and mathematical, became accessible to the Arabspeaking races. But for the next three centuries fresh versions, both of the philosopher and of his commentators, continued to succeed each other.

To the Arabians Aristotle represented and summed up Greek philosophy, even as Galen became to them the code of Greek medicine. They adopted the doctrine and system which the progress of human affairs had made the intellectual aliment of their Syrian guides. It was a matter of historical necessity, and not an act of deliberate choice. Just as the early poets of Rome, when they tried to naturalise the drama, reproduced the works of Euripides, the popular tragedian of their time, so the Arabians, when the need of scientific culture awoke amongst thém, accepted Aristotle. From first to last Arabian philosophers made no claim to originality; their aim was merely to propagate the truth of Peripateticism as it had been delivered to them. In medicine and astronomy, as well as in philosophy, they entertained an almost superstitious reverence for their Greek teachers. It was with them that the deification of Aristotle began; and from them the belief that in him human intelligence had reached its limit passed to the later schoolmen. The doctrine is fixed: truth has been ascertained: all that is needed is a faithful and skilful interpreter. Hence, their perpetual labour of exposition and illustration: their epitomes and paraphrases of Aristotelian doctrine. The progress amongst the Arabians on this side lies in a closer adherence to their text, a nearer approach to the bare exegesis of their author, and an increasing emancipation from control by the tenets of the popular religion.

Secular philosophy found its first entrance amongst the Saracens in the days of the early caliphs of the Abbaside dynasty, whose ways and thoughts had been moulded by their residence in Persia amid the influences of an older creed, and of ideas which had in the last resort sprung from the Greeks. The seat of empire had been transferred to Baghdad, on the highway of Oriental commerce; and the distant Khorassan became the favourite province of the caliph. 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 Baghdad and Nisabur first came to attract students from every quarter, from the valleys of Andalusia, as well as the upland plains of Transoxiana. Al-Ma’nsûr, the second of the Abbasides, encouraged the appropriation of Greek science; but it was Al-Mamûn, the son of Harûn al-Rashid, who deserves in the Mahometan empire the same position of royal founder and benefactor which is held by Charlemagne in the history of the Latin schools. In his reign (813-833) Aristotle was first translated into Arabic. Legend told how Al-Mamûn had been induced to send to the Byzantine emperor for Greek books on philosophy, in consequence of a vision in which a venerable personage, who made himself known as Aristotle, had excited without gratifying the curiosity of the caliph. Orthodox Mussulmans, however, distrusted the course on which their chief had entered, and his philosophical proclivities became one ground for doubting as to bis final salvation.

In the Eastern provinces the chief names of Arabian philosophy are those known to the Latin schoolmen as Alkindius, Alpharabius, Avicenna, and Algazel, or under forms resembling these, or under other names derived from various parts of their complex Arabic designations. The first of these, Alkindius (Abu Jusuf Jacub ibn-Ishak al-Kencli), wrote in the reigns of Al-Mamûn and Al-Motassem (813-842). His claims to notice at the present day rest upon a few works on medicine and the astrological astronomy of his age,—the only remnant left of the 200 treatises which he is said to have composed on all the themes of science and philosophy. With him begins that encyclopaedic character—the simultaneous cultivation of the whole field of investigation which is reflected from Aristotle on the Arabian school. Towards the close of the 10th century the presentation of an entire scheme of knowledge, beginning with logic and mathematics, and ascending through the various departments of physical inquiry to the region of religious doctrine, was accomplished by a society which had its chief seat at Basra, the native town of Al-Kendi. This society—the Brothers of Purity or Sincerity—divided into four orders, wrought in the interests of religion no less than of science; and though its attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of existing knowledge may have been premature, it yet contributed to spread abroad a desire for further information. The proposed reconciliation between science and faith was not accomplished, because the compromise coιdd please neither party. The fifty-one treatises of w hich this encyclopaedia consists are interspersed with apologues in true Oriental style, and the idea of goodness, of moral perfection, is as prominent an end in every discourse as it was in the alleged dream of Al-Mamûn. Tho materials of the work come chiefly from Aristotle, but they are conceived in a Platonising spirit, which places as the bond of all things a universal soul of the world with its partial orifragmentary souls. Contemporary with this semireligious and semi-philosophical society lived Alfarabius (Abou-Nasr Mohammed ben-Mohammed ben-Tarkhan al-Farabi} or Abunasar. From Turkestan, the place of his birth, he passed southward to Baghdad where he studied, and died at Damascus in 950, after living for some time at Aleppo on the invitation of its prince. The legendary accounts of Al-Farabi describe him as a man of vast erudition, the master of seventy languages, and accomplished both in the theory and the practice of the musical art. Of his numerous waitings on all the branches of science only a few remain in Arabic or Hebrew versions, but 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. He gave the tone and direction to nearly all subsequent speculations among the Arabians. His order and enumeration of the principles of being, his doctrine of the double aspect of intellect, and of the perfect beatitude which consists in the aggregation of noble minds when they are delivered from the separating barriers of individual bodies, present at least in germ the characteristic theory of Averroes. But Al-Farabi w as not alw ays consistent in his views; a certain sobriety checked his speculative flights; and although holding that the true perfection of man is reached in this life by the elevation of the intellectual nature, he came towards the close to think the separate existence of intellect no better than a phantasm and delusion.

Unquestionably the most illustrious name amongst the Oriental Moslems was Avicenna (980-1037). His fame in Europe rested more upon his medical canon than on his philosophical works; but even in logic and metaphysics his influence on the West was considerable. With him the encyclopaedic tendencies of the school of Baghdad reached their culmination. He was followed by Algazel (Abou-Hamed Mohammed ibn-Mohammed al-Ghazalι), whose name was the last that attained a European reputation. Born near Tûs in 1058, he studied there and at Nisabur; and having left his native province of Khorassan at the age of 36, he was appointed to a high educational post at Baghdad. There, as well as at Damascus, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, his lectures attracted crowds of eager listeners. Suddenly he withdrew from active life, assumed the habits of the Sufite mystic, and devoted himself to contemplation of religious truth; and although he was persuaded to resume for a while his duties in the college of Baghdad, he soon returned to seclusion, and passed his last days in a monastery which he had himself founded at Tûs (1111). To Algazel 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 and spirit of the Moslem theologian. In his Tendencies of the Philosophers (Makâcid al-Falâsifa) he gave a resumé of the contemporary state of...