Chapter XIX: Act 1737: , and the Apportionment Act 1834, and is now allowed generally (10)

Unquestionably the most illustrious name amongst the Oriental Moslems was Avicenna (980-1037). His rank in the medieval world as a philosopher was far beneath his fame as a physician. Still, the logic of Albertus Magnus and succeeding doctors was largely indebted to him for its formulae. In logic Avicenna starts from distinguishing between the isolated concept and the judgment or assertion; from which two primitive elements of knowledge there is artificially generated a complete and scientific knowledge by the two processes of definition and syllogism. But the chief interest for the history of logic belongs to his doctrine in so far as it bears upon the nature and function of abstract ideas. The question had been suggested alike to East and West by Porphyry, and the Arabians were the first to approach the full statement of the problem. Farabi 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 intellectual, just as in another connexion 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. The essences or forms--the _intelligibilia_ which constitute the world of real knowledge--may be looked at in themselves (metaphysically), or as embodied in the things of sense (physically), or as expressing the processes of thought (logically). The first of these three points of view deals with the form or idea as self-contained in the principles of its own being, apart from those connexions and distinctions which it receives in real (sensuous) science, and through the act of intellect. Secondly, the form may be looked at as the similarity evolved by a process of comparison, as the work of mental reflection, and in that way as essentially expressing a relation. 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. _Intellectus in formis agit universalitatem._ In the third place, the form or essence may be looked upon as embodied in outward things (_in singularibus propriis_), and thus it is the type more or less represented by the members of a natural kind. It is the designation of these outward things which forms the "first intention" of names; and it is only at a later stage, when thought comes to observe its own modes, that names, looked upon as predicables and universals, are taken in their "second intention." Logic deals with such second intentions. It does not consider the forms _ante multiplicitatem_, i.e. as eternal ideas--nor in _multiplicitate_, i.e. as immersed in the matter of the phenomenal world--but _post multiplicitatem_, _i. e._ as they exist in and for the intellect which has examined and compared. Logic does not come in contact with things, except as they are subject to modification by intellectual forms. In other words, universality, individuality and speciality are all equally modes of our comprehension or notion; their meaning consists in their setting forth the relations attaching to any object of our conception. In the mind, e.g., one form may be placed in reference to a multitude of things, and as thus related will be universal. The form animal, e.g., is an abstract intelligible or metaphysical idea. 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. The three modes of the universal before things, in things, and after things, spring from Arabian influence, but depart somewhat from his standpoint.

The place of Avicenna amongst Moslem philosophers is seen in the fact that Shahrastani takes him as the type of all, and that Ghazali's attack against philosophy is in reality almost entirely directed against Avicenna. 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 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. 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. In man there is only the susceptibility to reason, which is sustained and helped by the light of the active intellect. Man may prepare himself for this influx by removing the obstacles which prevent the union of the intellect with the human vessel destined for its reception. 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 habitu_; it is compared 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. In this period of half-trained reason, it appears as happy conjecture, not yet transformed into art or science proper. 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. in theological language, to communication with God and his angels. 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. 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. Thus Avicenna, like his predecessors, tried to harmonize the abstract forms of philosphy 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 Ghazali on the tendencies and results of speculation.

Ghazali.

To Ghazali (q.v.) 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. 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; but what assurance have we that the verdicts of reason may not be reversed by some higher authority? Ghazali then interrogated all the sects in succession to learn their criterion of truth. He first applied to the theological schoolmen, who grounded their religion on reason; but their aim was only to preserve the faith from heresy. He turned to the philosophers, and examined the accepted Aristotelianism in a treatise which has come down to us--_The Destruction of the Philosophers_. He assails them on twenty points of their mixed physical and metaphysical peripateticism, from the statement of which, in spite of his pretended scepticism, we can deduce some very positive metaphysical opinions of his own. He claims to have shown that the dogmas of the eternity of matter and the permanence of the world are false; that their description of the Deity as the demiurgos is unspiritual; that they fail to prove the existence, the unity, the simplicity, the incorporeality or the knowledge (both of species and accidents) of God; that their ascription of souls to the celestial spheres is unproved; that their theory of causation, which attributes effects to the very natures of the causes, is false, for that all actions and events are to be ascribed to the Deity; and, finally, that they cannot establish the spirituality of the soul, nor prove its mortality. These criticisms disclose nothing like a sceptical state of mind, but rather a reversion from the metaphysical to the theological stage of thought. He denies the intrinsic tendencies, or souls, by which the Aristotelians explained the motion of the spheres, because he ascribes their motion to God. The sceptic would have denied both. G.H. Lewes censures Renan for asserting of Ghazali's theory of causation--"_Hume n'a rien dit plus_." It is true that Ghazali maintains that the natural law according to which effects proceed inevitably from their causes is only custom, and that there is no _necessary_ connexion between them. But while Hume absolutely denies the necessity, Ghazali merely removes it one stage farther back, and plants it in the mind of the Deity. This, of course, is not metaphysics, but theology. Having, as he believed, refuted the opinions of the philosophers, he next investigated the pretensions of the Allegorists, who derived their doctrines from an imam. These Arabian ultramontanes had no word for the doubter. They could not, he says, even understand the problems they sought to resolve by the assumption of infallibility, and he turned again, in his despair, to the instructors of his youth--the Sufis. 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 Ghazali. It is a mere abstract or statement of the Peripatetic systems, and was made preliminary to that _Destruction_ of which we have already spoken.

This indictment against liberal thought from the standpoint of the theological school was afterwards answered in Spain by Averroes; but in Bagdad it heralded the extinction of the light of philosophy. Moderate and compliant with the popular religion as Alfarabius and Avicenna had always been, as compared with their Spanish successor, they had equally failed to conciliate the popular spirit, and were classed in the same category with the heretic or the member of an immoral sect. The 12th century exhibits the decay of liberal intellectual activity in the Caliphate, and the gradual ascendancy of Turkish races animated with all the intolerance of semi-barbarian proselytes to the Mahommedan faith. Philosophy, which had only sprung up when the purely Arabian influences ceased to predominate, came to an end when the sceptre of the Moslem world passed away from the dynasty of Persia. Even in 1150 Bagdad had seen a library of philosophical books burned by command of the caliph Mostanjid; and in 1192 the same place might have witnessed a strange scene, in which the books of a physician were first publicly cursed, and then committed to the flames, while their owner was incarcerated. Thus, while the Latin church showed a marvellous receptivity for ethnic philosophy, and assimilated doctrines which it had at an earlier date declared impious, in Islam the theological system entrenched itself towards the end of the 12th century in the narrow orthodoxy of the Asharites, and reduced the votaries of Greek philosophy to silence.

In Spain.

The same phenomena were repeated in Spain under the Mahommedan rulers of Andalusia and Morocco, with this difference, that the time of philosophical development was shorter, and the heights to which Spanish thinkers soared were greater. The reign of al-Hakam the Second (961-976) inaugurated in Andalusia those scientific and philosophical studies which were simultaneously prosecuted by the Society of Basra. From Cairo, Bagdad, Damascus and Alexandria, books both old and new were procured at any price for the library of the prince; twenty-seven free schools were opened in Cordova for the education of the poor; and intelligent knowledge was perhaps more widely diffused in Mahommedan Spain than in any other part of Europe at that day. The mosques of the city were filled with crowds who listened to lectures on science and literature, law and religion. But the future glory thus promised was long postponed. The usurping successor of Hakam found it a politic step to request the most notable doctors of the sacred law to examine the royal library; and every book treating of philosophy, astronomy and other forbidden topics was condemned to the flames. But the spirit of research, fostered by the fusion of races and the social and intellectual competition thus engendered, was not crushed by these proceedings; and for the next century and more the higher minds of Spain found in Damascus and Bagdad the intellectual aliment which they desired. At last, towards the close of the 11th century, the long-pent spiritual energies of Mahommedan Spain burst forth in a brief series of illustrious men. Whilst the native Spaniards were narrowing the limits of the Moorish kingdoms, and whilst the generally fanatical dynasty of the Almohades might have been expected to repress speculation, the century preceding the close of Mahommedan sway saw philosophy cultivated by Avempace, Abubacer and Averroes. Even amongst the Almohades there were princes, such as Yusuf (who began his reign in 1163) and Yaqub Almansur (who succeeded in 1184), who welcomed the philosopher at their courts and treated him as an intellectual compeer. 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 Almansur condemned a certain Ibn-Habib to death for the crime of philosophizing.

Avempace.

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 Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya, surnamed Ibn-Bajja, and known to the Latin world as Avempace. He was born at Saragossa, and died comparatively young at Fez in 1138. Besides commenting on various physical treatises of Aristotle's, he wrote some philosophical essays, notably one on the _Republic or Regime of the Solitary_, understanding by that the organized system of rules, by obedience to which the individual may rise from the mere life of the senses to the perception of pure intelligible principles and may participate in the divine thought which sustains the world. These rules for the individual are but the image or reflex of the political organization of the perfect or ideal state; and the man who strives to lead this life is called the _solitary_, not because he withdraws from society, but because, while in it, he guides himself by reference to a higher state, an ideal society. Avempace does not develop at any length this curious Platonic idea of the perfect state. 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. 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 Ghazali 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 Regime do not permit us to judge how far he anticipated the later thinker. (See Munk, _Melanges de phil. juive et arabe_, pp. 383-410.)

The same theme was developed by Ibn.-Tufail (q.v.) in his philosophical romance, called _Hayy ibn-Yakdhan_ (the Living, Son of the Waking One), best known by Pococke's Latin version, as the _Philosophus Autodidactus_. 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. The experiences of the religious mystic are paralleled with the ecstatic vision in which the philosophical hermit sees a world of pure intelligences, where birth and decease are unknown. It was this theory which Averroes (1126-1198), the last and most famous of the thinkers of Moslem Spain, carried out to his doctrine of the unity of intellect.

Averroes.

For Aristotle the reverence of Averroes was unbounded, and to expound him was his chosen task. The uncritical receptivity of his age, the defects of the Arabic versions, the emphatic theism of his creed, and the rationalizing mysticism of some Oriental thought, may have sometimes led him astray, and given prominence to the less obvious features of Aristotelianism. But in his conception of the relation between philosophy and religion, Averroes had a light which the Latins were without. The science, falsely so called, of the several theological schools, their groundless distinctions and sophistical demonstrations, he regarded as the great source of heresy and scepticism. 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, Ghazali 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.

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. The points by which he told on Europe were all implicit in Aristotle, but Averroes set in relief what the original had left obscure, and emphasized things which the Christian theologian passed by or misconceived. Thus Averroes had a double effect. He was the great interpreter of Aristotle to the later Schoolmen. On the other hand, he came to represent those aspects of Peripateticism most alien to the spirit of Christendom; and the deeply religious Moslem gave his name to the anti-sacerdotal party, to the materialists, sceptics and atheists, who defied or undermined the dominant beliefs of the church.

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.

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. In his science he followed the Greeks, and to the Schoolmen he and his compatriots rightly seemed philosophers of the ancient world. He maintained alike the claim of demonstrative science with its generalities for the few who could live in that ethereal world, and the claim of religion for all--the common life of each soul as an individual and personal consciousness. But theology, or the mixture of the two, he regarded as a source of evil to both--fostering the vain belief in a hostility of philosophers to religion, and meanwhile corrupting religion by a pseudo-science.

The latent nominalism of Aristotle only came gradually to be emphasized through the prominence which Christianity gave to the individual life, and, apart from passing notices as in Abelard, first found clear enunciation in the school of Duns Scotus. The Arabians, on the contrary, emphasized the idealist aspect which had been adopted and promoted by the Neo-Platonist commentators. Hence, to Averroes the eternity of the world finds its true expression in the eternity of God. 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. In the eye of reason the full fruition of this desired finality is already and always attained; the actualization, invisible to the senses, is achieved now and ever, and is thus beyond the element of time. This transcendent or abstract being is that which the world of nature is always seeking. 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. For the perfect and absolute, the consummation 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 achievement. 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 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. 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 the intellect is revealed; and so long as mankind lasts there must always be some individuals destined to receive this light. 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 manifestation 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. These grades in the main resemble those given by Avicenna. 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--the eternal and universal nature of true intellectual life. By his interpreters it was transformed into a theory of one soul common to all mankind, and when thus corrupted conflicted not unreasonably with the doctrines of a future life, common to Islam and Christendom.

Opponents of Averoism.

Averroes, rejected by his Moslem countrymen, found a hearing among the Jews, to whom Maimonides had shown the free paths of Greek speculation. In the cities of Languedoc and of Provence to which they had been driven by Spanish fanaticism, the Jews no longer used the learned Arabic, and translations of the works of Averroes became necessary. His writings became the text-book of Levi ben Gerson at Perpignan, and of Moses of Narbonne. Meanwhile, before 1250, Averroes became accessible to the Latin Schoolmen by means of versions, accredited by the names of Michael Scot and others. William of Auvergne is the first Schoolman who criticizes the doctrines of Averroes, not, however, by name. Albertus Magnus and St Thomas devote special treatises to an examination of the Averroist theory of the unity of intellect, which they labour to confute in order to establish the orthodoxy of Aristotle. But as early as Aegidius Romanus (1247-1316). Averroes had been stamped as the patron of indifference to theological dogmas, and credited with the emancipation which was equally due to wider experience and the lessons of the Crusades. There had never been an absence of protest against the hierarchical doctrine. Berengar of Tours (11th century) had struggled in that interest, and with Abelard, in the 12th century, the revolt against authority in belief grew loud. The dialogue between a Christian, a Jew and a philosopher suggested a comparative estimate of religions, and placed the natural religion of the moral law above all positive revelations. Nihilists and naturalists, who deified logic and science at the expense of faith, were not unknown at Paris in the days of John of Salisbury. In such a critical generation the words of Averroism found willing ears, and pupils who outran their teacher. Paris became the centre of a sceptical society, which the decrees of bishops and councils, and the enthusiasm of the orthodox doctors and knights-errant of Catholicism, were powerless to extinguish. At Oxford Averroes told more as the great commentator. In the days of Roger Bacon he had become an authority. Bacon, placing him beside Aristotle and Avicenna, recommends the study of Arabic as the only way of getting the knowledge which bad versions made almost hopeless. In Duns Scotus, Averroes and Aristotle are the unequalled masters of the science of proof; and he pronounces distinctly the separation between Catholic and philosophical truth, which became the watchword of Averroism. By the 14th century Averroism was the common leaven of philosophy; John Baconthorpe is the chief of Averroists, and Walter Burley has similar tendencies.

Meanwhile Averrcism had come to be regarded by the great Dominican school as the arch-enemy of the truth. When the emperor Frederick II. consulted a Moslem free-thinker on the mysteries of the faith, when the phrase or legend of the "Three Impostors" presented in its most offensive form the scientific survey of the three laws of Moses, Christ and Mahomet, and when the characteristic doctrines of Averroes were misunderstood, it soon followed that his name became the badge of the scoffer and the sceptic. What had begun with the subtle disputes of the universities of Paris, went on to the materialist teachers in the medical schools and the sceptical men of the world in the cities of northern Italy. The patricians of Venice and the lecturers of Padua made Averroism synonymous with doubt and criticism in theology, and with sarcasm against the hierarchy. Petrarch refuses to believe that any good thing can come out of Arabia, and speaks of Averroes as a mad dog barking against the church. 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.

The school of Padua.

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. As early as 1300, at Padua, Petrus Aponensis, a notable expositor of medical theories, had betrayed a heterodoxy in faith; and John of Jandun, one of the pamphleteers on the side of Louis of Bavaria, was a keen follower of Averroes, whom he styles a "perfect and most glorious physicist." Urbanus of Bologna, Paul of Venice (d. 1428), and Cajetanus de Thienis (1387-1465), established by their lectures and their discussions the authority of Averroes; and a long list of manuscripts rests in the libraries of Lombardy to witness the diligence of these writers and their successors. Even a lady of Venice, Cassandra Fedele, in 1480, gained her laurels in defence of Averroist theses.

With Pietro Pomponazzi (q.v.) in 1495, a brilliant epoch began for the school of Padua. Questions of permanent and present interest took the place of outworn scholastic problems. The disputants ranged themselves under the rival commentators, Alexander and Averroes; and the immortality of the soul became the battle-ground of the two parties. Pomponazzi defended the Alexandrist doctrine of the utter mortality of the soul, whilst Agostino Nifo (q.v.), the Averroist, was entrusted by Leo X. with the task of defending the Catholic doctrine. The parties seemed to have changed when Averroism thus took the side of the church; but the change was probably due to compulsion. Nifo had edited the works of Averroes (1495-1497); but his expressions gave offence to the dominant theologians, and he had to save himself by distinguishing his personal faith from his editorial capacity. Alessandro Achillini, the persistent philosophical adversary of Pomponazzi, both at Padua and subsequently at Bologna, attempted, along with other moderate but not brilliant Averroists, to accommodate their philosophical theory with the requirements of Catholicism. It was this comparatively mild Averroism, reduced to the merely explanatory activity of a commentator, which continued to be the official dogma at Padua during the 16th century. Its typical representative is Marc-Antonio Zimara (d. 1552), the author of a reconciliation between the tenets of Averroes and those of Aristotle.

Summary.

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 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. Nevertheless, while Fallopius, Vesalius and Galileo were claiming attention to their discoveries, G. Zabarella, Francesco Piccolomini (1520-1604) and Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631) continued the traditions of Averroism, not without changes and additions. Cremonini, the last of them, died in 1631, after lecturing twelve years at Ferrara, and forty at Padua. The great educational value of Arabian philosophy for the later schoolmen consisted in its making them acquainted with an entire Aristotle. At the moment when it seemed as if everything had been made that could be made out of the fragments of Aristotle, and the compilations of Capella, Cassiodorus and others, and when mysticism and scepticism seemed the only resources left for the mind, the horizon of knowledge was suddenly widened by the acquisition of a complete Aristotle. Thus the mistakes inevitable in the isolated study of an imperfect _Organon_ could not henceforth be made. The real bearing of old questions, and the meaninglessness of many disputes, were seen in the new conception of Aristotelianism given by the _Metaphysics_ and other treatises. The former Realism and Nominalism were lifted into a higher phase by the principle of the universalizing action of intellect--_Intellectus in formis agit universalitatem_. The commentaries of the Arabians in this respect supplied nutriment more readily assimilated by the pupils than the pure text would have been.

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. In the hurry of first terror, the church struck Aristotle with the anathema launched against innovations in philosophy. The provincial council of Paris in 1209, which condemned Amalricus and his followers, as well as David of Dinant's works, forbade the study of Aristotle's _Natural Philosophy_ and the _Commentaries_. In 1215 the same prohibition was repeated, specifying the _Metaphysics_ and _Physics_, and the _Commentaries_ by the Spaniard Mauritius (i.e. probably Averroes). Meanwhile Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, accepting the exegetical services of the Arabians, did their best to controvert the obnoxious doctrine of the Intellect, and to defend the orthodoxy of Aristotle against the unholy glosses of infidels. But it is doubtful whether even they kept as pure from the infection of illegitimate doctrine as they supposed. The tide meanwhile flowed in stronger and stronger. In 1270 Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, supported by an assembly of theologians, anathematized thirteen propositions bearing the stamp of Arabian authorship; but in 1277 the same views and others more directly offensive to Christians and theologians had to be censured again. Raymond Lully, in a dialogue with an infidel thinker, broke a lance in support of the orthodox doctrine, and carried on a crusade against the Arabians in every university; and a disciple of Thomas Aquinas drew up a list (_De erroribus philosophorum_) of the several delusions and errors of each of the thinkers from Kindi to Averroes. Strong in their conviction of the truth of Aristotelianism, the Arabians carried out their logical results in the theological field, and made the distinction of necessary and possible, of form and matter, the basis of conclusions in the most momentous questions. They refused to accept the doctrine of creation because it conflicted with the explanation of forms as the necessary evolution of matter. They denied the particular providence of God, because knowledge in the divine sphere did not descend to singulars. They excluded the Deity from all direct action upon the world, and substituted for a cosmic principle the active intellect,--thus holding a form of Pantheism. But all did not go the same length in their divergence from the popular creed.

The half-legendary accounts which attribute the introduction of Arabian science to Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II., to Constantinus Africanus and to Adelard of Bath, if they have any value, refer mainly to medical science and mathematics. It was not till about the middle of the 12th century that under the patronage of Raymond, archbishop of Toledo, a society of translators, with the archdeacon Dominicus Gundisalvi at their head, produced Latin versions of the _Commentaries_ of Avicenna, and Ghazali, of the _Fons Vitae_ of Avicebron, and of several Aristotelian treatises. The working translators were converted Jews, the best-known among them being Joannes Avendeath. With this effort began the chief translating epoch for Arabic works. Avicenna's _Canon of Medicine_ was first translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187), to whom versions of other medical and astronomical works are due. The movement towards introducing Arabian science and philosophy into Europe, however, culminated under the patronage of the emperor Frederick II. (1212-1250). Partly from superiority to the narrowness of his age, and partly in the interest of his struggle with the Papacy, this _Malleus ecclesiae Romanae_ drew to his court those savants whose pursuits were discouraged by the church, and especially students in the forbidden lore of the Arabians. He is said to have pensioned Jews for purposes of translation. One of the scholars to whom Frederick gave a welcome was Michael Scot, the first translator of Averroes. Scot had sojourned at Toledo about 1217, and had accomplished the versions of several astronomical and physical treatises, mainly, if we believe Roger Bacon, by the labours of a Jew named Andrew. But Bacon is apparently hypercritical in his estimate of the translators from the Arabic. Another protege of Frederick's was Hermann the German (Alemannus), who, between the years 1243 and 1256, translated amongst other things a paraphrase of al-Farabi on the _Rhetoric_, and of Averroes on the _Poetics_ and _Ethics_ of Aristotle. Jewish scholars held an honourable place in transmitting the Arabian commentators to the schoolmen. It was amongst them, especially in Maimonides, that Aristotelianism found refuge after the light of philosophy was extinguished in Islam; and the Jewish family of the Ben-Tibbon were mainly instrumental in making Averroes known to southern France.

See S. Munk, _Melanges de philosophie juive et arabe_ (Paris, 1859);
E. Renan, _De Philosophia Peripatetica apud Syros_ (1852), and
_Averroes et l'Averroisme_ (Paris, 3rd ed., 1867); Am. Jourdain,
_Recherches critiques sur l'age et l'origine des traductions latines
d'Aristote_ (Paris, 2^me ed., 1843); B. Haureau, _Philosophie
scolastique_ (Paris, 1850), tome i. p. 359; E. Vacherot, _Ecole
d'Alexandrie_ (1846-1851), tome iii. p. 85; Schmolders, _Documenta
philosophiae Arabum_ (Bonn, 1836), and _Essai sur les ecoles
philosophiques chez les Arabes_ (Paris, 1842); Shahrastani, _History
of Religious and Philosophical Sects_, in German translation by
Haarbrucker (Halle, 1850-1851); Dieterici, _Streit zwischen Mensch und
Thier_ (Berlin, 1858), and his other translations of the
_Encyclopaedia of the Brothers of Sincerity_ (1861 to 1872); T.J. de
Boer, _The History of Philosophy in Islam_ (London, 1903); K. Prantl,
_Geschichte der Logik_ (Leipzig, 1861); and the Histories of
Philosophy; also the literature under the biographies of philosophers
mentioned. (W. W.; G. W. T.)

ARABIAN SEA (anc. _Mare Erythraeum_), the name applied to the portion of the Indian Ocean bounded E. by India, N. by Baluchistan and part of the southern Persian littoral, W. by Arabia, and S., approximately, by a line between Cape Guardafui, the north-east point of Somaliland, and Cape Comorin in India. It has two important branches--at the south-west the Gulf of Aden, connecting with the Red Sea through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb; and at the north-west the Gulf of Oman, connecting with the Persian Gulf. Besides these larger ramifications, there are the Gulfs of Cambay and Kach on the Indian coast. An interest and importance belong to this sea as forming part of the chief highway between Europe and India. Its islands are few and insignificant, the chief being Sokotra, off the African, and the Laccadives, off the Indian coast.

ARABICI, a religious sect originating about the beginning of the 3rd century, which is mentioned by Augustine (_De Haeres_. c. lxxxiii.), and called also [Greek: thnetopseuchitai] ("mortal-souled") by John of Damascus (_De Haeres_. c. xc.) The name is given to the Arabians mentioned by Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl_. vi. 37), whose distinctive doctrine was a form of Christian materialism, showing itself in the belief that the soul perished and was restored to life along with the body. We may compare Tatian's view of the soul as a subtler variety of matter. According to Eusebius, they were convinced of their error by Origen, and renounced it at a council held about A.D. 246.

ARABI PASHA (c. 1839- ), more correctly AHMAD 'ARABI, to which in later years he added the epithet _al-Misri_, "the Egyptian," Egyptian soldier and revolutionary leader, was born in Lower Egypt in 1839 or 1840 of a fellah family. Having entered the army as a conscript he was made an officer by Said Pasha in 1862, and was employed in the transport department in the Abyssinian campaign of 1875 under Ismail Pasha. A charge of peculation, unproved, was made against him in connexion with this expedition and he was placed on half-pay. During this time he joined a secret society formed by Ali Rubi with the object of getting rid of Turkish officers from the Egyptian army. Arabi also attended lectures at the mosque El Azhar and acquired a reputation as an orator. In 1878 he was employed by Ismail in fomenting a disturbance against the ministry of Nubar, Rivers Wilson and de Blignieres, and received in payment a wife from Ismail's harem and the command of a regiment. This increased his influence with the secret society, which, under the feeble government of Tewfik Pasha and the Dual Control, began to agitate against Europeans. In all that followed Arabi was put forward as the leader of the discontented Egyptians; he was in reality little more than the mouthpiece and puppet of abler men such as Ali Rubi and Mahmud Sami. On the 1st of February 1881 Arabi and two other Egyptian colonels, summoned before a court-martial for acts of disobedience, were rescued by their soldiers, and the khedive was forced to dismiss his then minister of war in favour of Mahmud Sami. A military demonstration on the 8th of September 1881, led by Arabi, forced the khedive to increase the numbers and pay of the army, to substitute Sherif Pasha for Riaz Pasha as prime minister, and to convene an assembly of notables. Arabi became under-secretary for war at the beginning of 1882, but continued his intrigues. The assembly of notables claimed the right of voting the budget, and thus came into conflict with the foreign controllers who had been appointed to guard the interests of the bondholders in the management of the Egyptian finances. Sherif fell in February, Mahmud Sami became prime minister, and Arabi (created a pasha) minister of war. Arabi, after a brief fall from office, acquired a dictatorial power that alarmed the British government. British and French warships went to Alexandria at the beginning of June; on the 11th of that month rioting in that city led to the sacrifice of many European lives. Order could only be restored through the intervention of Arabi, who now adopted a more distinctly anti-European attitude. His arming of the forts at Alexandria was held to constitute a menace to the British fleet. On the refusal of France to co-operate, the British fleet bombarded the forts (11th July), and a British force, under Sir Garnet Wolseley, defeated Arabi on the 13th of September at Tel-el-Kebir. Arabi fled to Cairo where he surrendered, and was tried (3rd of December) for rebellion. In accordance with an understanding made with the British representative, Lord Dufferin, Arabi pleaded guilty, and sentence of death was immediately commuted to one of banishment for life to Ceylon. The same sentence was passed on Mahmud Sami and others. After Arabi's exile had lasted for nearly twenty years, however, the khedive Abbas II. exercised his prerogative of mercy, and in May 1901 Arabi was permitted to return to Egypt. Arabi, as has been said, was rather the figurehead than the inspirer of the movement of 1881-1882; and was probably more honest, as he was certainly less intelligent, than those whose tool, in a large measure, he was. The movement which he represented in the eye of Europe, whatever the motives of its leaders, "was in its essence a genuine revolt against misgovernment,"[1] and it was a dim recognition of this fact which led Arabi to style himself "the Egyptian."

See EGYPT: _History_; also the accounts of Arabi in _Khedives and
Pashas_, by C.F. Moberly Bell (1884); and in Lord Cromer's _Modern
Egypt_ (1908).

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Lord Cromer in _Egypt_, No. 1, 1905, p. 2.

ARABISTAN (formerly KHUZISTAN), a province of Persia, bounded on the S. by the Persian Gulf, on the W. by Turkish territory, on the N. by Luristan and on the E. by the Bakhtiari district and Fars. It has its modern name, signifying "land of the Arabs," from the Arabs who form the bulk of the population, and is subdivided into the districts of Muhamrah, Fellahiyeh (the old Dorak), Ram Hormuz (popularly known as Ramiz), Havizeh, Shushter and Dizful. It has a population of about 200,000 and pays a yearly revenue of about L30,000. The soil is very fertile, but since the dam over the Karun at Ahvaz was swept away and the numerous canals which diverted the waters of the river for irrigation became useless, a great part of the province is uncultivated, and most of the crops and produce depend for water on rainfall and wells. The climate is hot, and in the low-lying, swampy districts very unhealthy; the prevailing winds are north-west and south-east, the former hot and dry from the arid districts west of Mesopotamia, the latter bearing much moisture from the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The principal Arab tribes are the Kab (generally known as Chaab) and Beni Lam, the former mostly settled in towns and villages and by religion Shi'ites, the latter nomads and Sunnites. The staples of food are dates and fish in the south, elsewhere the produce of the herds and flocks and rice, wheat and barley. Other products are maize, cotton, silk and indigo, and the manufactures include carpets without pile, coarse woollens, cottons and silk nettings. Dyeing is extensively carried on in Dizful where most of the indigo is grown.

Khuzistan (meaning "the land of the Khuz") was a part of the Biblical Elam, the classical Susiana, and appears in the great inscription of Darius as Uvaja.

ARABS, the name given to that branch of the Semitic race which from the earliest historic times inhabited the south-western portion of the Arabian peninsula. The name, to-day the collective term for the overwhelming majority of the surviving Semitic peoples, was originally restricted to the nomad tribes who ranged the north of the peninsula east of Palestine and the Syro-Arabian desert. In this narrow sense "Arab" is used in the Assyrian inscriptions, in the Old Testament and in the Minaean inscriptions. Before the Christian era it had come to include all the inhabitants of the peninsula. This, it is suggested, may have been due to the fact that the "Arabs" were the chief people near the Greek and Roman colonies in Syria and Mesopotamia. Classical writers use the term both in its local and general sense. The Arabs to-day occupy, besides Arabia, a part of Mesopotamia, the western shores of the Red Sea, the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf and the north of Africa. The finest type of the race is found in south Arabia among the Ariba Arabs, among the mountaineers of Hadramut and Yemen and among the Bedouin tribes roaming over the interior of central and northern Arabia. The Arabs of the coasts and those of Mesopotamia are hybrids, showing Turkish, Negroid and Hamitic crossings. The people of Syria and Palestine are hybrids of Arab, Phoenician and Jewish descent. The theory that early Arab settlements were made on the east coast of Africa as far as Sofala south of the Zambezi, is without foundation; the earliest Arab settlement on the east coast of Africa that can be proved is Magadoxo (Mukdishu) in the 10th century, and the ruined cities of Mashonaland, once supposed to be the remains of Arab settlements, are now known to be of medieval African origin. On the East African coast-lands Arab influence is still considerable. Traces of the Arab type are met with in Asia Minor, the Caucasus, western Persia and India, while the influence of the Arab language and civilization is found in Europe (Malta and Spain), China and Central Asia.

Ethnology.

The Arabs are at once the most ancient as they in many ways are the purest surviving type of the true Semite. Certainly the inhabitants of Yemen are not, and in historic times never were, pure Semites. Somali and other elements, generally described under the collective racial name of Hamitic, are clearly traceable; but the inland Arabs still present the nearest approach to the primitive Semitic type. The origin of the Arab race can only be a matter of conjecture. From the remotest historic times it has been divided into two branches, which from their geographical position it is simplest to call the North Arabians and the South Arabians. Arabic and Jewish tradition trace the descent of the latter from Joktan (Arabic _Kahtan_) son of Heber, of the former from Ishmael. The South Arabians--the older branch--were settled in the south-western part of the peninsula centuries before the uprise of the Ishmaelites. These latter include not only Ishmael's direct descendants through the twelve princes (Gen. xxv. 16), but the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, Midianites and other tribes. This ancient and undoubted division of the Arab race --roughly represented to-day by the universally adopted classification into Arabs proper and Bedouin Arabs (see BEDOUINS)-has caused much dispute among ethnologists. All authorities agree in declaring the race to be Semitic in the broadest ethnological signification of that term, but some thought they saw in this division of the race an indication of a dual origin. They asserted that the purer branch of the Arab family was represented by the sedentary Arabs who were of Hamitic (Biblical Cushite), i.e. African ancestry, and that the nomad Arabs were Arabs only by adoption, and were nearer akin to the true Semite as sons of Ishmael. Many arguments were adduced in support of this theory, (1) The unquestioned division in remote historic times of the Arab race, and the immemorial hostility between the two branches. (2) The concurrence of pre-Islamitic literature and records in representing the first settlement of the "pure" Arab as made in the extreme south-western part of the peninsula, near Aden. (3) The use of Himyar, "dusky" or "red" (suggesting African affinities), as the name sometimes for the ruling class, sometimes for the entire people. (4) The African affinities of the Himyaritic language. (5) The resemblance of the grammar of the Arabic now spoken by the "pure" Arabs, where it differs from that of the North, to the Abyssinian grammar. (6) The marked resemblance of the pre-Islamitic institutions of Yemen and its allied provinces-its monarchies, courts, armies and serfs--to the historical Africo-Egyptian type and even to modern Abyssinia. (7) The physique of the "pure" Arab, the shape and size of the head, the slenderness of the lower limbs, all suggesting an African rather than an Asiatic origin. (8) The habits of the people, viz. their sedentary rather than nomad occupations, their fondness for village life, for dancing, music and society, their cultivation of the soil, having more in common with African life than with that of the western Asiatic continent. (9) The extreme facility of marriage which exists in all classes of the southern Arabs with the African races, the fecundity of such unions and the slightness or even total absence of any caste feeling between the dusky "pure" Arab and the still darker African, pointing to a community of origin. And further arguments were found in the characteristics of the Bedouins, their pastoral and nomad tendencies; the peculiarities of their idiom allied to the Hebrew; their strong clan feeling, their continued resistance to anything like regal power or centralized organization.

Such, briefly, were the more important arguments; but latterly ethnologists are inclined to agree that there is little really to be said for the African ancestry theory and that the Arab race had its beginning in the deserts of south Arabia, that in short the true Arabs are aborigines.