Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/295

and these show a considerable amount of inaccuracy in detail. In 1240 William published censures against certain opinions, which he states to be derived from the Arabic philosophers; amongst these he expresses his disapproval of the doctrine of the First Intelligence, an emanation from God, as being the agent of creation, a doctrine common to all the philosophers, but which he attributes specifically to al-Ghazali; he objects also to the teaching that the world is eternal, which he attributes correctly to Aristotle and Ibn Sina, but mentions Averroes as an orthodox defender of the truth; he further condemns the doctrine of the unity of intellects, which most incorrectly he attributes to Aristotle, and also refers to al-Farabi as maintaining this heresy; throughout he cites Averroes as a sounder teacher who tends to correct these ideas, but his description of the doctrine of the unity of intellects reproduces the features which are distinctive of Averroes. The arguments he uses against this latter doctrine are, on the whole, very much the same as those employed a little later by Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, viz., that the doctrine undermines the reality of the individual personality, and is inconsistent with the observed facts of diversity of intelligence in different persons. He cites Abubacer (Ibn Bajja) as a commentator on Aristotle's Physics, but in fact this was a book on which Ibn Bajja did not write a commentary, and the substance of the citation agrees with the teaching of Averroes. At that time evidently the position was