Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/21

Physics and Metaphysics" * * * "No one for fifteen hundred years has been able to add anything to his writings, or to find in them an error of any moment" * * * "He should rather be called divine than human" * * * "The doctrine of Aristotle is the sovereign truth, for his intelligence is the limit of human understanding."

A portion of this praise may be laid to the Arab habit of high sounding eulogy which made their ruling princes, 'the Shadow of God'; but the wisest of the pagans, and the christian doctors of all times, have praised him in almost equivalent terms.

Aristotle, in my opinion, stands almost alone in philosophy.—Cicero (10643 B. C).

Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect.—Eusebiua (264-349 A. D.).

Whenever the divine wisdom of Aristotle has opened its mouth, the wisdom of others, so it seems to me, is to be disregarded.—Dante (1265-1321).

Aristotle was a man beside whom no age has an equal to place.—Hegel (1770-1831).

By a singular chance "the greatest of inductive philosophers became the hero of a recklessly deductive age" (Robinson). By a still more singular chance he became the corner-stone of Roman Catholic theology.

The Stagirite agrees with Catholic theism, though not with the Pentateuch, in saying that God is without parts or passions, but there his agreement ceases. Excluding such a thing as Divine interference with all Nature, his theology, of course, excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles and grace. (Benn: Greek Philosophers, i, p. 312.) Towards the end of the twelfth century a war on philosophy was set on foot throughout the Moslem world. A theological reaction like that which followed the Council of Trent (1545-63) in the Latin Church sought to conquer lost territory by dint of argumentation and violence. * * * Escaping more and more from the control of the Arab race, essentially skeptic in inclination, islamism came by accidents of history to be the especial charge of races prone to fanaticism—the Berbers, Spanish, Persians and Turks—and took on the form of an austere and exclusive dogmatism. Islamism in general suffered the fate which befell Catholism in Spain; which would have befallen that of all Europe if the religious revival of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century had succeeded in stifling all national development.^[1]

The doctrines expounded by Arab writers were exoteric—intended for the mass of men. They taught their esoteric doctrines by word of mouth, or, occasionally, in works not confided to the multitude. Algazel, in his 'Logic,' declares that opinions which he does not share are there exposed, and that in his book on the contradictions of the philosophers his true views are to be found. The problems that he dismisses as insolvable in his published works are resolved in this book of esoteric doctrine. Abd-el-Melik Ibn-Wahib of Seville would not even converse on delicate subjects, 'so that, in his writings, one does

1. Renan: Averroës et l'averroisme, Chapter I. Like all general statements this one requires completion in order to be exact in all its details; the Persians, for instance, were never austere or dogmatic, so far as I know.