In this last point, the third of the great monotheistic religions, Mohammedanism, is more favourable to Materialism. This, the youngest of them, was also the first to develop, in connection with the brilliant outburst of Arabian civilisation, a free philosophical spirit, which exercised a powerful influence primarily upon the Jews of the middle ages, and so indirectly upon the Christians of the West.

Even before the communication of Greek philosophy to the Arabians, Islam had produced numerous sects and theological schools, some of which entertained so abstract a notion of God that no philosophical speculation could proceed further in this direction, whilst others believed nothing but what could be understood and demonstrated; others, again, combined fanaticism and incredulity into fantastic systems. In the high school at Basra there arose, under the protection of the Abbassides, a school of rationalists which sought to reconcile reason and faith.15

By the side of this rich stream of purely Islamitic theology and philosophy, which has not unjustly been compared with the Christian Scholasticism, the Peripatetics of whom we usually think when the Arabian medieval philosophy is mentioned, form but a relatively unimportant branch, with little internal variety; and Averroes, whose name was, next to that of Aristotle, the most frequently mentioned in the West, is by no means a star of the first magnitude in the heavens of the Mohammedan philosophy.

sition to the transcendental theism and ascetic dogmatism. While the Epikurean school (see above, p. 125), among all the ancient philosophical schools, preserved the most distinctive stamp and the most self-contained system of doctrines, the Talmud already describes Sadducees and Freethinkers generally as Epikureans. In the twelfth century there appears in Florence a sect of Epikureans,' which can scarcely be considered so in the strict Scholastic sense, any more than the Epikureans whom VOL. I.

Dante describes as lying in fiery pits (comp. Renan, Averroès, pp. 123 and 227). A similar vulgarisation has, of course, befallen also the name of the 'Stoics.'

15 Renan, Averroès, p. 76 ff., shows how the most abstract shape of the idea of God was essentially promoted by the opposition waged against the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation of the Deity. The mediatising school of the Motazelites' is compared by Renan with the school of Schleiermacher.

M

His true importance lies much rather in the fact that it was he who gathered together the results of the ArabicoAristotelian philosophy as the last of its great representatives, and delivered them to the West in a wide range of literary activity, and especially by his commentaries on Aristotle. This philosophy was developed, like the Christian Scholasticism, from a Neo-Platonically coloured interpretation of Aristotle; only that while the Scholastics of the first period possessed a very slender stock of Peripatetic traditions, and those thoroughly intermingled and controlled by the Christian theology, the springs flowed to the Arabians through the channel of the Syrian schools in much greater abundance, and thought was with them developed with greater freedom from the influence of theology, which pursued its own paths of speculation. So it resulted that the naturalistic side of the Aristotelian system (cf. above, p. 85) could develop itself amongst the Arabians in a manner which remained quite foreign to the earlier Scholasticism, and which later made the Christian Church regard Averroism as a source of the most arrant heresies. There are three points in particular here to be regarded the eternity of the world and of matter in its opposition to the Christian doctrine of creation; the relation of God to the world, according to which he influences either only the outermost sphere of the fixed stars, and all earthly things are only indirectly governed by God through the power of the stars, or God and the world run into each other in pantheistic fashion; 16 finally, the doctrine of the unity of the reason, which is the only immortal part of

16 To the first of these views Avicenna gave his adhesion, while the second, according to an opinion started by Averroes, is supposed to have been his real view. Averroes himself makes all change and movement in the world, and especially the becoming and perishing of organisms, potentially inherent in matter, and God has nothing to do but to turn this potentiality into actuality. But as

soon as we place ourselves at the standpoint of eternity, the distinction between potentiality and actuality disappears, since in the course of eternity all potentialities become actualities. But thus disappears also from the highest standpoint of observation the opposition, too, of God and the world. Cf. Renan, Averroès, pp. 73 and 82 foll.

man-a doctrine which denies individual immortality, since the reason is only the one divine light which shines in upon the soul of man, and makes knowledge possible.17

It is intelligible enough that such doctrines must have exercised a mischievous interference in the world under the sway of Christian dogma, and that in this way, as well as through its naturalistic elements, Averroism prepared the way for the new Materialism. For all that, the two tendencies are fundamentally different, and Averroism became a chief pillar of that Scholasticism which, by the unconditional reverence for Aristotle, and by the strengthening of those principles which we shall examine more closely in the following chapter, rendered so long impossible a Materialistic consideration of things.

But besides its philosophy, we have to thank the Arabian civilisation of the middle ages for still another element, which stands perhaps in yet closer relation to the history of Materialism; that is, its achievements in the sphere of positive inquiry, of mathematics and the natural sciences, in the broadest sense of the term. The brilliant services of the Arabians in the field of astronomy and of mathematics are sufficiently known.18 And it was these studies particularly which, connecting themselves with Greek traditions, again made room for the idea of the regularity and subjection to law of the course of nature. This happened at a time when the degeneracy of belief in the Christian world had brought more disorder into the moral and logical order of things than had been the case at any period of Græco-Roman heathenism; at a

17 This view, which rests upon the Aristotelian theory of the voûs ToinTIKÓS (De Anima, iii. 5), has been designated "Monopsychism," that is, the doctrine that the immortal soul (in distinction from the perishable animal soul) in all beings that partake of a soul is one and the same.

18 Comp. Humboldt's Kosmos, ii. 258 foll. E. T.; Bohn's ed., ii. 592,

cf. 582. Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe (ed. 1875), ii. 36 foll. The author, who is best qualified to speak in the matter of natural science (cf. above, note 4), complains (p. 42) of "the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight our scientific obligations to the Mohammedans."

time when everything was regarded as possible and nothing as necessary, and an unlimited field was allowed for the discretion of beings, which were ever endowed by the imagination with fresh properties.

The mingling of astronomy with the fantasies of astrology was, for this very reason, not so disadvantageous as might be supposed. Astrology, as well as the essentially related alchemy, possessed in every respect the regular form of sciences,19 and were, in the purer shape in which they were practised by the Arabian and the Christian savants of the middle ages, far removed from the measureless charlatanry which made its appearance in the sixteenth and especially in the seventeenth century, and after austerer science had rejected these fanciful elements. Apart from the fact that the impulse to inquiry into important and unfathomable secrets through that early connection came to the aid of the scientific discoveries in astronomy and chemistry, in those deep mysterious studies

19 Comp. Liebig, Chemische Briefe, 3 and 4 Br. The remark," Alchemy was never anything more than chemistry," goes, of course, a little too far. As to the caution against confounding it with the gold-making art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it must not escape us that this is only alchemy run wild, just as the nativity delusion of the same period is astrology run wild. The most important contrast between the spirit of modern chemistry and of medieval alchemy may be most clearly shown in the relation between theory and experiment. With the alchemists the theory in all its main features stood unshakably firm; it was ranked above experiment; and if this gave an unexpected result, this was forced into an artificial conformity with the theory, which was of aprioristic origin. It was therefore essentially directed to the production of this previously anticipated result rather than to free investigation. This tendency of

experiment is indeed still active enough in our modern chemistry, and the authority of general theories, if not in our own days, at all events in a period not very far behind us, was very great. Yet the real principle of modern chemistry is the empirical; that of alchemy, despite its empirical results, was the Aristotelo-scholastic. The scientific form of alchemy as well as of astrology rests upon the consistent carrying out of certain axioms as to the nature of all bodies and their mutual relations-axioms simple in themselves, but capable of the utmost varieties in their combinations.

As to the furtherance of the scientific spirit by means of astrology in its purer forms, compare, further, Lecky, Hist. of Rationalism in Europe, i. 302 foll.; where also, in note 2 to p. 303, several instances are given of the bold ideas of astrological freethinkers. Compare also Humboldt's Kosmos, ii. 256 foll

themselves was implied, as a necessary presupposition, the belief in a regular progress of events following eternal laws. And this belief has formed one of the most powerful springs in the whole development of culture from the middle ages to modern times.

We must here also have special regard to medicine, which in our days has become in a certain measure the theology of Materialists. This science was treated by the Arabs with especial zeal.20 Here too, whilst attaching themselves chiefly to Greek traditions, they nevertheless set to work with an independent feeling for exact observation, and developed especially the doctrine of life, which stands in so close a connection with the problems of Materialism. In the case of man, as well as in those of the animal and vegetable worlds, everywhere, in short, in organic nature, the fine sense of the Arabians traced not only the particularities of the given object, but its development, its generation, and decay-just those departments, therefore, in which the mystic theory of life finds its foundation.

Every one has heard of the early rise of schools of medicine on the soil of Lower Italy, where Saracens and the more cultivated Christian races came into such close contact. As early as the tenth century, the monk Constantine taught in the monastery of Monte Cassino, the man whom his contemporaries named the second Hippokrates, and who, after wandering through all the East, dedicated his leisure to the translation from the Arabic of medical works. At Monte Cassino, and later at Salerno and Naples, arose those famous schools of medicine, to which the seekers for knowledge streamed from the whole Western world. 21

20 Draper, Intell. Devclp. of Europe, i. 384 foll. Less favourable judgments of Arabian medicine will be found in Häser, Gesch. d. Med. (2 Aufl., Jena, 1853), 173 foll., and in Daremberg, Hist. des Sciences Médi

cales (Paris, 1870). Yet their great activity in this department is shown clearly enough even in these ac

counts.

21 Comp. Wachler, Handb. der Gesch. d. Liter., ii. S. 87. Meiners,