Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/138

 and evil have objective characters which can be recognised so that our knowledge of this difference does not depend only on God's revelation: but no man can know anything about God but by the medium of revelation which is given principally for this purpose.

Ibrahim b. Sayar an-Nazzam (d. 231), the next great Mu'tazilite leader was a devoted student of the Greek philosophers and an encyclopædic writer. In this he was typical of the earlier Arabic philosophers whose endeavour was to apply Greek science to the interpretation of life and nature generally, an aim which necessarily tended to produce encyclopædic compilations rather than original studies in any one field of knowledge. Already the Mu'tazilites had reached the position that good and evil represent objective realities and that God, knowing the good, does not will that which is contrary to it; but an-Nazzam presses this further and asserts that God can do nothing in the creature save what is for its good and is in itself just. To this the objection was raised that in such case God's own acts are determined and are not free. An-Nazzam replied that he admitted this determination, not in action but in potentiality as God is restricted by his own nature. He attempted to reproduce the ancient doctrine that the soul is the form of the body, as had already been asserted by Aristotle, but he misunderstood the terminology employed and represents the soul as of the same shape as the body. This implies that the soul is a very