Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/164

 source from which it had been derived. The logical conclusion was thus a denial, not of a future life, nor of its eternity, but of the separate existence of an individual soul, and this, as we shall see, was actually worked out as a result of Arabic Aristotelianism. Thus the scholastic theologians, both of Islam and of Latin Christianity, attack the philosophers as undermining belief in individual personality and in opposing the doctrine of the resurrection, and in this latter, it must be remembered, Muslim doctrine is committed to cruder details than prevail in Christianity. But al-Farabi did not see where the Aristotelian teaching would lead him: to him Aristotle seemed orthodox because his doctrines seemed to prove the immortality of the soul.

Al-Farabi expresses his theory of causality in the treatise called "the gems of wisdom." Everything which exists after having not existed, he says, must be brought into being by a cause which itself may be the result of some preceding cause, and so on, until we reach a First Cause, which is and always has been, its eternity being necessary because there is no other cause to precede it, and Aristotle has shown that the chain of causes cannot be infinite. The First Cause is one and eternal, and is God (cf. Aristot. Metaph. 12. 7, and similarly Plato, Timaeus 28). Being unchanged this First Cause is perfect, and to know it is the aim of all philosophy, for obviously everything would be intelligible if the cause of all were known. This First Cause is the "necessary being" whose