Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/17

 atmosphere in which Western Asia was educated and in which it lived. Men became Christians, for a time the new religious interest filled their minds, but later on it was inevitable that philosophy should re-assert its power, and then Christian doctrine had to be re-cast to conform to it: the descendants of these people became Muslims and then again, after an interval, religion had to conform itself to current philosophy. We have no such dominant philosophical system in force to-day, but we have a certain mass of scientific facts and theories which form an intellectual background to modern European life and the defenders of traditional religion find it necessary to adjust their teaching to the principles implied in those facts and theories.

But the important point is that then Christian teachers began to put themselves into touch with current philosophy, and so when the Muslims later on did the same, they had to reckon with philosophy as they found it actually living in their own days: they did not become Platonists or Aristotelians in the sense in which we should understand the terms. The current philosophy had changed from the older standards, not because the degenerate people of those days could not understand the pure doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but because they took philosophy so seriously and earnestly as an explanation of the universe and of man's place in it that they were bound to re-adjust their views in the light of what they regarded as later information, and the views had altered