Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/180

 change lies in the new meaning given to "wisdom," which ceases to signify scientific facts and speculations acquired intellectually, and is taken to mean a supra-intellectual knowledge of God. This, perhaps, represents the Indian contribution working upon elements of Hellenistic origin.

The doctrines of the Brethren of Purity were introduced to the West by a Spanish doctor, Muslim b. Muhammad Abu l-Qasim al-Majriti al-Andalusi (d. 395–6), and were largely influential in producing the falasifa of Spain, who ultimately exercised so great an influence on mediæval Latin scholasticism.

Before leaving this particular section of our subject it will be well to note that all these sects and groups we have mentioned after al-Farabi, from the sect founded by Abdullah b. Maymun to the Brethren of Purity, agreed in treating philosophy, at least in so far as it had any bearing on theological topics, as esoteric, and not to be disclosed to any save the elect. This general attitude will appear again, in a slightly different form, in the works of the Spanish philosophers, and to some extent recurs in all Islamic thought.

The greatest product in Asia of the ferment of thought produced by the general study of the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophies appears in Abu 'Ali al-Husayn b. 'Abdullah b. Sina (d. 428 = A.D. 1027), commonly known as Ibn Sina, which is Latinized as Avicenna. His life is known to us from an autobiography completed by his pupil, Abu Ubayd