Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/255

 it thinks of mathematical forms thinks of them as separated, though they are not separated") do not exist apart in reality; the abstracting is only a mental process, so the general idea exists only as a concept, not as a reality. But between the purely spiritual being of God and the crudely material observed in the bodies existing in this world are intermediate forms of existence, such as angels, souls, etc., wherein the form is not impressed upon matter.

Besides this "Fountain of Life" Ibn Gabirol was the author of two ethical treatises, the Tikkun Midwoth han-Nefesh, "the correction of the manners of the soul," in which man is treated as a microcosm after the kabbalistic fashion; and Mibchar hap-Peninim, a collection of ethical maxims collected from the Greek and Arabic philosophers. The former has been published at Luneville in 1804, the latter at Hamburg in 1844.

At the beginning of the sixth century A.H., a younger contemporary of al-Ghazali, we have Abu Bakr ibn Bajja (d. 533 A.H. = 1138 A.D.), the first of the Muslim philosophers of Spain. By this time, some three-quarters of a century after the death of Ibn Sina, Arabic philosophy was almost extinct in Asia and was treated as a dangerous heresy. In Egypt, it is true, there was a greater degree of toleration, though less than in the golden age of the Fatimids, but Egypt was regarded with suspicion as the home of heresy and of forms of superstition which were uncongenial to the philosopher. Spain thus becomes the place