Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/257

 mediæval scholasticism, which inherited it from the Arabic philosophers, and from it came the further question whether the contemplation of such abstract ideas gives us a better knowledge of realities than observation of the concrete bodies. Both Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas associate Avempace especially with this question and with the doctrine of the "acquired intellect," to which we have already referred in our notes on Ibn Sina, and which completes the theory of "separate substances" by supposing that intelligible forms stream into our souls from an outside Agent Intellect by way of emanation as substantial forms descend on corporeal matter. St. Thomas Aquinas shows direct knowledge of Avempace's treatment of these subjects, but this is not so evident in Albertus. Avempace, like all other Arabic philosophers, describes ittisal or union of the human intellect with the Agent Intellect, of which it is an emanation, as the supreme beatitude and final end of human life. By the operation of the Agent Intellect on the latent intellect in man this is awakened to life, but eternal life consists in the complete union of the intellect with the Agent Intellect. In Avempace the Sufi strain is much weaker than in al-Farabi; the means of attaining this union is not by ecstasy, but by a steady disentangling of the soul of those material things which hinder its pure intellectual life and consequent union. This leads us to the teaching of asceticism as the discipline of the soul for its spiritual progress, and the ascetic and solitary life