Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/268

 which he designed as a refutation of al-Ghazali's Destruction of the Philosophers.

But it was as a commentator on the text of Aristotle that he became best known to subsequent generations amongst the Jews and the later Latin scholastics; he was the great and final commentator. Strangely, however, Ibn Rushd never perceived the importance of reading Aristotle in the original; he had no knowledge of Greek, and gives no sign of supposing that a study of the Greek text would at all assist a student of the philosopher. The method of his commentaries is the time-honoured form derived from the Syriac commentators: a sentence of the text is given and the explanatory comments follow.

In main substance Ibn Rushd reproduces the psychology of Aristotle as interpreted by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, but with some important modifications. In man is a passive and an active intellect: the active intellect is roused to action by the operation of the Agent Intellect, and thus becomes an acquired intellect; the individual intellects are many, but the Agent Intellect is but one, though present in each, just as the sun is one, but there are in action as many suns as there are bodies which it illuminates. This is the form of the Aristotelian doctrine as it had been transmitted through Ibn Sina; the Agent Intellect is one, but it is as by emanation present in each, so that the quickening power in each one is part of the universal Agent Intellect. But Ibn Rushd differs from his predecessors in his treatment of the passive