Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/278

 Samuel b. Tibbon as Moreh Nebukin. The Arabic text, edited by Munk, was published at Paris (3 vols.) in 1856-66, and in 1884 an English translation by Friedländer was published in London. Next to this in importance is the treatise Maqalah fi-t-Tawhid, a treatise on the unity of God, of which a Hebrew translation was made in the 14th cent. A.D. His other works were mainly medical, and include treatises "on poisons and their antidotes," "on hæmorrhoids," "on asthma," and a commentary on Hippocrates.

Maimonides' teaching reproduces the substance of that already associated with al-Farabi and Ibn Sina put into a Jewish form. God is the Intellect, the ens intelligens, and the intelligibile: He is the necessary First Cause and the permanent source. He is essentially and necessarily one, and attributes cannot be so used as to imply plurality: only those attributes which describe activity are admissible, not those which imply relations between God and the creature. Like Ibn Rushd he disapproves of the Mutakallimin, whom he regards as mere opportunists in their philosophy and without any staple principles, besides which their method of compromise does not face fairly the law of causality. The Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter cannot, however, be admitted; creation must have been from nothing, as follows from the law of causality; that such was the case cannot be proved, but every contrary supposition is untenable. All the properties of