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 Khorasan became the favourite province of the caliph. Then was inaugurated the period of Persian supremacy, during which Islam was laid open to the full current of alien ideas and culture. The incitement came, however, not from the people, but from the prince: it was in the light of court favour that the colleges of Bagdad and Nishapur first came to attract students from every quarter, from the valleys of Andalusia as well as the upland plains of Transoxiana. Mansūr, the second of the Abbasids, encouraged the appropriation of Greek science; but it was al-Maʽmūn, the son of Harūn al-Rashīd, who deserves in the Mahommedan empire the same position of royal founder and benefactor which is held by Charlemagne in the history of the Latin schools. In his reign (813–833) Aristotle was first translated into Arabic. Orthodox Moslems, however, distrusted the course on which their chief had entered, and his philosophical proclivities became one ground for doubting as to his final salvation.

In the eastern provinces the chief names of Arabian philosophy are those known to the Latin schoolmen as Alkindius, Alfarabius, Avicenna and Algazel, or under forms resembling these. The first of these, Alkindius (see ), flourished at the court of Bagdad in the first half of the 9th century. His claims to notice at the present day rest upon a few works on medicine, theology, music and natural science. With him begins that encyclopaedic character—the simultaneous cultivation of the whole field of investigation which is reflected from Aristotle on the Arabian school. In him too is found the union of Platonism and Aristotelianism expressed in Neo-Platonic terms. Towards the close of the 10th century the presentation of an entire scheme of knowledge, beginning with logic and mathematics, and ascending through the various departments of physical inquiry to the region of religious doctrine, was accomplished by a society which had its chief seat at Basra, the native town of al-Kindi. This society—the Brothers of Purity or Sincerity (Ikhwān us Safāʽi)—divided into four orders, wrought in the interests of religion no less than of science; and though its attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of existing knowledge may have been premature, it yet contributed to spread abroad a desire for further information. The proposed reconciliation between science and faith was not accomplished, because the compromise could please neither party. The fifty-one treatises of which this encyclopaedia consists are interspersed with apologues in true Oriental style, and the idea of goodness, of moral perfection, is as prominent an end in every discourse as it was in the alleged dream of al-Maʽmūn. The materials of the work come chiefly from Aristotle, but they are conceived in a Platonizing spirit, which places as the bond of all things a universal soul of the world with its partial or fragmentary souls. Contemporary with this semi-religious and semi-philosophical society lived Alfarabius (see ), who died in 950. His paraphrases of Aristotle formed the basis on which Avicenna constructed his system, and his logical treatises produced a permanent effect on the logic of the Latin scholars. He gave the tone and direction to nearly all subsequent speculations among the Arabians. His order and enumeration of the principles of being, his doctrine of the double aspect of intellect, and of the perfect beatitude which consists in the aggregation of noble minds when they are delivered from the separating barriers of individual bodies, present at least in germ the characteristic theory of Averroes. But al-Farābī was not always consistent in his views; a certain sobriety checked his speculative flights, and although holding that the true perfection of man is reached in this life by the elevation of the intellectual nature, he came towards the close to think the separate existence of intellect no better than a delusion.

Unquestionably the most illustrious name amongst the Oriental Moslems was Avicenna (980–1037). His rank in the medieval world as a philosopher was far beneath his fame as a physician. Still, the logic of Albertus Magnus and succeeding doctors was largely indebted to him for its formulae. In logic Avicenna starts from distinguishing between the isolated concept and the judgment or assertion; from which two primitive elements of knowledge there is artificially generated a complete and scientific knowledge by the two processes of definition and syllogism. But the chief interest for the history of logic belongs to his doctrine in so far as it bears upon the nature and function of abstract ideas. The question had been suggested alike to East and West by Porphyry, and the Arabians were the first to approach the full statement of the problem. Farābī had pointed out that the universal and individual are not distinguished from each other as understanding from the senses, but that both universal and individual are in one respect intellectual, just as in another connexion they play a part in perception. He had distinguished the universal essence in its abstract nature, from the universal considered in relation to a number of singulars. These suggestions formed the basis of Avicenna’s doctrine. The essences or forms—the intelligibilia which constitute the world of real knowledge—may be looked at in themselves (metaphysically), or as embodied in the things of sense (physically), or as expressing the processes of thought (logically). The first of these three points of view deals with the form or idea as self-contained in the principles of its own being, apart from those connexions and distinctions which it receives in real (sensuous) science, and through the act of intellect. Secondly, the form may be looked at as the similarity evolved by a process of comparison, as the work of mental reflection, and in that way as essentially expressing a relation. When thus considered as the common features derived by examination from singular instances, it becomes a universal or common term strictly so called. It is intellect which first makes the abstract idea a true universal. Intellectus in formis agit universalitatem. In the third place, the form or essence may be looked upon as embodied in outward things (in singularibus propriis), and thus it is the type more or less represented by the members of a natural kind. It is the designation of these outward things which forms the “first intention” of names; and it is only at a later stage, when thought comes to observe its own modes, that names, looked upon as predicables and universals, are taken in their “second intention.” Logic deals with such second intentions. It does not consider the forms ante multiplicitatem, i.e. as eternal ideas—nor in multiplicitate, i.e. as immersed in the matter of the phenomenal world—but post multiplicitatem, i. e. as they exist in and for the intellect which has examined and compared. Logic does not come in contact with things, except as they are subject to modification by intellectual forms. In other words, universality, individuality and speciality are all equally modes of our comprehension or notion; their meaning consists in their setting forth the relations attaching to any object of our conception. In the mind, e.g., one form may be placed in reference to a multitude of things, and as thus related will be universal. The form animal, e.g., is an abstract intelligible or metaphysical idea. When an act of thought employs it as a schema to unify several species, it acquires its logical aspect (respectus) of generality; and the various living beings qualified to have the name animal applied to them constitute the natural class or kind. Avicenna’s view of the universal may be compared with that of Abelard, which calls it “that whose nature it is to be predicated of several,” as if the generality became explicit only in the act of predication, in the sermo or proposition, and not in the abstract, unrelated form or essence. The three modes of the universal before things, in things, and after things, spring from Arabian influence, but depart somewhat from his standpoint.

The place of Avicenna amongst Moslem philosophers is seen in the fact that Shahrastānī takes him as the type of all, and that Ghazālī’s attack against philosophy is in reality almost entirely directed against Avicenna. His system is in the main a codification of Aristotle modified by fundamental views of Neo-Platonist origin, and it tends to be a compromise with theology. In order, for example, to maintain the necessity of creation, he taught that all things except God were admissible or possible in their own nature, but that certain of them were rendered necessary by the act of the creative first agent,—in other words, that the possible could be transformed into the necessary. Avicenna’s