Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/548

Rh 510 A L G A L G dance grapes, figs, oranges, lemons, olives, almonds, and aloes, and even the plantain and the date. The land is, however, not well suited for the production of cereals; little wheat or other corn is grown in the province, and its grain supplies are chiefly derived from Spain. On the coast the people derive their subsistence in great measure from the fisheries, tunny and sardines being caught in considerable quantities. Salt is also made from sea-water. There is no manufacturing or mining industry of any importance. The harbours are bad, and the whole foreign trade is carried on by ships of other nations, although the inhabitants of Algarve are reputed to be the best seamen and fishermen of Portugal. The chief exports are dried fruit, wine, salt, tunny, sardines, and anchovies. The name of Algarve is derived from the Arabic, and signifies a land lying to the west. The province was taken from the Moors in 1253 by Alphonso III., king of Por tugal, who then assumed the additional title of king of Algarve. It is sometimes designated the district of Faro, and is subdivided into fifteen communes and sixty-two parishes. The chief town is Faro, and among the other towns are Castro Marino, Tavira, Portimao, Lagos, and Sagres, all on the coast or on the estuaries of the rivers, and Silves, on the river Portimao, the ancient Moorish capital of Algarve. ALGAU, or ALLGAU, the name now given to a compara tively small district forming the south-western corner of Bavaria, and belonging to the province of Swabia and Neu- burg, but formerly applied to a much larger territory, which extended as far as the Danube on the north, the Inn on the south, and the Lech on the west. The Algau Alps contain several lofty peaks, the highest of which is Madele- Gabel, 8611 feet above the sea. The district is celebrated for the cattle, milk, butter, and cheese that it produces. AL-GAZALI, ABU HAMED MUHAMMAD, usually described as an Arabian philosopher, was really a Moslem theologian who met the heretical philosophers on their own ground. He was born in 1058, and belonged to the sect of the Ascharites, or extreme right of the Motecallemin, who (and not the philosophers) were the real Arabian school men. At thirty-three he became the head of a theological college at Baghdad, where his professor s chair was sur rounded by eager crowds, including all the imams of the country. It was a time of keen speculation, when philo sophic scepticism was encouraged in high places ; and the premature convictions of Al-Gazali gave way under a violent reaction against the orthodox creed. Driven by mental inquietude, he escaped from Baghdad on the plea of making a pilgrimage to Mecca, but went to Syria, and (after visiting, though a Mahometan, the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem) settled at Damascus, where he spent ten years in seclusion and meditation. Eecalled by his private affairs as he was on his way to Egypt, he returned to Baghdad, reluctantly resumed teaching (which he continued for fifteen years), then retired to Tous, his native town, and devoted his remaining years to the contemplative life of the Sufis, who had been his earliest instructors. He died in 1111. His outer life, so restless and unquiet, was the reflex of a mental history disturbed by prolonged agita tion. Revolting, in the height of his success, against the current creed, he began to examine the foundations of knowledge. Where could certainty be found? In the perceptions of the senses ? But these are contradicted by one another, and disproved by reason. In the notions of reason ? Reason, indeed, professes to furnish us with necessary truths ; but what assurance have we that the verdicts of reason may not be reversed by some higher authority 1 ? Al-Gazali then interrogated all the sects in succession to learn their criterion of truth. He first applied to the theological schoolmen, who grounded their religion on reason ; but their aim was only to preserve the faith from heresy. He turned to the philosophers, and examined the accepted Aristotelianism in a treatise which has come down to us The Destruction of the Philosophers. He assails them on twenty points of their mixed physical and metaphysical peripateticism, from the statement of which, in spite of his pretended scepticism, we can deduce some very positive metaphysical opinions of his own. He claims to have shown that the dogmas of the eternity of matter and the permanence of the world are false ; that their description of the Deity as the&quot; demiurgos is unspiritual ; that they fail to prove the existence, the unity, the sim plicity, the incorporeality, or the knowledge (both of species and accidents) of God; that their ascription of souls to the celestial spheres is unproved ; that their theory of causation, which attributes effects to the very natures of the causes, is false, for that all actions and events are to be ascribed to the Deity ; and, finally, that they cannot establish the spirituality of the soul, nor prove its mortality. These criticisms disclose nothing like a sceptical state of mind, but rather a reversion from the metaphysical to the theological stage of thought. He denies the intrinsic tendencies, or souls, by which the Aristotelians explained the motion of the spheres, because he ascribes their motion to God. The sceptic would have denied both. Mr Lewes rightly censures M. Renan for asserting of Al-Gazali s theory of causation &quot;Hume n a rien dit phis.&quot; It is true that Al-Gazali maintains that the natural law accord ing to which effects proceed inevitably from their causes is only custom, and that there is no necessary connection between them. So far the Eastern and the European sceptic are on the same ground. But while Hume abso lutely denies the necessity, Al-Gazali merely removes it one stage further back, and plants it in the mind of the Deity. This, of course, is not metaphysics, but theology. Having, as he believed, refuted the opinions of the philo sophers, he next investigated the pretensions of the Alle- gorists, who derived their doctrines from an imam. These Arabian ultramontanes had no word for the doubter. Did he ask for the proof of their doctrine, they could only answer that &quot;thus it was written.&quot; They could not, he says, even understand the problems they sought to resolve by the assumption of infallibility, and he turned again, in his despair, to the instructors of his youth the Sufis. In their mystical intuition of the laws of life, and absorption in the immanent Deity, he at last found peace. This pathetic close of his stormy career negatives the idea that he ever wrote the philosophical work he once contem plated on The Bases of Belief, and at the same time shows the true character of the treatise which, alike in medieval and modern times, has been quoted as containing an exposition of his opinions. The work called The Ten dencies of the Philosophers, and which was translated in 1506, with the title Logica et Philosophia Algazelis Arabis, contains neither the logic nor the philosophy of Al-Gazali It is a mere abstract or statement of the Peripatetic systems, and was made preliminary to that Destruction of which we have already spoken. With this work Arabian philosophy in the East came to an end ; but it revived in the new Arabia which had been planted in the West in Mahometan Spain. If, therefore, Al-Gazali was the Oriental Descartes in being the first destructive sceptic of the old, he was its Descartes no less in being the initiator of the new philosophy. For direct knowledge of Al-Gazali, see his Dcstructio, &c., in the ninth vol. of Averrhoes s works, Taut especially his spiritual auto biography, translated by Schmblders in his Essai sur les Ecolcs Philosophiqucs chcz les Arabes. See also Von Hammer, introduction to Kind; Munk, Melanges; and Gosche in Abhandlungen der Konig. Akad. der Wisscnschaftcn zu Berlin, 1858.