Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/166

Rh popular acceptance, but must proceed to reflect upon and examine the existing things of the world. Averroes, at the same time, condemns the attempts of those who tried to give demonstrative science where the mind was not capable of more than rhetoric : they harm religion by their mere negations, destroying an old sensuous creed, but can not build up a higher and intellectual faith. In this spirit Averroes does not allow the fancied needs of theological reasoning to interfere with his study of Aristotle, whom he simply interprets as a truth-seeker. The points by which ho told on Europe were all implicit in Aristotle, but Averroes set in relief what the original had left obscure, and emphasised things which the Christian theologian passed by or misconceived. Thus Averroes had a double effect. He was the great interpreter of Aristotle to the later Schoolmen, worthy of a place, according to Dante, beside the glorious sages of the heathen world. On the other hand, he came to represent those aspects of Peripateticism most alien to the spirit of Christendom ; and the deeply-religious Moslem gave his name to the anti-sacerdotal party, to the materialists, sceptics, and atheists, who defied or undermined the dominant beliefs of the church. On three points Averroes, like other Moslem thinkers, came specially into relation, real or supposed, with the religious creed, viz., the creation of the world, the divine knowledge of particular things, and the future of the human soul. But the collision was rather with the laboured ratiocinations by which the Asharite and Motazelite theologians aimed at rationalising dogma than with the doctrine of religion in its simplicity. True philosophy is the foster sister of religion, but is the critic of scholastic subtleties. In regard to the second charge, Averroes himself remarks that philosophy only protests against reducing the divine to the level of the created mind. But the real grandeur of Averroes is seen in his resolute pro secution of the stand-point of science in matters of this world, and in his recognition that religion is not a branch of knowledge to be reduced to propositions and systems of dogma, but a personal and inward power, an individual truth which stands distinct from, but not contradictory to, the universalities of scientific law. In his science he followed the Greeks, and to the Schoolmen he and his compatriots rightly seemed philosophers of the ancient world. He maintained alike the claim of demonstrative science with its generalities for the few who could live in that ethereal world, and the claim of religion for all, the common life of each soul as an individual and personal consciousness. But theology, or the mixture of the two, he regarded as a source of evil to both fostering the vain belief in a hostility of philosophers to religion, and meanwhile corrupting religion by a pseudo-science. A stand-point like this was the very antithesis of scholasticism; it was the anticipation of an adequate view which modern speculation has seldom exhibited. The latent nominalism of Aristotle only came gradually to be emphasised through the prominence which Chris tianity gave to the individual life, and, apart from passing notices as in Abelard, first found clear enunciation in the school of Duns Scotus. The Arabians, on the contrary, emphasised the idealist aspect which had been adopted and promoted by the Neo-Platonist commentators. Hence, to Averroes the eternity of the world finds its true expression in the eternity of God. The ceaseless movement of growth and change, which presents matter in form after form as a continual search after a finality which in time and movement is not, and cannot be reached, represents only the aspect the world shows to the physicist and to the senses. In the eye of reason the full fruition of this desired finality is already and always attained; the actualisation, invisible to the senses, is achieved now and ever, and is thus beyond the element of time. This tran scendent or abstract being is that which the world of nature is always seeking. He is thought or intellect, the actuality, of which movement is but the fragmentary attainment in successive instants of time. Such a mind is not in the theological sense a creator, yet the onward movement is not the same as what some modern thinkers seem to mean by development. For the perfect and absolute, the con summation of movement is not generated at any point in the process ; it is an ideal end, which guides the operations of nature, and does not wait upon them for its achieve ment. God is the unchanging essence of the movement, and therefore its eternal cause. A special application of this relation between the prior perfect, and the imperfect, which it influences, is found in the doctrine of the connection of the abstract (transcendent) intellect with man. This transcendent mind is sometimes connected with the moon, according to the theory of Aris totle, who assigned an imperishable matter to the sphere beyond the sublunary, and in general looked upon the celestial orbs as living and intelligent. Such an intellect, named active or productive, as being the author of the development of reason in man, is the permanent, eternal thought, which is the truth of the cosmic and physical movement. It is in man that the physical or sensible passes most evidently into the metaphysical and rational. Humanity is the chosen vessel in which the light of tho intellect is revealed ; and so long as mankind lasts thero must always be some individuals destined to receive this light. &quot; There must of necessity always be some philo sopher in the race of man.&quot; What seems from the material point of view to be the acquisition of learning, study, and a moral life, is from the higher point of view the manifest tation of the transcendent intellect in the individual. The preparation of the heart and faculties gives rise to a series of grades between the original predisposition and the full acquisition of actual intellect. These grades in the main resemble those given by Avicenna. But beyond these, Averroes claims as the highest bliss of the soul a union in this life with the actual intellect. The intellect, therefore, is one and continuous in all individuals, who differ only in the degree which their illumination has attained. Such was the Averroist doctrine of the unity of intellect ths eternal and universal nature of true intellectual life. By his interpreters it was transformed into a theory of one soul common to all mankind, and when thus corrupted conflicted not unreasonably with the doctrines of a future life, com mon to Islam and Christendom. Averroes, rejected by his Moslem countrymen, found a hearing among the Jews, to whom Maimonides had shown the free paths of Greek speculation. In the cities of Languedoc and Provence, to which they had been driven by Spanish fanaticism, the Jews no longer used the learned Arabic, and translations of the works of Averroes became necessary. His writings became the text-book of Levi ben Gerson at Perpignan, and of Moses of Narbonne. Mean while, before 1250, Averroes became accessible to the Latin Schoolmen by means of versions, accredited by the names of Michael Scot and others. William of Auvergne is the first Schoolman who criticises the doctrines of Averroes, not, however, by name. Albertus Magnus and St Thomas devote special treatises to an examination of the Averroist theory of the unity of intellect, which they labour to confute in order to establish the orthodoxy of Aristotle. But as early as ^Egidius Romanus V 1247-1316), Averroes had been stamped as the patron of indifference to theolo gical dogmas, and credited with the emancipation which was equally due to wider experience and the lessons of the Crusades. There had never been an absence of protest 