Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/170

Rh devotion to work with facile indulgence in sensual pleasures. His passion for wine and women was almost as well known as his learning. With much gaiety of heart, and great powers of understanding, he showed at the same time the spirit of an Aristippus more than that of an Aristotle at the courts of the wealthy. Versatile, light-hearted, boastful, and pleasure-loving, he contrasts with the nobler and more intellectual character of Averroes. His bouts of pleasure gradually weakened his constitution ; a severe colic, which seized him on the march of the army against Hamadan, was checked by remedies so violent that Avicenna could scarcely stand. On a similar occasion the disease returned; with difficulty he reached Hamadan, where, finding the disease gaining ground, he refused to keep up the regi men imposed, and resigned himself to his fate. On his deathbed remorse seized him ; he bestowed his goods on the poor, restored unjust gains, freed his slaves, and every third day till his death listened to the reading of the Koran. He died in June 1037, in his 58th year, and was buried among the palm-trees by the Kiblah of Hamadan. It was mainly accident which determined that from the 12th to the 17th century Avicenna should be the guide of medical study in European universities, and eclipse the names of Rhazes, Ali, and Avenzoar. His work is not essentially different from that of his predecessors Rhazes and Ali; all present the doctrine of Galen, and through Galen the doctrine of Hippocrates, modified by the system of Aristotle. But the Canon of Avicenna is distinguished from the El-Hawi (Contintns) or Summary of Rhazes by its greater method, due perhaps to the logical studies of the former, and entitling him to his surname of Prince of the Physicians. The work has been variously appreciated in subsequent ages, some regarding it as a treasury of wisdom, and others, like Avenzoar, holding it useful only as waste paper. In modern times it has been more criticised than read. The vice of the book is excessive classification of bodily faculties, and over-subtlety in the discrimination of diseases. It includes five books ; of which the first and second treat of physiology, pathology, and hygiene, the third and fourth deal with the methods of treating disease, and the fifth describes the composition and preparation of remedies. This last part contains some contingent of personal observation. He is, like all his countrymen, ample in the enumeration of symptoms, and is said to be inferior to Ali in practical medicine and surgery. He introduced into medical theory the four causes of the Peripatetic system. Of natural history and botany he pretends to no special knowledge. Up to the year 1650, or thereabouts, the Canon was still used as a text-book in the universities of Louvain and Montpellier.

The rank of Avicenna in the mediaeval world as a philo sopher wag far beneath his fame as a physician. Still, the logic of Albertus Magnus and succeeding doctors was largely indebted to him for its formula. In logic Avi cenna starts from distinguishing between the isolated concept and the judgment or assertion ; from which two primitive elements of knowledge there is artificially gene rated a complete and scientific knowledge by the two pro cesses 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. Alfarabius 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 intel lectual, just as in another connection 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 intelliyibilia which constitute the world of real knowledge may be looked at in themselves (metaphysi cally), 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 connections 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 express ing 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 informis agio nniversalitatem.) 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 &quot; first intention &quot; 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 &quot; second intention.&quot; 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 com pared. 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 &quot; that whose nature it is to be predicated of several,&quot; 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 stand-point.

The place of Avicenna amongst Moslem philosophers 19 seen in the fact that Shahrastani takes him as the type of all, and that Algazali 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 ov,~n 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 theory of the process of knowledge is an interesting part of his doctrine. Man has a rational soul, one face of which is turned towards the body, and, by the help of the higher aspect, acts as practical understandiag ; the other face lies open to the reception and acquisition of the intelligible forms, and its aim is to become a reason-