History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

CHAPTER IV.

"IN the course of my long life," said the Khalif Ali, "I have often observed that men are more like the times they live in than they are like their fathers." This profoundly philosophical remark of the son-in-law of Mohammed is strictly true; for, though the personal, the bodily lineaments of a man may indicate his parentage, the constitution of his mind, and therefore the direction of his thoughts, is determined by the environment in which he lives.

When Amrou, the lieutenant of the Khalif Omar, conquered Egypt, and annexed it to the Saracenic Empire, he found in Alexandria a Greek grammarian, John surnamed Philoponus, or the Labor-lover. Presuming on the friendship which had arisen between them, the Greek solicited as a gift the remnant of the great library—a remnant which war and time and bigotry had spared. Amrou, therefore, sent to the khalif to ascertain his pleasure. "If," replied the khalif, "the books agree with the Koran, the Word of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree with it, they are pernicious. Let them be destroyed." Accordingly, they were distributed among the baths of Alexandria, and it is said that six months were barely sufficient to consume them.

Although the fact has been denied, there can be little doubt that Omar gave this order. The khalif was an illiterate man; his environment was an environment of fanaticism and ignorance. Omar's act was an illustration of Ali's remark.

THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY BURNT. But it must not be supposed that the books which John the Labor-lover coveted were those which constituted the great library of the Ptolemies, and that of Eumenes, King of Pergamus. Nearly a thousand years had elapsed since Philadelphus began his collection. Julius Caesar had burnt more than half; the Patriarchs of Alexandria had not only permitted but superintended the dispersion of almost all the rest. Orosius expressly states that he saw the empty cases or shelves of the library twenty years after Theophilus, the uncle of St. Cyril, had procured from the Emperor Theodosius a rescript for its destruction. Even had this once noble collection never endured such acts of violence, the mere wear and tear, and perhaps, I may add, the pilfering of a thousand years, would have diminished it sadly. Though John, as the surname he received indicates, might rejoice in a superfluity of occupation, we may be certain that the care of a library of half a million books would transcend even his well-tried powers; and the cost of preserving and supporting it, that had demanded the ample resources of the Ptolemies and the Caesars, was beyond the means of a grammarian. Nor is the time required for its combustion or destruction any indication of the extent of the collection. Of all articles of fuel, parchment is, perhaps, the most wretched. Paper and papyrus do excellently well as kindling-materials, but we may be sure that the bath-men of Alexandria did not resort to parchment so long as they could find any thing else, and of parchment a very large portion of these books was composed.

There can, then, be no more doubt that Omar did order the destruction of this library, under an impression of its uselessness or its irreligious tendency, than that the Crusaders burnt the library of Tripoli, fancifully said to have consisted of three million volumes. The first apartment entered being found to contain nothing but the Koran, all the other books were supposed to be the works of the Arabian impostor, and were consequently committed to the flames. In both cases the story contains some truth and much exaggeration. Bigotry, however, has often distinguished itself by such exploits. The Spaniards burnt in Mexico vast piles of American picture-writings, an irretrievable loss; and Cardinal Ximenes delivered to the flames, in the squares of Granada, eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical authors.

We have seen how engineering talent, stimulated by Alexander's Persian campaign, led to a wonderful development of pure science under the Ptolemies; a similar effect may be noted as the result of the Saracenic military operations.

The friendship contracted by Amrou, the conqueror of Egypt, with John the Grammarian, indicates how much the Arabian mind was predisposed to liberal ideas. Its step from the idolatry of the Caaba to the monotheism of Mohammed prepared it to expatiate in the wide and pleasing fields of literature and philosophy. There were two influences to which it was continually exposed. They conspired in determining its path. These were—1. That of the Nestorians in Syria; 2. That of the Jews in Egypt.

INFLUENCE OF THE NESTORIANS AND JEWS. In the last chapter I have briefly related the persecution of Nestor and his disciples. They bore testimony to the oneness of God, through many sufferings and martyrdoms. They utterly repudiated an Olympus filled with gods and goddesses. "Away from us a queen of heaven!"

Such being their special views, the Nestorians found no difficulty in affiliating with their Saracen conquerors, by whom they were treated not only with the highest respect, but intrusted with some of the most important offices of the state. Mohammed, in the strongest manner, prohibited his followers from committing any injuries against them. Jesuiabbas, their pontiff, concluded treaties both with the Prophet and with Omar, and subsequently the Khalif Haroun-al-Raschid placed all his public schools under the superintendence of John Masue, a Nestorian.

To the influence of the Nestorians that of the Jews was added. When Christianity displayed a tendency to unite itself with paganism, the conversion of the Jews was arrested; it totally ceased when Trinitarian ideas were introduced. The cities of Syria and Egypt were full of Jews. In Alexandria alone, at the time of its capture by Amrou, there were forty thousand who paid tribute. Centuries of misfortune and persecution had served only to confirm them in their monotheism, and to strengthen that implacable hatred of idolatry which they had cherished ever since the Babylonian captivity. Associated with the Nestorians, they translated into Syriac many Greek and Latin philosophical works, which were retranslated into Arabic. While the Nestorian was occupied with the education of the children of the great Mohammedan families, the Jew found his way into them in the character of a physician.

FATALISM OF THE ARABIANS. Under these influences the ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens abated, their manners were polished, their thoughts elevated. They overran the realms of Philosophy and Science as quickly as they had overrun the provinces of the Roman Empire. They abandoned the fallacies of vulgar Mohammedanism, accepting in their stead scientific truth.

In a world devoted to idolatry, the sword of the Saracen had vindicated the majesty of God. The doctrine of fatalism, inculcated by the Koran, had powerfully contributed to that result. "No man can anticipate or postpone his predetermined end. Death will overtake us even in lofty towers. From the beginning God hath settled the place in which each man shall die." In his figurative language the Arab said: "No man can by flight escape his fate. The Destinies ride their horses by night.... Whether asleep in bed or in the storm of battle, the angel of death will find thee." "I am convinced," said Ali, to whose wisdom we have already referred—"I am convinced that the affairs of men go by divine decree, and not by our administration." The Mussulmen are those who submissively resign themselves to the will of God. They reconciled fate and free-will by saying, "The outline is given us, we color the picture of life as we will." They said that, if we would overcome the laws of Nature, we must not resist, we must balance them against each other.

This dark doctrine prepared its devotees for the accomplishment of great things—things such as the Saracens did accomplish. It converted despair into resignation, and taught men to disdain hope. There was a proverb among them that "Despair is a freeman, Hope is a slave."

But many of the incidents of war showed plainly that medicines may assuage pain, that skill may close wounds, that those who are incontestably dying may be snatched from the grave. The Jewish physician became a living, an accepted protest against the fatalism of the Koran. By degrees the sternness of predestination was mitigated, and it was admitted that in individual life there is an effect due to free-will; that by his voluntary acts man may within certain limits determine his own course. But, so far as nations are concerned, since they can yield no personal accountability to God, they are placed under the control of immutable law.

In this respect the contrast between the Christian and the Mohammedan nations was very striking: The Christian was convinced of incessant providential interventions; he believed that there was no such thing as law in the government of the world. By prayers and entreaties he might prevail with God to change the current of affairs, or, if that failed, he might succeed with Christ, or perhaps with the Virgin Mary, or through the intercession of the saints, or by the influence of their relics or bones. If his own supplications were unavailing, he might obtain his desire through the intervention of his priest, or through that of the holy men of the Church, and especially if oblations or gifts of money were added. Christendom believed that she could change the course of affairs by influencing the conduct of superior beings. Islam rested in a pious resignation to the unchangeable will of God. The prayer of the Christian was mainly an earnest intercession for benefits hoped for, that of the Saracen a devout expression of gratitude for the past. Both substituted prayer for the ecstatic meditation of India. To the Christian the progress of the world was an exhibition of disconnected impulses, of sudden surprises. To the Mohammedan that progress presented a very different aspect. Every corporeal motion was due to some preceding motion; every thought to some preceding thought; every historical event was the offspring of some preceding event; every human action was the result of some foregone and accomplished action. In the long annals of our race, nothing has ever been abruptly introduced. There has been an orderly, an inevitable sequence from event to event. There is an iron chain of destiny, of which the links are facts; each stands in its preordained place—not one has ever been disturbed, not one has ever been removed. Every man came into the world without his own knowledge, he is to depart from it perhaps against his own wishes. Then let him calmly fold his hands, and expect the issues of fate.

Coincidently with this change of opinion as to the government of individual life, there came a change as respects the mechanical construction of the world. According to the Koran, the earth is a square plane, edged with vast mountains, which serve the double purpose of balancing it in its seat, and of sustaining the dome of the sky. Our devout admiration of the power and wisdom of God should be excited by the spectacle of this vast crystalline brittle expanse, which has been safely set in its position without so much as a crack or any other injury. Above the sky, and resting on it, is heaven, built in seven stories, the uppermost being the habitation of God, who, under the form of a gigantic man, sits on a throne, having on either side winged bulls, like those in the palaces of old Assyrian kings.

THEY MEASURE THE EARTH. These ideas, which indeed are not peculiar to Mohammedanism, but are entertained by all men in a certain stage of their intellectual development as religious revelations, were very quickly exchanged by the more advanced Mohammedans for others scientifically correct. Yet, as has been the case in Christian countries, the advance was not made without resistance on the part of the defenders of revealed truth. Thus when Al-Mamun, having become acquainted with the globular form of the earth, gave orders to his mathematicians and astronomers to measure a degree of a great circle upon it, Takyuddin, one of the most celebrated doctors of divinity of that time, denounced the wicked khalif, declaring that God would assuredly punish him for presumptuously interrupting the devotions of the faithful by encouraging and diffusing a false and atheistical philosophy among them. Al-Mamun, however, persisted. On the shores of the Red Sea, in the plains of Shinar, by the aid of an astrolabe, the elevation of the pole above the horizon was determined at two stations on the same meridian, exactly one degree apart. The distance between the two stations was then measured, and found to be two hundred thousand Hashemite cubits; this gave for the entire circumference of the earth about twenty-four thousand of our miles, a determination not far from the truth. But, since the spherical form could not be positively asserted from one such measurement, the khalif caused another to be made near Cufa in Mesopotamia. His astronomers divided themselves into two parties, and, starting from a given point, each party measured an arc of one degree, the one northward, the other southward. Their result is given in cubits. If the cubit employed was that known as the royal cubit, the length of a degree was ascertained within one-third of a mile of its true value. From these measures the khalif concluded that the globular form was established.

THEIR PASSION FOR SCIENCE. It is remarkable how quickly the ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens was transformed into a passion for intellectual pursuits. At first the Koran was an obstacle to literature and science. Mohammed had extolled it as the grandest of all compositions, and had adduced its unapproachable excellence as a proof of his divine mission. But, in little more than twenty years after his death, the experience that had been acquired in Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt, had produced a striking effect, and Ali the khalif reigning at that time, avowedly encouraged all kinds of literary pursuits. Moawyah, the founder of the Ommiade dynasty, who followed in 661, revolutionized the government. It had been elective, he made it hereditary. He removed its seat from Medina to a more central position at Damascus, and entered on a career of luxury and magnificence. He broke the bonds of a stern fanaticism, and put himself forth as a cultivator and patron of letters. Thirty years had wrought a wonderful change. A Persian satrap who had occasion to pay homage to Omar, the second khalif, found him asleep among the beggars on the steps of the Mosque of Medina; but foreign envoys who had occasion to seek Moawyah, the sixth khalif, were presented to him in a magnificent palace, decorated with exquisite arabesques, and adorned with flower-gardens and fountains.

THEIR LITERATURE. In less than a century after the death of Mohammed, translations of the chief Greek philosophical authors had been made into Arabic; poems such as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," being considered to have an irreligious tendency from their mythological allusions, were rendered into Syriac, to gratify the curiosity of the learned. Almansor, during his khalifate (A.D. 753-775), transferred the seat of government to Bagdad, which he converted into a splendid metropolis; he gave much of his time to the study and promotion of astronomy, and established schools of medicine and law. His grandson, Haroun-al-Raschid (A.D. 786), followed his example, and ordered that to every mosque in his dominions a school should be attached. But the Augustan age of Asiatic learning was during the khalifate of Al-Mamun (A.D. 813-832). He made Bagdad the centre of science, collected great libraries, and surrounded himself with learned men.

The elevated taste thus cultivated continued after the division of the Saracen Empire by internal dissensions into three parts. The Abasside dynasty in Asia, the Fatimite in Egypt, and the Ommiade in Spain, became rivals not merely in politics, but also in letters and science.

THEY ORIGINATE CHEMISTRY. In letters the Saracens embraced every topic that can amuse or edify the mind. In later times, it was their boast that they had produced more poets than all other nations combined. In science their great merit consists in this, that they cultivated it after the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks, not after the manner of the European Greeks. They perceived that it can never be advanced by mere speculation; its only sure progress is by the practical interrogation of Nature. The essential characteristics of their method are experiment and observation. Geometry and the mathematical sciences they looked upon as instruments of reasoning. In their numerous writings on mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, it is interesting to remark that the solution of a problem is always obtained by performing an experiment, or by an instrumental observation. It was this that made them the originators of chemistry, that led them to the invention of all kinds of apparatus for distillation, sublimation, fusion, filtration, etc.; that in astronomy caused them to appeal to divided instruments, as quadrants and astrolabes; in chemistry, to employ the balance, the theory of which they were perfectly familiar with; to construct tables of specific gravities and astronomical tables, as those of Bagdad, Spain, Samarcand; that produced their great improvements in geometry, trigonometry, the invention of algebra, and the adoption of the Indian numeration in arithmetic. Such were the results of their preference of the inductive method of Aristotle, their declining the reveries of Plato.

THEIR GREAT LIBRARIES. For the establishment and extension of the public libraries, books were sedulously collected. Thus the khalif Al-Mamun is reported to have brought into Bagdad hundreds of camel-loads of manuscripts. In a treaty he made with the Greek emperor, Michael III., he stipulated that one of the Constantinople libraries should be given up to him. Among the treasures he thus acquired was the treatise of Ptolemy on the mathematical construction of the heavens. He had it forthwith translated into Arabic, under the title of "Al-magest." The collections thus acquired sometimes became very large; thus the Fatimite Library at Cairo contained one hundred thousand volumes, elegantly transcribed and bound. Among these, there were six thousand five hundred manuscripts on astronomy and medicine alone. The rules of this library permitted the lending out of books to students resident at Cairo. It also contained two globes, one of massive silver and one of brass; the latter was said to have been constructed by Ptolemy, the former cost three thousand golden crowns. The great library of the Spanish khalifs eventually numbered six hundred thousand volumes; its catalogue alone occupied forty-four. Besides this, there were seventy public libraries in Andalusia. The collections in the possession of individuals were sometimes very extensive. A private doctor refused the invitation of a Sultan of Bokhara because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels.

There was in every great library a department for the copying or manufacture of translations. Such manufactures were also often an affair of private enterprise. Honian, a Nestorian physician, had an establishment of the kind at Bagdad (A.D. 850). He issued versions of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, etc. As to original works, it was the custom of the authorities of colleges to require their professors to prepare treatises on prescribed topics. Every khalif had his own historian. Books of romances and tales, such as "The Thousand and One Arabian Nights' Entertainments," bear testimony to the creative fancy of the Saracens. Besides these, there were works on all kinds of subjects—history, jurisprudence, politics, philosophy, biographies not only of illustrious men, but also of celebrated horses and camels. These were issued without any censorship or restraint, though, in later times, works on theology required a license for publication. Books of reference abounded, geographical, statistical, medical, historical dictionaries, and even abridgments or condensations of them, as the "Encyclopedic Dictionary of all the Sciences," by Mohammed Abu Abdallah. Much pride was taken in the purity and whiteness of the paper, in the skillful intermixture of variously-colored inks, and in the illumination of titles by gilding and other adornments.

The Saracen Empire was dotted all over with colleges. They were established in Mongolia, Tartary, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Morocco, Fez, Spain. At one extremity of this vast region, which far exceeded the Roman Empire in geographical extent, were the college and astronomical observatory of Samarcand, at the other the Giralda in Spain. Gibbon, referring to this patronage of learning, says: "The same royal prerogative was claimed by the independent emirs of the provinces, and their emulation diffused the taste and the rewards of science from Samarcand and Bokhara to Fez and Cordova. The vizier of a sultan consecrated a sum of two hundred thousand pieces of gold to the foundation of a college at Bagdad, which he endowed with an annual revenue of fifteen thousand dinars. The fruits of instruction were communicated, perhaps, at different times, to six thousand disciples of every degree, from the son of the noble to that of the mechanic; a sufficient allowance was provided for the indigent scholars, and the merit or industry of the professors was repaid with adequate stipends. In every city the productions of Arabic literature were copied and collected, by the curiosity of the studious and the vanity of the rich." The superintendence of these schools was committed with noble liberality sometimes to Nestorians, sometimes to Jews. It mattered not in what country a man was born, nor what were his religious opinions; his attainment in learning was the only thing to be considered. The great Khalif Al-Mamun had declared that "they are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties; that the teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of this world, which, without their aid, would again sink into ignorance and barbarism."

After the example of the medical college of Cairo, other medical colleges required their students to pass a rigid examination. The candidate then received authority to enter on the practice of his profession. The first medical college established in Europe was that founded by the Saracens at Salerno, in Italy. The first astronomical observatory was that erected by them at Seville, in Spain.

THE ARABIAN SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT. It would far transcend the limits of this book to give an adequate statement of the results of this imposing scientific movement. The ancient sciences were greatly extended—new ones were brought into existence. The Indian method of arithmetic was introduced, a beautiful invention, which expresses all numbers by ten characters, giving them an absolute value, and a value by position, and furnishing simple rules for the easy performance of all kinds of calculations. Algebra, or universal arithmetic—the method of calculating indeterminate quantities, or investigating the relations that subsist among quantities of all kinds, whether arithmetical or geometrical—was developed from the germ that Diophantus had left. Mohammed Ben Musa furnished the solution of quadratic equations, Omar Ben Ibra him that of cubic equations. The Saracens also gave to trigonometry its modern form, substituting sines for chords, which had been previously used; they elevated it into a separate science. Musa, above mentioned, was the author of a "Treatise on Spherical Trigonometry." Al-Baghadadi left one on land-surveying, so excellent, that by some it has been declared to be a copy of Euclid's lost work on that subject.

ARABIAN ASTRONOMY. In astronomy, they not only made catalogues, but maps of the stars visible in their skies, giving to those of the larger magnitudes the Arabic names they still bear on our celestial globes. They ascertained, as we have seen, the size of the earth by the measurement of a degree on her surface, determined the obliquity of the ecliptic, published corrected tables of the sun and moon fixed the length of the year, verified the precession of the equinoxes. The treatise of Albategnius on "The Science of the Stars" is spoken of by Laplace with respect; he also draws attention to an important fragment of Ibn-Junis, the astronomer of Hakem, the Khalif of Egypt, A.D. 1000, as containing a long series of observations from the time of Almansor, of eclipses, equinoxes, solstices, conjunctions of planets, occultations of stars—observations which have cast much light on the great variations of the system of the world. The Arabian astronomers also devoted themselves to the construction and perfection of astronomical instruments, to the measurement of time by clocks of various kinds, by clepsydras and sun-dials. They were the first to introduce, for this purpose, the use of the pendulum.

In the experimental sciences, they originated chemistry; they discovered some of its most important reagents—sulphuric acid, nitric acid, alcohol. They applied that science in the practice of medicine, being the first to publish pharmacopoeias or dispensatories, and to include in them mineral preparations. In mechanics, they had determined the laws of falling bodies, had ideas, by no means indistinct, of the nature of gravity; they were familiar with the theory of the mechanical powers. In hydrostatics they constructed the first tables of the specific gravities of bodies, and wrote treatises on the flotation and sinking of bodies in water. In optics, they corrected the Greek misconception, that a ray proceeds from the eye, and touches the object seen, introducing the hypothesis that the ray passes from the object to the eye. They understood the phenomena of the reflection and refraction of light. Alhazen made the great discovery of the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the atmosphere, and proved that we see the sun and moon before they have risen, and after they have set.

AGRICULTURE AND MANUFACTURE. The effects of this scientific activity are plainly perceived in the great improvements that took place in many of the industrial arts. Agriculture shows it in better methods of irrigation, the skillful employment of manures, the raising of improved breeds of cattle, the enactment of wise codes of rural laws, the introduction of the culture of rice, and that of sugar and coffee. The manufactures show it in the great extension of the industries of silk, cotton, wool; in the fabrication of cordova and morocco leather, and paper; in mining, casting, and various metallurgic operations; in the making of Toledo blades.

Passionate lovers of poetry and music, they dedicated much of their leisure time to those elegant pursuits. They taught Europe the game of chess; they gave it its taste for works of fiction—romances and novels. In the graver domains of literature they took delight: they had many admirable compositions on such subjects as the instability of human greatness; the consequences of irreligion; the reverses of fortune; the origin, duration, and end of the world. Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves have originated in our own times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development were taught in their schools. In fact, they carried them much farther than we are disposed to do, extending them even to inorganic or mineral things. The fundamental principle of alchemy was the natural process of development of metalline bodies. "When common people," says Al-Khazini, writing in the twelfth century, "hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body which has attained to perfection of maturity, to the goal of completeness, they firmly believe that it is something which has gradually come to that perfection by passing through the forms of all other metallic bodies, so that its gold nature was originally lead, afterward it became tin, then brass, then silver, and finally reached the development of gold; not knowing that the natural philosophers mean, in saying this, only something like what they mean when they speak of man, and attribute to him a completeness and equilibrium in nature and constitution—not that man was once a bull, and was changed into an ass, and afterward into a horse, and after that into an ape, and finally became a man."

CHAPTER V.

THE pagan Greeks and Romans believed that the spirit of man resembles his bodily form, varying its appearance with his variations, and growing with his growth. Heroes, to whom it had been permitted to descend into Hades, had therefore without difficulty recognized their former friends. Not only had the corporeal aspect been retained, but even the customary raiment.

THE SOUL. The primitive Christians, whose conceptions of a future life and of heaven and hell, the abodes of the blessed and the sinful, were far more vivid than those of their pagan predecessors, accepted and intensified these ancient ideas. They did not doubt that in the world to come they should meet their friends, and hold converse with them, as they had done here upon earth—an expectation that gives consolation to the human heart, reconciling it to the most sorrowful bereavements, and restoring to it its dead.

In the uncertainty as to what becomes of the soul in the interval between its separation from the body and the judgment-day, many different opinions were held. Some thought that it hovered over the grave, some that it wandered disconsolate through the air. In the popular belief, St. Peter sat as a door-keeper at the gate of heaven. To him it had been given to bind or to loose. He admitted or excluded the Spirits of men at his pleasure. Many persons, however, were disposed to deny him this power, since his decisions would be anticipatory of the judgment-day, which would thus be rendered needless. After the time of Gregory the Great, the doctrine of purgatory met with general acceptance. A resting-place was provided for departed spirits.

That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. A pleasing terror gathers round the winter's-evening fireside at the stories of apparitions, goblins, ghosts. In the old times the Romans had their lares, or spirits of those who had led virtuous lives; their larvae or lemures, the spirits of the wicked; their manes, the spirits of those of whom the merits were doubtful. If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of any thing whatever, that these shades of the dead congregate near tombstones, or take up their secret abode in the gloomy chambers of dilapidated castles, or walk by moonlight in moody solitude.

ASIATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS. While these opinions have universally found popular acceptance in Europe, others of a very different nature have prevailed extensively in Asia, and indeed very generally in the higher regions of thought. Ecclesiastical authority succeeded in repressing them in the sixteenth century, but they never altogether disappeared. In our own times so silently and extensively have they been diffused in Europe, that it was found expedient in the papal Syllabus to draw them in a very conspicuous manner into the open light; and the Vatican Council, agreeing in that view of their obnoxious tendency and secret spread, has in an equally prominent and signal manner among its first canons anathematized all persons who hold them. "Let him be anathema who says that spiritual things are emanations of the divine substance, or that the divine essence by manifestation or development becomes all things." In view of this authoritative action, it is necessary now to consider the character and history of these opinions.

Ideas respecting the nature of God necessarily influence ideas respecting the nature of the soul. The eastern Asiatics had adopted the conception of an impersonal God, and, as regards the soul, its necessary consequence, the doctrine of emanation and absorption.

EMANATION AND ABSORPTION. Thus the Vedic theology is based on the acknowledgment of a universal spirit pervading all things. "There is in truth but one Deity, the supreme Spirit; he is of the same nature as the soul of man." Both the Vedas and the Institutes of Menu affirm that the soul is an emanation of the all-pervading Intellect, and that it is necessarily destined to be reabsorbed. They consider it to be without form, and that visible Nature, with all its beauties and harmonies, is only the shadow of God.

Vedaism developed itself into Buddhism, which has become the faith of a majority of the human race. This system acknowledges that there is a supreme Power, but denies that there is a supreme Being. It contemplates the existence of Force, giving rise as its manifestation to matter. It adopts the theory of emanation and absorption. In a burning taper it sees an effigy of man—an embodiment of matter, and an evolution of force. If we interrogate it respecting the destiny of the soul, it demands of us what has become of the flame when it is blown out, and in what condition it was before the taper was lighted. Was it a nonentity? Has it been annihilated? It admits that the idea of personality which has deluded us through life may not be instantaneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by slow degrees. On this is founded the doctrine of transmigration. But at length reunion with the universal Intellect takes place, Nirwana is reached, oblivion is attained, a state that has no relation to matter, space, or time, the state into which the departed flame of the extinguished taper has gone, the state in which we were before we were born. This is the end that we ought to hope for; it is reabsorption in the universal Force—supreme bliss, eternal rest.

Through Aristotle these doctrines were first introduced into Eastern Europe; indeed, eventually, as we shall see, he was regarded as the author of them. They exerted a dominating influence in the later period of the Alexandrian school. Philo, the Jew, who lived in the time of Caligula, based his philosophy on the theory of emanation. Plotinus not only accepted that theory as applicable to the soul of man, but as affording an illustration of the nature of the Trinity. For, as a beam of light emanates from the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates, and thence the Holy Ghost. From these views Plotinus derived a practical religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul. In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness. In like manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God. He was a Tyrian by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity; his treatise on that subject was answered by Eusebius and St. Jerome, but the Emperor Theodosius silenced it more effectually by causing all the copies to be burnt. Porphyry bewails his own unworthiness, saying that he had been united to God in ecstasy but once in eighty-six years, whereas his master Plotinus had been so united six times in sixty years. A complete system of theology, based on the theory of emanation, was constructed by Proclus, who speculated on the manner in which absorption takes place: whether the soul is instantly reabsorbed and reunited in the moment of death, or whether it retains the sentiment of personality for a time, and subsides into complete reunion by successive steps.

ARABIC PSYCHOLOGY. From the Alexandrian Greeks these ideas passed to the Saracen philosophers, who very soon after the capture of the great Egyptian city abandoned to the lower orders their anthropomorphic notions of the nature of God and the simulachral form of the spirit of man. As Arabism developed itself into a distinct scientific system, the theories of emanation and absorption were among its characteristic features. In this abandonment of vulgar Mohammedanism, the example of the Jews greatly assisted. They, too, had given up the anthropomorphism of their ancestors; they had exchanged the God who of old lived behind the veil of the temple for an infinite Intelligence pervading the universe, and, avowing their inability to conceive that any thing which had on a sudden been called into existence should be capable of immortality, they affirmed that the soul of man is connected with a past of which there was no beginning, and with a future to which there is no end.

In the intellectual history of Arabism the Jew and the Saracen are continually seen together. It was the same in their political history, whether we consider it in Syria, in Egypt, or in Spain. From them conjointly Western Europe derived its philosophical ideas, which in the course of time culminated in Averroism; Averroism is philosophical Islamism. Europeans generally regarded Averroes as the author of these heresies, and the orthodox branded him accordingly, but he was nothing more than their collector and commentator. His works invaded Christendom by two routes: from Spain through Southern France they reached Upper Italy, engendering numerous heresies on their way; from Sicily they passed to Naples and South Italy, under the auspices of Frederick II.

But, long before Europe suffered this great intellectual invasion, there were what might, perhaps, be termed sporadic instances of Orientalism. As an example I may quote the views of John Erigena (A.D. 800) He had adopted and taught the philosophy of Aristotle had made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of that philosopher, and indulged a hope of uniting philosophy and religion in the manner proposed by the Christian ecclesiastics who were then studying in the Mohammedan universities of Spain. He was a native of Britain.

In a letter to Charles the Bald, Anastasius expresses his astonishment "how such a barbarian man, coming from the very ends of the earth, and remote from human conversation, could comprehend things so clearly, and transfer them into another language so well." The general intention of his writings was, as we have said, to unite philosophy with religion, but his treatment of these subjects brought him under ecclesiastical censure, and some of his works were adjudged to the flames. His most important book is entitled "De Divisione Nature."

Erigena's philosophy rests upon the observed and admitted fact that every living thing comes from something that had previously lived. The visible world, being a world of life, has therefore emanated necessarily from some primordial existence, and that existence is God, who is thus the originator and conservator of all. Whatever we see maintains itself as a visible thing through force derived from him, and, were that force withdrawn, it must necessarily disappear. Erigena thus conceives of the Deity as an unceasing participator in Nature, being its preserver, maintainer, upholder, and in that respect answering to the soul of the world of the Greeks. The particular life of individuals is therefore a part of general existence, that is, of the mundane soul.

If ever there were a withdrawal of the maintaining power, all things must return to the source from which they issued—that is, they must return to God, and be absorbed in him. All visible Nature must thus pass back into "the Intellect" at last. "The death of the flesh is the auspices of the restitution of things, and of a return to their ancient conservation. So sounds revert back to the air in which they were born, and by which they were maintained, and they are heard no more; no man knows what has become of them. In that final absorption which, after a lapse of time, must necessarily come, God will be all in all, and nothing exist but him alone." "I contemplate him as the beginning and cause of all things; all things that are and those that have been, but now are not, were created from him, and by him, and in him. I also view him as the end and intransgressible term of all things.... There is a fourfold conception of universal Nature—two views of divine Nature, as origin and end; two also of framed Nature, causes and effects. There is nothing eternal but God."

The return of the soul to the universal Intellect is designated by Erigena as Theosis, or Deification. In that final absorption all remembrance of its past experiences is lost. The soul reverts to the condition in which it was before it animated the body. Necessarily, therefore, Erigena fell under the displeasure of the Church.

It was in India that men first recognized the fact that force is indestructible and eternal. This implies ideas more or less distinct of that which we now term its "correlation and conservation." Considerations connected with the stability of the universe give strength to this view, since it is clear that, were there either an increase or a diminution, the order of the world must cease. The definite and invariable amount of energy in the universe must therefore be accepted as a scientific fact. The changes we witness are in its distribution.

But, since the soul must be regarded as an active principle, to call a new one into existence out of nothing is necessarily to add to the force previously in the world. And, if this has been done in the case of every individual who has been born, and is to be repeated for every individual hereafter, the totality of force must be continually increasing.

Moreover, to many devout persons there is something very revolting in the suggestion that the Almighty is a servitor to the caprices and lusts of man, and that, at a certain term after its origin, it is necessary for him to create for the embryo a soul.

Considering man as composed of two portions, a soul and a body, the obvious relations of the latter may cast much light on the mysterious, the obscure relations of the former. Now, the substance of which the body consists is obtained from the general mass of matter around us, and after death to that general mass it is restored. Has Nature, then, displayed before our eyes in the origin, mutations, and destiny of the material part, the body, a revelation that may guide us to a knowledge of the origin and destiny of the companion, the spiritual part, the soul?

Let us listen for a moment to one of the most powerful of Mohammedan writers:

"God has created the spirit of man out of a drop of his own light; its destiny is to return to him. Do not deceive yourself with the vain imagination that it will die when the body dies. The form you had on your entrance into this world, and your present form, are not the same; hence there is no necessity of your perishing, on account of the perishing of your body. Your spirit came into this world a stranger, it is only sojourning, in a temporary home. From the trials and tempests of this troublesome life, our refuge is in God. In reunion with him we shall find eternal rest—a rest without sorrow, a joy without pain, a strength without infirmity, a knowledge without doubt, a tranquil and yet an ecstatic vision of the source of life and light and glory, the source from which we came." So says the Saracen philosopher, Al-Gazzali (A.D. 1010).

In a stone the material particles are in a state of stable equilibrium; it may, therefore, endure forever. An animal is in reality only a form through which a stream of matter is incessantly flowing. It receives its supplies, and dismisses its wastes. In this it resembles a cataract, a river, a flame. The particles that compose it at one instant have departed from it the next. It depends for its continuance on exterior supplies. It has a definite duration in time, and an inevitable moment comes in which it must die.

In the great problem of psychology we cannot expect to reach a scientific result, if we persist in restricting ourselves to the contemplation of one fact. We must avail ourselves of all accessible facts. Human psychology can never be completely resolved except through comparative psychology. With Descartes, we must inquire whether the souls of animals be relations of the human soul, less perfect members in the same series of development. We must take account of what we discover in the intelligent principle of the ant, as well as what we discern in the intelligent principle of man. Where would human physiology be, if it were not illuminated by the bright irradiations of comparative physiology?

Brodie, after an exhaustive consideration of the facts, affirms that the mind of animals is essentially the same as that of man. Every one familiar with the dog will admit that that creature knows right from wrong, and is conscious when he has committed a fault. Many domestic animals have reasoning powers, and employ proper means for the attainment of ends. How numerous are the anecdotes related of the intentional actions of the elephant and the ape! Nor is this apparent intelligence due to imitation, to their association with man, for wild animals that have no such relation exhibit similar properties. In different species, the capacity and character greatly vary. Thus the dog is not only more intelligent, but has social and moral qualities that the cat does not possess; the former loves his master, the latter her home.

Du Bois-Reymond makes this striking remark: "With awe and wonder must the student of Nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations." What an impressive inference we may draw from the statement of Huber, who has written so well on this subject: "If you will watch a single ant at work, you can tell what he will next do!" He is considering the matter, and reasoning as you are doing. Listen to one of the many anecdotes which Huber, at once truthful and artless, relates: "On the visit of an overseer ant to the works, when the laborers had begun the roof too soon, he examined it and had it taken down, the wall raised to the proper height, and a new ceiling constructed with the fragments of the old one." Surely these insects are not automata, they show intention. They recognize their old companions, who have been shut up from them for many months, and exhibit sentiments of joy at their return. Their antennal language is capable of manifold expression; it suits the interior of the nest, where all is dark.

While solitary insects do not live to raise their young, social insects have a longer term, they exhibit moral affections and educate their offspring. Patterns of patience and industry, some of these insignificant creatures will work sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Few men are capable of sustained mental application more than four or five hours.

Similarity of effects indicates similarity of causes; similarity of actions demands similarity of organs. I would ask the reader of these paragraphs, who is familiar with the habits of animals, and especially with the social relations of that wonderful insect to which reference has been made, to turn to the nineteenth chapter of my work on the "Intellectual Development of Europe," in which he will find a description of the social system of the Incas of Peru. Perhaps, then, in view of the similarity of the social institutions and personal conduct of the insect, and the social institutions and personal conduct of the civilized Indian—the one an insignificant speck, the other a man—he will not be disposed to disagree with me in the opinion that "from bees, and wasps, and ants, and birds, from all that low animal life on which he looks with supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to learn what in truth he really is."

The views of Descartes, who regarded all insects as automata, can scarcely be accepted without modification. Insects are automata only so far as the action of their ventral cord, and that portion of their cephalic ganglia which deals with contemporaneous impressions, is concerned.

It is one of the functions of vesicular-nervous material to retain traces or relics of impressions brought to it by the organs of sense; hence, nervous ganglia, being composed of that material, may be considered as registering apparatus. They also introduce the element of time into the action of the nervous mechanism. An impression, which without them might have forthwith ended in reflex action, is delayed, and with this duration come all those important effects arising through the interaction of many impressions, old and new, upon each other.

There is no such thing as a spontaneous, or self-originated, thought. Every intellectual act is the consequence of some preceding act. It comes into existence in virtue of something that has gone before. Two minds constituted precisely alike, and placed under the influence of precisely the same environment, must give rise to precisely the same thought. To such sameness of action we allude in the popular expression "common-sense"—a term full of meaning. In the origination of a thought there are two distinct conditions: the state of the organism as dependent on antecedent impressions, and on the existing physical circumstances.

In the cephalic ganglia of insects are stored up the relics of impressions that have been made upon the common peripheral nerves, and in them are kept those which are brought in by the organs of special sense—the visual, olfactive, auditory. The interaction of these raises insects above mere mechanical automata, in which the reaction instantly follows the impression.

In all cases the action of every nerve-centre, no matter what its stage of development may be, high or low, depends upon an essential chemical condition—oxidation. Even in man, if the supply of arterial blood be stopped but for a moment, the nerve-mechanism loses its power; if diminished, it correspondingly declines; if, on the contrary, it be increased—as when nitrogen monoxide is breathed—there is more energetic action. Hence there arises a need of repair, a necessity for rest and sleep.

Two fundamental ideas are essentially attached to all our perceptions of external things: they are SPACE and TIME, and for these provision is made in the nervous mechanism while it is yet in an almost rudimentary state. The eye is the organ of space, the ear of time; the perceptions of which by the elaborate mechanism of these structures become infinitely more precise than would be possible if the sense of touch alone were resorted to.

There are some simple experiments which illustrate the vestiges of ganglionic impressions. If on a cold, polished metal, as a new razor, any object, such as a wafer, be laid, and the metal be then breathed upon, and, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon it the shadowy form emerges.

Such an illustration shows how trivial an impression may be thus registered and preserved. But, if, on such an inorganic surface, an impression may thus be indelibly marked, how much more likely in the purposely-constructed ganglion! A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace, a trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes. Photographic operations are cases in point. The portraits of our friends, or landscape views, may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or glassy surface until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.

If, after the eyelids have been closed for some time, as when we first awake in the morning, we suddenly and steadfastly gaze at a brightly-illuminated object and then quickly close the lids again, a phantom image is perceived in the indefinite darkness beyond us. We may satisfy ourselves that this is not a fiction, but a reality, for many details that we had not time to identify in the momentary glance may be contemplated at our leisure in the phantom. We may thus make out the pattern of such an object as a lace curtain hanging in the window, or the branches of a tree beyond. By degrees the image becomes less and less distinct; in a minute or two it has disappeared. It seems to have a tendency to float away in the vacancy before us. If we attempt to follow it by moving the eyeball, it suddenly vanishes.

Such a duration of impressions on the retina proves that the effect of external influences on nerve-vesicles is not necessarily transitory. In this there is a correspondence to the duration, the emergence, the extinction, of impressions on photographic preparations. Thus, I have seen landscapes and architectural views taken in Mexico developed, as artists say, months subsequently in New York—the images coming out, after the long voyage, in all their proper forms and in all their proper contrast of light and shade. The photograph had forgotten nothing. It had equally preserved the contour of the everlasting mountains and the passing smoke of a bandit-fire.

Are there, then, contained in the brain more permanently, as in the retina more transiently, the vestiges of impressions that have been gathered by the sensory organs? Is this the explanation of memory—the Mind contemplating such pictures of past things and events as have been committed to her custody. In her silent galleries are there hung micrographs of the living and the dead, of scenes that we have visited, of incidents in which we have borne a part? Are these abiding impressions mere signal-marks, like the letters of a book, which impart ideas to the mind? or are they actual picture-images, inconceivably smaller than those made for us by artists, in which, by the aid of a microscope, we can see, in a space not bigger than a pinhole, a whole family group at a glance?

The phantom images of the retina are not perceptible in the light of the day. Those that exist in the sensorium in like manner do not attract our attention so long as the sensory organs are in vigorous operation, and occupied in bringing new impressions in. But, when those organs become weary or dull, or when we experience hours of great anxiety, or are in twilight reveries, or are asleep, the latent apparitions have their vividness increased by the contrast, and obtrude themselves on the mind. For the same reason they occupy us in the delirium of fevers, and doubtless also in the solemn moments of death. During a third part of our life, in sleep, we are withdrawn from external influences; hearing and sight and the other senses are inactive, but the never-sleeping Mind, that pensive, that veiled enchantress, in her mysterious retirement, looks over the ambrotypes she has collected—ambrotypes, for they are truly unfading impressions—and, combining them together, as they chance to occur, constructs from them the panorama of a dream.

Nature has thus implanted in the organization of every man means which impressively suggest to him the immortality of the soul and a future life. Even the benighted savage thus sees in his visions the fading forms of landscapes, which are, perhaps, connected with some of his most pleasant recollections; and what other conclusion can be possibly extract from those unreal pictures than that they are the foreshadowings of another land beyond that in which his lot is cast? At intervals he is visited in his dreams by the resemblances of those whom he has loved or hated while they were alive; and these manifestations are to him incontrovertible proofs of the existence and immortality of the soul. In our most refined social conditions we are never able to shake off the impressions of these occurrences, and are perpetually drawing from them the same conclusions that our uncivilized ancestors did. Our more elevated condition of life in no respect relieves us from the inevitable operation of our own organization, any more than it relieves us from infirmities and disease. In these respects, all over the globe men are on an equality. Savage or civilized, we carry within us a mechanism which presents us with mementoes of the most solemn facts with which we can be concerned. It wants only moments of repose or sickness, when the influence of external things is diminished, to come into full play, and these are precisely the moments when we are best prepared for the truths it is going to suggest. That mechanism is no respecter of persons. It neither permits the haughtiest to be free from the monitions, nor leaves the humblest without the consolation of a knowledge of another life. Open to no opportunities of being tampered with by the designing or interested, requiring no extraneous human agency for its effect, out always present with every man wherever he may go, it marvelously extracts from vestiges of the impressions of the past overwhelming proofs of the realities of the future, and, gathering its power from what would seem to be a most unlikely source, it insensibly leads us, no matter who or where we may be, to a profound belief in the immortal and imperishable, from phantoms which have scarcely made their appearance before they are ready to vanish away.

The insect differs from a mere automaton in this, that it is influenced by old, by registered impressions. In the higher forms of animated life that registration becomes more and more complete, memory becomes more perfect. There is not any necessary resemblance between an external form and its ganglionic impression, any more than there is between the words of a message delivered in a telegraphic office and the signals which the telegraph may give to the distant station; any more than there is between the letters of a printed page and the acts or scenes they describe, but the letters call up with clearness to the mind of the reader the events and scenes.

An animal without any apparatus for the retention of impressions must be a pure automaton—it cannot have memory. From insignificant and uncertain beginnings, such an apparatus is gradually evolved, and, as its development advances, the intellectual capacity increases. In man, this retention or registration reaches perfection; he guides, himself by past as well as by present impressions; he is influenced by experience; his conduct is determined by reason.

A most important advance is made when the capability is acquired by any animal of imparting a knowledge of the impressions stored up in its own nerve-centres to another of the same kind. This marks the extension of individual into social life, and indeed is essential thereto. In the higher insects it is accomplished by antennal contacts, in man by speech. Humanity, in its earlier, its savage stages, was limited to this: the knowledge of one person could be transmitted to another by conversation. The acts and thoughts of one generation could be imparted to another, and influence its acts and thoughts.

But tradition has its limit. The faculty of speech makes society possible—nothing more.

Not without interest do we remark the progress of development of this function. The invention of the art of writing gave extension and durability to the registration or record of impressions. These, which had hitherto been stored up in the brain of one man, might now be imparted to the whole human race, and be made to endure forever. Civilization became possible—for civilization cannot exist without writing, or the means of record in some shape.

From this psychological point of view we perceive the real significance of the invention of printing—a development of writing which, by increasing the rapidity of the diffusion of ideas, and insuring their permanence, tends to promote civilization and to unify the human race.

In the foregoing paragraphs, relating to nervous impressions, their registry, and the consequences, that spring from them, I have given an abstract of views presented in my work on "Human Physiology," published in 1856, and may, therefore, refer the reader to the chapter on "Inverse Vision, or Cerebral Sight;" to Chapter XIV., Book I.; and to Chapter VIII., Book II.; of that work, for other particulars.

The only path to scientific human psychology is through comparative psychology. It is a long and wearisome path, but it leads to truth.

Is there, then, a vast spiritual existence pervading the universe, even as there is a vast existence of matter pervading it—a spirit which, as a great German author tells us, "sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, awakes in man?" Does the soul arise from the one as the body arises from the other? Do they in like manner return, each to the source from which it has come? If so, we can interpret human existence, and our ideas may still be in unison with scientific truth, and in accord with our conception of the stability, the unchangeability of the universe.

To this spiritual existence the Saracens, following Eastern nations, gave the designation "the Active Intellect." They believed that the soul of man emanated from it, as a rain-drop comes from the sea, and, after a season, returns. So arose among them the imposing doctrines of emanation and absorption. The active intellect is God.

In one of its forms, as we have seen, this idea was developed by Chakia Mouni, in India, in a most masterly manner, and embodied in the vast practical system of Buddhism; in another, it was with less power presented among the Saracens by Averroes.

But, perhaps we ought rather to say that Europeans hold Averroes as the author of this doctrine, because they saw him isolated from his antecedents. But Mohammedans gave him little credit for originality. He stood to them in the light of a commentator on Aristotle, and as presenting the opinions of the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools up to his time. The following excerpts from the "Historical Essay on Averroism," by M. Renan, will show how closely the Sarscenic ideas approached those presented above:

This system supposes that, at the death of an individual, his intelligent principle or soul no longer possesses a separate existence, but returns to or is absorbed in the universal mind, the active intelligence, the mundane soul, which is God; from whom, indeed, it had originally emanated or issued forth.

The universal, or active, or objective intellect, is uncreated, impassible, incorruptible, has neither beginning nor end; nor does it increase as the number of individual souls increases. It is altogether separate from matter. It is, as it were, a cosmic principle. This oneness of the active intellect, or reason, is the essential principle of the Averroistic theory, and is in harmony with the cardinal doctrine of Mohammedanism—the unity of God.

The individual, or passive, or subjective intellect, is an emanation from the universal, and constitutes what is termed the soul of man. In one sense it is perishable and ends with the body, but in a higher sense it endures; for, after death, it returns to or is absorbed in the universal soul, and thus of all human souls there remains at last but one—the aggregate of them all, life is not the property of the individual, it belongs to Nature. The end of, man is to enter into union more and more complete with the active intellect—reason. In that the happiness of the soul consists. Our destiny is quietude. It was the opinion of Averroes that the transition from the individual to the universal is instantaneous at death, but the Buddhists maintain that human personality continues in a declining manner for a certain term before nonentity, or Nirwana, is attained.

Philosophy has never proposed but two hypotheses to explain the system of the world: first, a personal God existing apart, and a human soul called into existence or created, and thenceforth immortal; second, an impersonal intelligence, or indeterminate God, and a soul emerging from and returning to him. As to the origin of beings, there are two opposite opinions: first, that they are created from nothing; second, that they come by development from pre-existing forms. The theory of creation belongs to the first of the above hypotheses, that of evolution to the last.

Philosophy among the Arabs thus took the same direction that it had taken in China, in India, and indeed throughout the East. Its whole spirit depended on the admission of the indestructibility of matter and force. It saw an analogy between the gathering of the material of which the body of man consists from the vast store of matter in Nature, and its final restoration to that store, and the emanation of the spirit of man from the universal Intellect, the Divinity, and its final reabsorption.

Having thus indicated in sufficient detail the philosophical characteristics of the doctrine of emanation and absorption, I have in the next place to relate its history. It was introduced into Europe by the Spanish Arabs. Spain was the focal point from which, issuing forth, it affected the ranks of intelligence and fashion all over Europe, and in Spain it had a melancholy end.

The Spanish khalifs had surrounded themselves with all the luxuries of Oriental life. They had magnificent palaces, enchanting gardens, seraglios filled with beautiful women. Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining-halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety. Wine was prohibited. The enchanting moonlight evenings of Andalusia were spent by the Moors in sequestered, fairy-like gardens or in orange-groves, listening to the romances of the story-teller, or engaged in philosophical discourse; consoling themselves for the disappointments of this life by such reflections as that, if virtue were rewarded in this world, we should be without expectations in the life to come; and reconciling themselves to their daily toil by the expectation that rest will be found after death—a rest never to be succeeded by labor.

In the tenth century the Khalif Hakein II. had made beautiful Andalusia the paradise of the world. Christians, Mussulmen, Jews, mixed together without restraint. There, among many celebrated names that have descended to our times, was Gerbert, destined subsequently to become pope. There, too, was Peter the Venerable, and many Christian ecclesiastics. Peter says that he found learned men even from Britain pursuing astronomy. All learned men, no matter from what country they came, or what their religious views, were welcomed. The khalif had in his palace a manufactory of books, and copyists, binders, illuminators. He kept book-buyers in all the great cities of Asia and Africa. His library contained four hundred thousand volumes, superbly bound and illuminated.