Note 49 — ERRATUM. p. 78, note 1, l. 19; for “were in orders, for the most part in holy orders;” read “were generally speaking in holy orders;”

The “Arabs” were a mixed throng of orientals; some of them were Aryans, as the Persians and Nestorians; some were Arabs, Syrians, or Hebrews. The Nestorians were eminent as physicians, and it is interesting to this College to know that one of the best translators of Aristotle into Arabic was Johannitius, a Nestorian physician. The Eastern peoples, as the Western, owed all to the Greeks except a double measure of dialectical ingenuity, which was their own, and is their own to-day. By the incisive methods of Aristotle the Christian neo-platonists had been variously carved into heretics—such as the Monophysites; and these when driven eastwards carried Greek to Edessa and Bagdad: from these centres it was, and from Nisibur in Persia and elsewhere, that the “Saracens” drew their culture. Aristotle was first translated into Arabic in the reign of Al Mansur, the son of Harûn al Raschid (813-833); Avicenna carried the Aristotelian encyclopedia to its culmination; and Cordova in the tenth century was as full of fervid disciples as was Paris in the thirteenth. The Arabian medicine was Aristotle and Galen. The Arabian philosophy was originally built upon the Alexandrian emanations and hypostases (the soul of the universe, intelligence the first of creatures, nature and mutability, and so forth). Essences and forms were produced, as the “intelligibilia” of “real” knowledge, till, as some one has wittily put it, “universals became almost palpable.” Avicenna indeed approached understanding from the senses, and Averroes accepted this right position; but he taught the permanent subsistence of intelligence, as a sphere in a hierarchy of spiritual principles independent of matter and persons. In no long time this was turned into the unity, as opposed to the individuality, of the soul; the universal soul dipping as it were into the individual, and at his death returning into the universal; a virtual denial of personal immortality. Hence the bitter defiance of Albert and St Thomas. The Averroistic doctrines were enthusiastically propagated on the other hand by that “malleus Ecclesiae Romanae” Frederick the Second (1212-1250). The Arabian science consisted in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and alchemy. Averroes it was who first asserted the independence of the spheres of science and religion; a division popular at the present day, and one which lent itself to many a convenient subterfuge, in Padua.