Part 9 (1/2)
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 G.o.d.
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 G.o.d; from whom, indeed, it had originally emanated or issued forth.
The universal, or active, or objective intellect, is uncreated, impa.s.sible, 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 G.o.d.
The individual, or pa.s.sive, or subjective intellect, is an emanation from the universal, and const.i.tutes 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 nonent.i.ty, or Nirwana, is attained.
Philosophy has never proposed but two hypotheses to explain the system of the world: first, a personal G.o.d existing apart, and a human soul called into existence or created, and thenceforth immortal; second, an impersonal intelligence, or indeterminate G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.logy 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 wa.s.sail 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.
Throughout the Mohammedan dominions in Asia, in Africa, and in Spain, the lower order of Mussulmen entertained a fanatical hatred against learning. Among the more devout--those who claimed to be orthodox--there were painful doubts as to the salvation of the great Khalif Al-Mamun--the wicked khalif, as they called him--for he had not only disturbed the people by introducing the writings of Aristotle and other Greek heathens, but had even struck at the existence of heaven and h.e.l.l by saying that the earth is a globe, and pretending that he could measure its size. These persons, from their numbers, const.i.tuted a political power.
Almansor, who usurped the khalifate to the prejudice of Hakem's son, thought that his usurpation would be sustained if he put himself at the head of the orthodox party. He therefore had the library of Hakem searched, and all works of a scientific or philosophical nature carried into the public places and burnt, or thrown into the cisterns of the palace. By a similar court revolution Averroes, in his old age--he died A.D. 1193--was expelled from Spain; the religious party had triumphed over the philosophical. He was denounced as a traitor to religion.
An opposition to philosophy had been organized all over the Mussulman world. There was hardly a philosopher who was not punished. Some were put to death, and the consequence was, that Islam was full of hypocrites.
Into Italy, Germany, England, Averroism had silently made its way.
It found favor in the eyes of the Franciscans, and a focus in the University of Paris. By very many of the leading minds it had been accepted. But at length the Dominicans, the rivals of the Franciscans, sounded an alarm. They said it destroys all personality, conducts to fatalism, and renders inexplicable the difference and progress of individual intelligences. The declaration that there is but one intellect is an error subversive of the merits of the saints, it is an a.s.sertion that there is no difference among men. What! is there no difference between the holy soul of Peter and the d.a.m.ned soul of Judas?
are they identical? Averroes in this his blasphemous doctrine denies creation, providence, revelation, the Trinity, the efficacy of prayers, of alms, and of litanies; he disbelieves in the resurrection and immortality; he places the summum bonum in mere pleasure.
So, too, among the Jews who were then the leading intellects of the world, Averroism had been largely propagated. Their great writer Maimonides had thoroughly accepted it; his school was spreading it in all directions. A furious persecution arose on the part of the orthodox Jews. Of Maimonides it had been formerly their delight to declare that he was ”the Eagle of the Doctors, the Great Sage, the Glory of the West, the Light of the East, second only to Moses.” Now, they proclaimed that he had abandoned the faith of Abraham; had denied the possibility of creation, believed in the eternity of the world; had given himself up to the manufacture of atheists; had deprived G.o.d of his attributes; made a vacuum of him; had declared him inaccessible to prayer, and a stranger to the government of the world. The works of Maimonides were committed to the flames by the synagogues of Montpellier, Barcelona, and Toledo.
Scarcely had the conquering arms of Ferdinand and Isabella overthrown the Arabian dominion in Spain, when measures were taken by the papacy to extinguish these opinions, which, it was believed, were undermining European Christianity.