the "Brothers of Purity,"
wandered out to the far West, to seek for appreciation among the Muslim,
Jews, and Christians of Spain. And for a brief time they found it there,
and in the twelfth century found also eloquent expounders at the
mosque-schools of Cordova, Toledo, Seville, and Saragossa. Of these the
most famous were Ibn Baja, Ibn Tufail, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).

During its progress, Muslim philosophy had gradually been eliminating
the Neo-Platonic, mystic element, and returning to pure Aristotelianism.
In Averroes, who professed to be merely a commentator on Aristotle, this
tendency reached its climax; and though he still regarded the
pseudo-Aristotelian works as genuine, and did not entirely escape their
influence, he is by far the least mystic of Muslim thinkers. The two
fundamental doctrines upon which he always insisted, and which long made
his name famous, not to say notorious, the eternity of matter and of the
world (involving a denial of the doctrine of creation), and the oneness
of the active intellect in all men (involving the mortality of the
individual soul and the impossibility of resurrection and judgment), are
both of Aristotelian origin. It was no wonder that he came into conflict
with the orthodox Muslim; for in the warfare between Arab prophetism,
with its shallow apologetic scholasticism, and Greek philosophy, with
its earnest endeavor to find truth, and its belief in reason as the sole
revealer thereof, he unhesitatingly took the side of the latter. He held
that man is made to discover truth, and that the serious study of God
and his works is the noblest form of worship.

However little one may agree with his chief tenets, there can be no
doubt that he was the most enlightened man of the entire Middle Age, in
Europe at least; and if his spirit and work had been continued, Western
Islam might have become a great permanent civilizing power. But here
again, after a brief period of extraordinary philosophic brilliancy,
fanaticism got the upper hand. With the death of Averroes the last hope
of a beneficent Muslim civilization came to an end. Since then, Islam
has been a synonym for blind fanaticism and cruel bigotry. In many parts
of the Muslim world, "philosopher" is a term of reproach, like
"miscreant."

But though Islam rejected its philosopher, Averroes's work was by no
means without its effect. It was through his commentaries on Aristotle
that the thought of that greatest of ancient thinke