ith an English translation by B.H. Ascher, in London, in 1859. In his
poetry, which, like that of other mediaeval Hebrew poets, Moses ben Ezra,
Judah Halevy, etc., is partly liturgical, partly worldly, he abandons
native forms, such as we find in the Psalms, and follows artificial
Arabic models, with complicated rhythms and rhyme, unsuited to Hebrew,
which, unlike Arabic, is poor in inflections. Nevertheless, many of his
liturgical pieces are still used in the services of the synagogue, while
his worldly ditties find admirers elsewhere. (See A. Geiger, 'Ibn
Gabirol und seine Dichtungen,' Leipzig, 1867.)

The philosophy of Ibn Gabirol is a compound of Hebrew monotheism and
that Neo-Platonic Aristotelianism which for two hundred years had been
current in the Muslim schools at Bagdad, Basra, etc., and which the
learned Jews were largely instrumental in carrying to the Muslims of
Spain. For it must never be forgotten that the great translators and
intellectual purveyors of the Middle Ages were the Jews. (See
Steinschneider, 'Die Hebraeischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters, und
die Juden als Dolmetscher,' 2 vols., Berlin, 1893.)

The aim of Ibn Gabirol, like that of the other three noted Hebrew
thinkers, Philo, Maimonides, and Spinoza, was--given God, to account for
creation; and this he tried to do by means of Neo-Platonic
Aristotelianism, such as he found in the Pseudo-Pythagoras,
Pseudo-Empedocles, Pseudo-Aristotelian 'Theology' (an abstract from
Plotinus), and 'Book on Causes' (an abstract from Proclus's 'Institutio
Theologica'). It is well known that Aristotle, who made God a "thinking
of thinking," and placed matter, as something eternal, over against him,
never succeeded in bringing God into effective connection with the world
(see K. Elser, 'Die Lehredes Aristotles ueber das Wirken Gottes,'
Muenster, 1893); and this defect the Greeks never afterward remedied
until the time of Plotinus, who, without propounding a doctrine of
emanation, arranged the universe as a hierarchy of existence, beginning
with the Good, and descending through correlated Being and Intelligence,
to Soul or Life, which produces Nature with all its multiplicity, and so
stands on "the horizon" between undivided and divided being. In the
famous encyclopaedia of the "Brothers of Purity," written in the East
about A.D. 1000, and representing Muslim thought at its best, the
hierarchy takes this form: God, Intelligence, Soul, Primal Matter,
Secondary M