he last of writers, according to the different
estimates of sceptics or believers. The works of speculation or
science may be reduced to the four classes of philosophy, mathematics,
astronomy, and physic. The sages of Greece were translated and
illustrated in the Arabic language, and some treatises, now lost in
the original, have been recovered in the versions of the East, which
possessed and studied the writings of Aristotle and Plato, of Euclid and
Apollonius, of Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen. Among the ideal systems
which have varied with the fashion of the times, the Arabians adopted
the philosophy of the Stagirite, alike intelligible or alike obscure
for the readers of every age. Plato wrote for the Athenians, and his
allegorical genius is too closely blended with the language and religion
of Greece. After the fall of that religion, the Peripatetics, emerging
from their obscurity, prevailed in the controversies of the Oriental
sects, and their founder was long afterwards restored by the Mahometans
of Spain to the Latin schools. The physics, both of the Academy and the
Lycaeum, as they are built, not on observation, but on argument, have
retarded the progress of real knowledge. The metaphysics of infinite,
or finite, spirit, have too often been enlisted in the service of
superstition. But the human faculties are fortified by the art and
practice of dialectics; the ten predicaments of Aristotle collect and
methodize our ideas, and his syllogism is the keenest weapon of dispute.
It was dexterously wielded in the schools of the Saracens, but as it is
more effectual for the detection of error than for the investigation
of truth, it is not surprising that new generations of masters and
disciples should still revolve in the same circle of logical argument.
The mathematics are distinguished by a peculiar privilege, that, in the
course of ages, they may always advance, and can never recede. But the
ancient geometry, if I am not misinformed, was resumed in the same state
by the Italians of the fifteenth century; and whatever may be the
origin of the name, the science of algebra is ascribed to the Grecian
Diophantus by the modest testimony of the Arabs themselves. They
cultivated with more success the sublime science of astronomy, which
elevates the mind of man to disdain his diminutive planet and momentary
existence. The costly instruments of observation were supplied by the
caliph Almamon, and the land of the Chaldaeans sti