A Compendium on the Soul

AVICENA’S OFFERING to the PRINCE
( Dante , Convito , III, 2.)
STAMPERIA DI NICOLA PADERNO S. Salvatore Corte Regia, 10 VERONA, ITALIA
BY Abû-'Aly al-Husayn Ibn 'Abdallah Ibn Sînâ: TRANSLATED, FROM THE ARABIC ORIGINAL, BY EDWARD ABBOTT van DYCK, WITH Grateful Acknowledgement of the Substantial Help OBTAINED From Dr. S. Landauer’s Concise German Translation, AND FROM James Middleton MacDonald’s Literal English Translation; AND PRINTED AT VERONA, ITALY, in THE YEAR 1906 , For the Use of Pupils and Students of Government Schools IN Cairo, Egypt .

Several sources out of which to draw information and seek guidance as to Ibn Sînâ’s biography and writings, and his systems of medicine and philosophy, are nowadays easily accessible to nearly every one. Among such sources the following are the best for Egyptian students:

The “Offering to the Prince in the Form of a Compendium on the Soul,” of which the present Pamphlet is my attempt at an English Translation, is the least known throughout Egypt and Syria of all Ibn Sînâ’s many and able literary works: indeed I have failed, after repeated and prolonged enquiry, to come across so much as one, among my many Egyptian acquaintances, that had even heard of it.
Doctor Samuel Landauer of the University of Strassburg published both the Arabic text, and his own concise German translation, of this Research into the Faculties of the Soul, in volume 29 for the year 1875 of the Z.d.D.M.G., together with his critical notes and exhaustively erudite confrontations of the original Arabic with many Greek passages from Plato, Aristotle, Alexander Aphrodisias, and others, that Ibn Sînâ had access to, it would appear, second hand, i.e. through translations. Doctor Landauer made use also of a very rare Latin translation by Andreas Alpagus, printed at Venice in 1546; and of the Cassel second edition of Jehuda Hallévy’s religious Dialogue entitled Khusari, which is in rabbinical Hebrew, and on pages 385 to 400 of which the views of “philosophers” on the Soul are set forth, Doctor Landauer having discovered to his agreeable surprise that those 15 pages are simply a word for word excerpt from this Research by Ibn Sînâ. For the Arabic text itself, he had at his command only two manuscript copies, the one, preserved in the Library at Leyden, being very faulty; and the other, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan, being far more accurate and correct.