Passing over the names of Sarakhsī[26:2], Fārābī who was a Turk, and the Physician Rāzī (d. 932 A.D.) who, true to his Persian habits of thought, looked upon light as the first creation, and admitted the eternity of matter, space and time, we come to the illustrious name of Abu ‘Alī Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ya‘qūb, commonly known as Ibn Maskawaih—the treasurer of the Buwaihid Sultān ‘Ad̤aduddaula—one of the most eminent theistic thinkers, physicians, moralists and historians of Persia. I give below a brief account of his system from his well known work Al-Fauz al-Aṣghar, published in Beirūt.
1. The existence of the ultimate principle.
Here Ibn Maskawaih follows Aristotle, and reproduces his argument based on the fact of physical motion. All bodies have the inseparable property of motion which covers all forms of change, and does not proceed from the nature of bodies themselves. Motion, therefore, demands an external source or prime mover. The supposition that motion may constitute the very essence of bodies, is contradicted by experience. Man, for instance, has the power of free movement; but, on the supposition, different parts of his body must continue to move even after they are severed from one another. The series of moving causes, therefore, must stop at a cause which, itself immovable, moves everything else. The immobility of the Primal cause is essential; for the supposition of motion in the Primal cause would necessitate infinite regress, which is absurd.
The immovable mover is one. A multiplicity of original movers must imply something common in their nature, so that they might be brought under the same category. It must also imply some point of difference in order to distinguish them from each other. But this partial identity and difference necessitate composition in their respective essences; and composition, being a form of motion, cannot, as we have shown, exist in the first cause of motion. The prime mover again is eternal and immaterial. Since transition from non-existence to existence is a form of motion; and since matter is always subject to some kind of motion, it follows that a thing which is not eternal, or is, in any way, associated with matter, must be in motion.
2. The Knowledge of the Ultimate.
All human knowledge begins from sensations which are gradually transformed into perceptions. The earlier stages of intellection are completely conditioned by the presence of external reality. But the progress of knowledge means to be able to think without being conditioned by matter. Thought begins with matter, but its object is to gradually free itself from the primary condition of its own possibility. A higher stage, therefore, is reached in imagination—the power to reproduce and retain in the mind the copy or image of a thing without reference to the external objectivity of the thing itself. In the formation of concepts thought reaches a still higher stage in point of freedom from materiality; though the concept, in so far as it is the result of comparison and assimilation of percepts, cannot be regarded as having completely freed itself from the gross cause of sensations. But the fact that conception is based on perception, should not lead us to ignore the great difference between the nature of the concept and the percept. The individual (percept) is undergoing constant change which affects the character of the knowledge founded on mere perception. The knowledge of individuals, therefore, lacks the element of permanence. The universal (concept), on the other hand, is not affected by the law of change. Individuals change; the universal remains intact. It is the essence of matter to submit to the law of change: the freer a thing is from matter, the less liable it is to change. God, therefore, being absolutely free from matter, is absolutely changeless; and it is His complete freedom from materiality that makes our conception of Him difficult or impossible. The object of all philosophical training is to develop the power of "ideation" or contemplation on pure concepts, in order that constant practice might make possible the conception of the absolutely immaterial.
3. How the one creates the many.
In this connection it is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to divide Ibn Maskawaih's investigations into two parts:—
(a) That the ultimate agent or cause created the Universe out of nothing. Materialists, he says, hold the eternity of matter, and attribute form to the creative activity of God. It is, however, admitted that when matter passes from one form into another form, the previous form becomes absolutely non-existent. For if it does not become absolutely non-existent, it must either pass off into some other body, or continue to exist in the same body. The first alternative is contradicted by every day experience. If we transform a ball of wax into a solid square, the original rotundity of the ball does not pass off into some other body. The second alternative is also impossible; for it would necessitate the conclusion that two contradictory forms e.g. circularity and length, can exist in the same body. It, therefore, follows that the original form passes into absolute non-existence, when the new form comes into being. This argument proves conclusively that attributes i.e., form, color, etc., come into being from pure nothing. In order to understand that the substance is also non-eternal like the attribute, we should grasp the truth of the following propositions:—
