(1). The Common Sense—the tablet of the mind. It is like the Prime Minister of the mind sending out five spies (external senses) to bring in news from the external world. When we say "this white thing is sweet", we perceive whiteness and sweetness by sight and taste respectively, but that both the attributes exist in the same thing is decided by the Common Sense. The line made by a falling drop, so far as the eye is concerned, is nothing but the drop. But what is the line which we see? To account for such a phenomenon, says Hādī, it is necessary to postulate another sense which perceives the lengthening of the falling drop into a line.
(2). The faculty which preserves the perceptions of the Common Sense—images and not ideas like the memory. The judgment that whiteness and sweetness exist in the same thing is completed by this faculty; since, if it does not preserve the image of the subject, Common Sense cannot perceive the predicate.
(3). The power which perceives individual ideas. The sheep thinks of the enmity of the wolf, and runs away from him. Some forms of life lack this power, e.g. the moth which hurls itself against the candle-flame.
(4). Memory—the preserver of ideas.
(5). The power of combining images and ideas, e.g. the winged man. When this faculty works under the guidance of the power which perceives individual ideas, it is called Imagination; when it works under the control of Intellect, it is called Conception.
But it is the spirit which distinguishes man from other animals. This essence of humanity is a "unity", not oneness. It perceives the Universal by itself, and the particular through the external and the internal senses. It is the shadow of the Absolute Light, and like it manifests itself in various ways—comprehending multiplicity in its unity. There is no necessary relation between the spirit and the body. The former is non-temporal and non-spatial; hence it is changeless, and has the power of judging the visible multiplicity. In sleep the spirit uses the "ideal body" which functions like the physical body; in waking life it uses the ordinary physical body. It follows, therefore, that the spirit stands in need of neither, and uses both at will. Hādī does not follow Plato in his doctrine of transmigration, the different forms of which he refutes at length. The spirit to him is immortal, and reaches its original home—Absolute Light—by the gradual perfection of its faculties. The various stages of the development of reason are as follows:—
A. Theoretical or Pure Reason—
1st Potential Reason.
2nd Perception of self-evident propositions.
3rd Actual Reason.
4th Perception of Universal concepts.
B. Practical Reason—
1st External Purification.
2nd Internal Purification.
3rd Formation of virtuous habits.
4th Union with God.
Thus the spirit rises higher and higher in the scale of being, and finally shares in the eternity of the Absolute Light by losing itself in its universality. "In itself non-existent, but existent in the eternal Friend: how wonderful that it is and is not at the same time". But is the spirit free to choose its course? Hādī criticises the Rationalists for their setting up man as an independent creator of evil, and accuses them of what he calls "veiled dualism". He holds that every object has two sides—"bright" side, and "dark" side. Things are combinations of light and darkness. All good flows from the side of light; evil proceeds from darkness. Man, therefore, is both free and determined.
But all the various lines of Persian thought once more find a synthesis in that great religious movement of Modern Persia—Bābism or Bahāism, which began as a Shī‘ah sect, with Mirzā ‘Alī Muḥammad Bāb of Shīrāz (b. 1820), and became less and less Islamic in character with the progress of orthodox persecutions. The origin of the philosophy of this wonderful sect must be sought in the Shī‘ah sect of the Shaikhīs, the founder of which, Shaikh Aḥmad, was an enthusiastic student of Mulla Ṣadrā's Philosophy, on which he had written several commentaries. This sect differed from the ordinary Shī‘ahs in holding that belief in an ever present Medium between the absent Imām (the 12th Head of the Church, whose manifestation is anxiously expected by the Shī‘ahs), and the church is a fundamental principle of the Shī‘ah religion. Shaikh Aḥmad claimed to be such a Medium; and when, after the death of the second Shaikhī Medium—Ḥājī Kāzim, the Shaikhīs were anxiously expecting the manifestation of the new Medium, Mirzā ‘Alī Muḥammad Bāb, who had attended the lectures of Ḥājī Kāzim at Karbalā, proclaimed himself the expected Medium, and many Shaikhīs accepted him.
The young Persian seer looks upon Reality as an essence which brooks no distinction of substance and attribute. The first bounty or self-expansion of the Ultimate Essence, he says, is Existence. "Existence" is the "known", the "known" is the essence of "knowledge"; "knowledge" is "will"; and "will" is "love". Thus from Mulla Ṣadrā's identity of the known and the knower, he passes to his conception of the Real as Will and Love. This Primal Love, which he regards as the essence of the Real, is the cause of the manifestation of the Universe which is nothing more than the self-expansion of Love. The word creation, with him, does not mean creation out of nothing; since, as the Shaikhīs maintain, the word creator is not peculiarly applicable to God alone. The Quranic verse, that "God is the best of creators",[188:1] implies that there are other self-manifesting beings like God.
