Thus we are told that when Abú Saäíd Abul­khair* and Abú Aly Seenā, (one the most accom­plished mystic of his age, and the other the greatest of modern philosophers,) were thrown into each other’s society, after separating, one said, “All that he sees I know,” — and the other said, “All that he knows I see.” The merits of this school, indeed, have never been questioned by any philosopher, but affirmed of all. Thus Aristotle says:* “These uni­versal assertions are as it were the ladder leading to a desired height; whoso wishes to master them (by demonstration) must first acquire another nature.” The divine Plato,* too, declared that he held a thousand propositions which he could not prove. Shaikh Abú Seenā says, in his Makāmāt ool Ârifína* (words to the wise), “He that wishes to know them must first graduate for entrance into the school of perception without presence — the school that arrives at the fountain head without being directed to its traces.” That sage divine Shahāb odín Maktúl,* who revived the canons of the old philosophers, tells us in his Tulwíhāt (inscriptions) — “In the vacancy of delight (for so in the idiom of that school they name abstraction* ) I beheld Aristotle, and proposed to him several niceties in the investigation of perception, which is among the most abstruse questions of philosophy. After which he fell to extolling his master Plato, and went great lengths in his praise: I inquired whether any of us moderns had reached as high a rank. He answered, No, nor to a seventy thousandth part of his excel­lence.* Thereupon I cited sundry philosophers of Islām, to none of whom he paid any attention, till I came to notice some of the school who look beneath the veil,* such as Janíd of Baghdad,* Abú Jazíd Bistāmi, and Sahal bin Abdalla Tústery. These, he said, are entitled to the name of philosophers, it is true — yet is this a course beset with sundry dangers and difficulties innumerable. Exposed to all the chances of infatuation, and the abysms of pas­sion, the wayfarer is led astray, by nugatory inquiries and false suppositions, over all the wilderness of investigation; and worst of all, when at some slight showing, like the mirage of the sandy desert which the thirsty man takes for water, he wanders from his path,* nor ever gives up pursuit, till, when he has gone he finds not any thing, and, when acquainted with its emptiness, disappointment and dejection are all he obtains:

Many a guide will enter the desert in noon-day heat, but few are they who can ensure arrival; and then a preceptor of this school (by which we are to under­stand one possessed of perfection and willing to impart it) is rarely to be met with; and the recog­nition of such a one (supposing him to exist) matter of debate and difficulty; for the human perfections are only to be recognised by one who is himself pos­sessed of them, just as the value of jewels is known only to a dealer in them.

The generality of men, led astray by fictitious form and unsubstantial exterior,

At times, too, it will happen that one is deceived at the very outset by some specious but spurious object, and wastes his life in the service of what is worth­less with the idea of its perfection, to the utter ruin of his character and fortune: God deliver us from inadvertence and delusion! Hence it was a practice with the early theorists to hold disputations with followers of the experimental road — a course essen­tial in the pursuit of self-purification; for, if entirely denuded of regular knowledge, the votary can never be secure from the opposite pitfalls of excess and deficiency, and can hardly avoid offences against reason and religion. In his ignorance, perchance, of the limits of equipoise, he may undertake too rigid an austerity, and so occasion the ruin of his constitution and the defeat of his capacity. Hence that declaration of his highness the director of both worlds* along the path of rectitude, — Never would God take the ignorant* for his servant; and again, There are two that I cannot support — the fool in his devotions, and the intelligent in his impieties.

Since it appears, then, that the accomplishment of the vice-regence (which is the end of man’s crea­tion) is connected and bound up with knowledge and practice, that science which proposes to ascer­tain the rules of conduct whereby this grand advan­tage is to be attained, may be considered the most important and most beneficial of any. Now this is practical wisdom, which philosophers have termed therapeutics of the mind;* because, by the knowledge this gives us, we are able to maintain the equipoise in man’s perfected mind; which answers to the maintenance of health in his body. And similarly, we are able to restore reasonable souls to their equipoise, in analogy with the removal of disease from their bodies. For bad qualities are diseases of the mind.

On this topic the particulars to be adduced are these. The eminence of any science lies either in the dignity of its subject, or in the importance of its object and the advantages derivable therefrom, or in closeness of demonstration and argument: in all three of which reasons this science is distinguished by peculiar properties. Its subject is no other than the reasonable soul of man — seeing that it is from this (under the guidance of reflection and will) that actions do entirely originate, whether good and praiseworthy, or vicious and culpable. Now, the eminence of man is clear from the tenour of the fore­going observations. Its end is to perfect this pearl of high order. And for advantage, what can be greater than that by means of which we elevate the human mind from the position of brute beasts, or lower than they, to a rank higher than the angels? Hence certain of the eminent* have termed it the philosopher’s stone; for the vilest of existent things, as a bad man is, may by these means reach a station more exalted than any other conceivable production: on which account it was that the ancient sages, whose wisdom had borrowed its lustre from the loop-hole of prophecy, directed the aspirant after excellence to commence with the science of moral culture;* to proceed next to logic;* next to mathe­matics; next to physics; and lastly, to theology. Hakím Abú Aly Mashkovi,* however, would place mathematics before logic, which seems the preferable course; for by practising itself in the former, the mind becomes stored with distinctions; the faculties of constancy and firmness are established; and its rule is always to distinguish between cavilling and investigation — between close reasoning and cross reasoning; for the contrary of all which habits those are for the most part noted who apply themselves to logic without studying in some department of mathematics; taking noise and wrangling for proficiency, and thinking refutation accomplished by the instancing of a doubt. This will explain the inscription placed by Plato over the door of his house: “whoso knows not the khuitarāt* (geometry), let him not enter here.” On the prece­dence of moral culture, however, to all the other sciences, the acknowledgment is general and the agreement entire.

It was a saying with the physician Hippocrates — “An unsound body, the more you nourish it, the more it increases in ailment:” which may be sig­nificative of a similar predicament in the mind; which, when not purified from vicious dispositions, experiences an augmentation of depravity by acquiring the truths of science; for it finds itself therein supplied with the material of pride and haughtiness, and empowered to carp at the good, and call the highest authorities in question. — Whereas the reason of so many students stopping short at the various stages of recusancy, secession, depravity, and ruin, is entirely this, that they do not act upon the proverb, — Enter the house by the doors thereof: — they do not exert themselves in the outset on the culture of the morals; but, having heard that knowledge delivers men from the bond of conformity, and exalts them to the dignity of investigation, and not knowing the proper meaning of the assertion, they entertain the absurd notion, that knowledge is to release them from the bonds of the institute, and absolve them from the established canons of the church. With this, not rising to any deliberate estimate, but actuated entirely by the calls of passion and propensities of nature, they divest themselves of the shackles of the institute, which, to the sincere wayfarers of improvement, are ornaments rather than bonds — turn like brute beasts with unblushing cheek to drink and pasture — and, like the ravenous ones, bite with tongues more sharp than teeth at the reputation of their coevals, and the honor of their masters and predecessors — men who are no less than the parents of their minds, and whose exertions must ever be gratefully acknowledged by the feelings of all genuine aspirants after perfection. Their next step is to renounce their belief in the miracles,* which is itself (as we are informed by the text — Stupidity is closer to deliverance, than intellect which innovates,) one method of salvation; and not having arrived at any certain conclusion, like him whom demons have deluded, they remain in perplexity upon the earth, fluctuating in the midst of it, and belonging neither to these nor those. Of them it comes (among other ill conse­quences) that wisdom — the wine of paradise — the well-spring of the waters of life — held up as it is in so many passages of Scripture, and Sunnah, as entitled to our reverence and our gratitude — is exposed, through the vile nature of these triflers, (who may be described as bringing all honor into dishonor,) to the reprobation* of its contemporaries: God deliver us and all the faithful from recusancy, and all other lapses in thought, word, and act: Power is not, nor strength, but in God; nor victory, except favour is displayed from God.

A certain difficulty there is which may chance to overspread the mental vision, and prevent us from discerning the Húri-like loveliness and angelic character of truths like these. This difficulty then it seems proper to examine, and endeavour its removal. It may thus be stated: the benefits of this art are then only to be realized when dispositions can be changed or altered — an hypothesis which is far from self-evident; its contrary being indeed more open to supposition; and from some expressions in the vehicles* of truth (as where the Prophet says — If ye hear that a mountain has changed its place, believe it: but if ye hear that a man has changed his disposition, believe it not; and again — He shall assuredly return to that for which he was created) — it follows by extension of the sense that change of disposition is altogether impossible. According, too to the principles of science, disposition follows temperament, and temperament we know is incapable of alteration; or if any one taking the opposite side should assert alteration of tempera­ment on account of the contrariety of temperament observable in a single individual during every year, nay, every instant, it may be replied, every one has a latitude of temperament intermediary between a determinate point of excess and a determinate point of deficiency; and that in every one of the four humours.* Now if a disposition enters into all the degrees of temperamental latitude, so that its cessa­tion would necessitate that of the person’s identity, (without which existence would be impossible,*) such a disposition undoubtedly it were wrong to attempt altering.

“No washing can whiten the Æthiop’s skin.”* Thus, among the sayings of the Prophet, we find the following: Men have their metal like the metal of gold and silver:* those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as they embrace it. Hence we are to conclude that the root of virtue is purity of substance and excellence of physical material; and that to endeavour after perfection, in spite of a coarse and mean original of nature, were like seeking to furbish glass into a ruby or emerald, or to polish iron into silver or gold, which of course is absurd.