IV. The translation of this abstruse and elaborate work was undertaken principally in order to illustrate and exemplify the resources of Persian literature, with a view to their bearing upon a question of great practical importance in our Eastern possessions. Of late years it has become a favourite position with those who know not how to explain by any more modest or humane theory the social degradation of the Asiatic people, to attribute it to some radical error in their scientific systems; in other words, to a want of average capacity in the inhabitants of that half of the globe to which the supposers do not happen to belong. The consequences they deduce are worthy of the liberality of their premises, — that Asiatic learning must be extirpated root and branch, and replaced by that of Europe. Now with such a treatise as the present in our hands, we might be excused, perhaps, if we overlooked the fallacy on which the conclusion proceeds, and chose to retort the charge of incapacity on the opposite side. Here, we might say, is a work of the fifteenth century, displaying a knowledge of the nature, and an enthusiasm in the cause of virtue, which will render it a delightful and improving study, as long as duty and inclination continue to contest the world. What European work of the same æra, as richly laden, as widely known, and as long sur­viving, will you venture to weigh against it? Political convulsions cut short the flattering promise of further improvement; but as long as the opportunity was given, where will you find a richer harvest?

Such, however, is not the warfare of a minority. Until the general mind is better qualified to enter on such a discussion with the impartiality it requires, we must leave the diversities of Muhammedan literature to work their own way in public estimation, and take our stand on the surer ground of its resemblances.

From a comparison of the present work with the authorities it professes to consult, it appears that Muham­medan philosophy is neither more nor less than Grecian philosophy in an Eastern garb; a twin offspring of that common parent from which the sciences of Europe are proud to acknowledge their derivation. Admitting that for the last two hundred years, the period during which these latter have made their greatest advance, the former has been comparatively stationary, the two systems must still have so much in common, as to make it mere con­tradiction to speak of establishing either on the ruins of the other — of destroying that which, properly used, will be found to afford the best and safest means of effecting the purpose for which it is destroyed.

But with sciences (which are near akin to institutions) the question is not merely what had better be done, but what can be done. The processes of developement, to be genuine, must be voluntarily or rather spontaneously con­ducted. Where mental relations are formed and mental systems transferred, previous analogies must subsist in order to make them applicable; and in the instance of Greeks and Arabs we trace them in the resemblance of their early national traits. The predatory habits and generous cast of feeling — the government fluctuating between the paternal and fraternal forms — the national independence maintained for ages in defiance of the great powers by whom they were successively assailed — the prevalence of the imaginative, the traditional, and the mysterious — the airy kingdoms of antediluvian beings — the swarms of genii retreating from the visible creation and the face of lordly man, only to lead a more congenial existence in the hidden powers and principles of nature — the hosts of heavenly messengers ever on the wing to comfort or admonish an erring but still favoured race — the tribes of birds and animals softening and hallowing the course of life by the moral lessons fabulously asso­ciated with their habits and appearances — these, the primitive characteristics of either people, require only a little adjustment of names and instances, in order to be at once identified with a counterpart in the other. From these princely savages it is, and from that purified abstract of their principles and feelings which the laws of Muhammad present, that all the races and ages of Islām have taken their form and character. As if to maintain the analogy after as well as before the point of social organization, corresponding to the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks we have the Súfyism of the Muhammedans; a tran­script probably of the same doctrine, concealed by a phraseology which rendered the secret little less impene­trable than the imposing mechanism of the mystagogues. The transfusion of science from one to the other of these two people was the introduction of nothing but formulæ and processes. The rudiment — the element — the embryo — was there ungiven; ready in the one case as in the other, on the application of the requisite means, to unfold itself into progressive maturity.

What resemblance, what analogy, has the cold and gloomy spirit of the North to offer in furtherance of a similar union — now too, when its nations have outlived the first tendencies of their rudiments — when the influence of the elements themselves seems lost and overwhelmed in the uniform pressure of intense civilization? One, and one only — the pre-constituted affinity of their speculative systems in virtue of a common and intermediate origin. Singularly enough, then, this futile endeavour to unite the people of the East and West by depriving the former of their intellectual treasures, turns out to be an attack against a bond of union most providentially provided already, and the only one of which the parties are readily susceptible. As Greece was the border or neutral ground upon which the opposite elements of Asiatic and Euro­pean character resolved themselves into harmony, so Grecian science, the offspring of this intellectual concert, is still the moral mean or menstruum of its maintenance at other times and places. The Asiatic treatises and tongues in which this science is modelled after eastern prepossessions, instead of being extirpated as superfluous, should be cherished as the best and only vehicles of an invaluable sympathy not otherwise to be obtained.

V. Of the following sample of such treatises — the earliest ever given to the modern world — it is only on these casual and limited grounds that the importance admits of debate. We have here an analysis of the motives and opinions by which a third part of the human race have for ages been actuated — and this an analysis coming to us under no less authenticity than that of their own acknowledgment. To all who are anxious to elicit truth by a comparison of the varying forms and phases of national persuasion — all who are interested in tracing the fortunes and characters of men in the different scenes and periods of their development — all who would pretend to decipher the phenomena of eastern politics, or apply to the future the great lessons of the past, — to all these and such as these the Muhammedans’ own exposition of their own rules and aspirations has a meaning which is not to be misunderstood. Indeed it is the peculiar privilege of this class of writings, that their value as pieces of political evidence, is utterly independent of their value as pieces of reasoning. Let the reasoning be ever so false, many great purposes are answered by displaying its falseness. Man’s progress towards truth is only an infinite rejection of error, every established instance of which is a contribution to the other. We may be startled sometimes by the wide contrast, sometimes by the great resemblance, in foreign practices and opinions to our own; but each will in turn afford us means for better knowing, and more highly valuing, the privileges of national superiority. And if the benefits derivable from such inquiries should, in some cases, seem to argue in the institutions of other people, a larger share of intrinsic excellence than we were pre­viously prepared to allow, let us shrink neither from the admission, if just, nor the obligation, if offered. It is only the common tax which all must pay who continue to form parts of this material system, where the very highest natures are often deeply indebted to the very lowest, and where benefits are not so much the acts of those who (often unconsciously) confer them, as of that hidden cause by which both material and process are provided. Let us pass then to the consideration of some instances of this debateable class; in dwelling upon which the scope and nature of the work will receive an illustration, not, it is hoped, less appropriately ushered, from appearing in connexion with the purposes to which they may be applied.

VI. First and foremost it may be read as a comment and complement to those old writers of whose works it professes to be a digest. The Grecian masters never exhausted a subject. “The world was all before them where to choose;” and before they had well cleared one division, they were called off to deal with another, and so on till the circle was complete; the connexion of all with each preventing the exclusive cultivation of any. Hence though their gigantic fragments are still the admiration of the world, nothing has descended to us at once so com­prehensive and so unique as the present treatise; which, constructed undeniably from their materials, may be received, in the absence of any genuine work, as a far and faint reflection of wisdom in the olden time. Treatises of this compendious and complete character subsisted, there can be no doubt, in the second age of Grecian philosophy; most probably indeed subsisted in such numbers, as to prevent the superlative celebrity of any, and thus occasion the neglect and loss of all. Not only then may the work before us be a resemblance of more valuable and authentic compilations, but it may well, in some measure, be a copy of them. For if they existed, (and they must have existed,) where might they more probably be brought to light than in the schools and libraries of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, the haunts alike of Grecian and Muhammedan philosophy? The eighth Section, in particular, should be read with reverence as a representative of treatises, composed, we learn from Cicero and Horace,* by the standard Peripatetics, on the very same subject.

This element of antiquity we may expect to recognise with greater ease, and recover in greater purity, when we consider the veneration, approaching to servility, with which every succeeding generation of Muhammedan schoolmen have invariably regarded the great body of their predecessors; and particularly (after the merits of these had been discovered) the masters of Grecian phi­losophy. Where they have happened to innovate, it has been insensibly and unconsciously done, not as corrective, but supplementary, to science as before subsisting. This modest and unostentatious mode of proceeding renders it less necessary, as well as less easy, to specify the instances in which it is their merit, or may be their fault, to differ with their originals. But there is at least one improve­ment, not so much in the fabric of the ideal structure as in the means of man’s access to it, which redounds to the credit of their philosophy, if not of its teachers. Without at all abandoning the supremacy of mind over matter, they abandoned the false refinement of arguing upon the first as if it could be, or ought to be, entirely uninfluenced by the other. “Of a compound being,” says the younger Sherlock, “the happiness is not to be secured by attention to a single element;” and of course the argument is good against the entire neglect of either. It is not to be supposed, that the great men who first promulgated the canons of Truth intentionally committed the oversight, or would not have provided against it, if the state of science had permitted them to combine as well as analyze: but so it was, that being necessarily most engrossed in the more important and abstruse constituent, the materials which they left to their successors were such as insensibly led these to conclusions repugnant to the true interests of man, because formed upon premises incommensurate with his entire nature. Beings who were to live in the world, if not for it, and to act and feel from and through matter, if not by it, were gravely told that the world and its events — the body and its necessities — were nothing to them; and taught (by implication) to consider it their first duty to defy society rather than support it. The incorrectness of these impracticable standards was detected at an early period by one himself not exempt from their influence. In his dialogue on Friendship, Tully casually remarks, that the wise man of the Stoics, if ever realized, would be little better than a block of wood or stone.* Nor was this all. The abuse of virtue brought virtue itself into disesteem; and whatever may have been the case with Epicurus, his followers, at least, pushed into the other excess, and exposed the lesser error only to fall into the graver one themselves. If any school was free from this deception it was that of the Peripatetics; in adopting and maturing the principles of which, while they entirely abandoned the rest, the Arabs must be allowed to have reformed as well as restored the most valuable productions of human thought. Small as might have been the difficulty, or may still be the credit of the achievement, the fact itself constitutes an æra in the history of mind. How far the monks of Europe, in their blind veneration for languages which to them were sacred, could have eradicated the fallacy as effectually as these fanatic voluptuaries, had learning been restored by its natural channels, instead of passing through the acumen of these last, — and how far in consequence we may be said to owe our emancipation from this dangerous delusion to the works of which the following is a specimen, — is one of those questions which may be thrown out for future discussion.

Thus much of the Arab school in the capacity of adver­sary to that one of which it is itself contented to be the expositor and handmaid. It is in this latter form that something more remains to be said of it, as a repository of illustration to the works of antiquity. Some instances of its efficacy for such a purpose may be found in the following pages, where the bald assertions of Herodotus are occasionally clad with meaning,* the authenticity of Xenophon* corroborated, and the triumphs of Cicero’s* genius recognised in a quarter of the world to which it has been hitherto supposed the influence of the Latin school had never found a path. These however do but illustrate the nature of the materials — the adequate use of them would require an erudition of the amplest and pro­foundest class. It is only in the writings of the lower classics — among the historians of the Byzantine Empire — that these comparisons can be worthily conducted. The best comment on any age is to be found in the state of the succeeding one. We should mount from the known to the unknown, from the present to the past. The more distant the epoch may be, the greater, à priori, is the difficulty of apprehending its peculiarities. If the time should ever come when the conflicting statements of the Eastern and Western historians shall be digested into one harmonious whole, and the naked summary of political facts be forced to yield to clear and consistent evidence of social condition, it will be brought about by the combined study of the manners and institutions of both people — by interpreting the representations which each gives of the other by the light of the other’s admissions, and using the result to correct the representations which each gives of themselves; — in fact, by an extended application of the knowledge which this very treatise may afford, if it ever attracts the attention of scholars who are competent to deal with its resources.