| TITLE PAGE | |
| DEDICATION | iii |
| PREFACE | v–x |
| PROLEGOMENA. | |
| I. Depreciation of Muhammedan systems — should now be at an end — II. Literary and political condition of Western Asia at the period when this work was produced — III. Derivation and growth of its materials — IV. Its bearings on the question of education in the East — V. Its general value as a piece of historical evidence — VI. Its power of illustrating Greek writers, and particularly those of the lower empire — VII. Its resemblance to the scholastic treatises of the middle ages — VIII. Importance of the moral canon it applies throughout — IX. Its subservience to religious objects — X. Its illustrations of Pantheism — sources of moral obligation — sketch of the Súfy metaphysics and their tendencies — indigenous to Asia — Muhammedan politics — their pressure upon the scientific classes | xv–lxiv |
| EXORDIUM. | |
| Praise of God, the Prophet, and the king — occasion, object, and material of the work — statement and division of the subject | 1–11 |
| INTRODUCTION. | |
| All things have their allotted end and province — that of man the vice-regence of God upon earth — his peculiar qualifications for the post — beyond those of other beings — even of the angels — to be realized by knowledge and practice — necessity of combining the two — the rule and method of pursuing them — it is the object of morals to set forth — consequent importance of the science — chief objection to it the immutability of character — discussed and overruled | 12–51 |
| BOOK I. THE INDIVIDUAL STATE. | |
| SECT. I. Sources of action — reason, desire, and resentment — proper adjustment of the three — virtues belonging to each — wisdom, equity, temperance, courage, — equity the paramount virtue — whether an element or a product? | 52–64 |
| SECT. II. Definitions of the generic virtues — must be realized in act — species of wisdom, of courage, of temperance, of equity | 65–87 |
| SECT. III. Counterfeit virtues under each of the four genera | 88–98 |
| SECT. IV. The vices — extremes of excess and deficiency — the mean of virtue, real and approximate — the generic vices — flightiness and stupidity, rashness and cowardice, lasciviousness and indifference, tyranny and servility | 99–111 |
| SECT. V. The divine nature a unity in distribution — proportion a recurrence of it — the rule of all excellence — proportions of equity — three preservatives of — three infractions of — anecdote of Malik Shāh — equity embodies all the virtues — its divisions — affection held to supersede equity | 112–145 |
| SECT. VI. Art an approach to nature — the order in which the powers are produced — should be that in which they are cultivated | 146–154 |
| SECT. VII. Natural proneness to evil — to be resisted — by avoiding temptation — practising blameless pursuits — and consulting others on the subject of our own defects | 155–168 |
| SECT. VIII. Genera of mental disease — excess, deficiency, and perversion of state in each of the three powers — influence of the body — methods of cure — application to instances — in the power of reason — perplexity — ignorance simple and compound — in the power of resentment — anger and its ten causes — faint-heartedness — fear, and especially fear of death — in the power of appetite — gluttony — lasciviousness — love — sorrow — envy | 169–244 |
| BOOK II. THE DOMESTIC STATE. | |
| SECT. I. Preparation and accumulation of food — requires the assistance of a partner — wife — children — servants — the five constituents of home — with home itself — how to be regulated | 245–250 |
| SECT. II. Variety of stores — money — income, its three sources — farming, trade, profession — compared — professions, how characterized — preservation of property — expenditure — its three divisions | 251–261 |
| SECT. III. Object of matrimony — rules for the choice of wives — for the management of them — plurality of wives indefensible — rules for the conduct of wives — divorce — Arab proverbs | 262–274 |
| SECT. IV. Suckling of children — naming them — training them — choice of an instructor — choice of a profession — cultivation of it — settlement of sons — education of daughters — manners — conversation — motion — meals | 275–298 |
| SECT. V. Rights of parents — how to be discharged — of parental friends | 299–303 |
| SECT. VI. Utility of menials — rules for selecting them — employing them — attaching them — dismissing them — slaves — national characteristics of | 304–311 |
| BOOK III. THE POLITICAL STATE. | |
| SECT. I. Perfection — instantaneous and progressive — means of effecting the latter — subserviency of other things to man — of men to each other — division of labour — diversity of qualification — inequality of property — generate dissension — Law and the Law-giver — the Executive — his functions — his art an aggregate of all arts | 312–328 |
| SECT. II. Affection perfects civilization — its analogy with attraction — natural or arbitrary — modes of the latter — between the young — between the virtuous — promoted by the Institute — between parties differently actuated — lover and loved — high and low — king and subject — father and son — orders of affection — between patron and patronized — Creator and created — the proper aim of intellect — creation an operation of intellect — predestination — Muhammedan Trinity — circuitous transition | 329–364 |
| SECT. III. Good and bad civilization — orders among the governed — degrees and process of perception — the treatment to be regulated accordingly — corrupt classes | 365–376 |
| SECT. IV. Grandeur of sovereignty — good and bad government — spirit of the age — qualifications for reigning — political harmony — empire of opinion — dissensions among adversaries — classes of the state — the learned — the martial — the mercantile — the agricultural, &c. — prevention the end of punishment — species of — rights and benefits — public and private wrongs — access to the sovereign — anecdotes of Pharaoh — rules for the sovereign — internal relations — external relations — how to prevent war — how to carry it on — sanctity of mercy | 377–416 |
| SECT. V. Rules for behaviour to those in authority | 417–426 |
| SECT. VI. Friendship ensures affection and its results — nature and value of — rules for commencing and conducting | 427–438 |
| SECT. VII. Intercourse with the remaining classes — enemies, secret and declared — moderation — indifferent parties — conciliation — inferiors — kindness | 439–449 |
| CONCLUSION OR EPILOGUE. | |
| PART I. Platonic Maxims on Ethics | 450 |
| PART II. Aristotelian Maxims on Politics | 452 |
| APPENDIX. The Laws of Harmony, omitted from Book I. Sect. v. | 458 |
| ADDENDA, &c. | 465 |
| INDEX | 471 |
| INDEX OF PROPER NAMES | 494 |
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE OTHER;
| “A portion at least of your precious opportunities you should contrive to rescue from the hand of Time the deceiver, and apply to the study of morals; — the essential aim and abstract of the whole round of science. The works of antiquity indeed, may not, in the present age, be procurable; but the study of the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry and Akhlāk-i-Jalāly will afford you ample occupation.” |
| Letter from the Minister of Akbar to the Khānkhānān or Commander in Chief, Inshāï Abul Fazl. Daftar I. Lett. 13. and Daftar II. Lett. 13. |
THE present production is not offered to the world as a full discharge of the ample promise of inquiry which the title-page exhibits, but only as that instalment of it, than which no writer seems disposed to offer, and few readers prepared to welcome, a fuller. The classical and the oriental scholar will each complain that much has been omitted in his own department, the want of which he may perhaps be ready to excuse, in consideration of the ready insight he obtains into the other: and if either should feel that what to him is the foreign ingredient could not be more plentifully scattered without overpowering his willingness to deal with it, he will perceive at the same time, that what to him is the congenial one could not be augmented without carrying proportionate disadvantage to many of the opposite faction. The literatures here exhibited in friendly juxtaposition have heretofore been cultivated with such hostile views, that a work which should propound in order to reconcile the highest mysteries of both, it is a question, not only who should execute, but how many would be found to comprehend.
Let it not however from this be understood that the Translator lays claim to any profounder erudition than he has here put forth, or indeed to any greater acquirement than his professional education and pursuits will readily explain. The work has rather executed itself than been executed by him; every department has grown up from suggestions which some other department supplied; and for this very reason it is, that the result is presented with greater confidence, as the aggregate of parts indispensable became mutually dependent. When the Writer undertook to occupy his leisure residence in England by translating a curious, and, in the East, a celebrated work, he little knew the magnitude of the task before him, or he should have shrunk alike from the labour and the pretension it involved. The first is now over; and will never be regretted by him, if he is here successful in deprecating all imputations of the last.
In the text of the version, at least, no responsibility has been incurred; not even that of selection: omission, however desirable in particular instances, has been carefully avoided, as tending to lower the authority of the whole; a few sentences of vague panegyric have been curtailed, as the asterisks denote; names and titles have been shortened and compressed; and benedictions which, by one of the most pleasing of oriental usages, invariably follow the names of distinguished persons, have been limited to the few occasions where the reader can sympathize with their expression. In the conclusion or epilogue of the work, which, for reasons, as there stated, applicable only to the people for whom it was composed, is of a fanciful and romantic cast, a few indifferent passages have been omitted, in order to relieve the tedium of that incongruous portion. With these trifling exceptions, the paraphrase is an exact counterpart of the original, even to the imitation of peculiarities, obscurities, and defects in style, — a fact which the reader is requested to bear in mind, as often as these present themselves to his remark.
The Notes have generally been drawn from direct reference to the originals referred to or transcribed; except in the case of an author, “quem fallere et effugere optimus est triumphus.” The quotations from Aristotle are taken only from Dr. Gillie’s translation of the Ethics. Much valuable information has been gained from other parts of the same work. Davis’s annotations on the Tusculan Disputations (Oxford, 1805,) have also afforded two or three important parallels. For the residue there is no boast in saying that the Writer is indebted solely to his own reading. Many of the most interesting references, (those to Galen and Hippocrates for instance,) after making several fruitless efforts to obtain access to the originals in the library of the British Museum, he laments to say he has been obliged to leave unauthenticated. But enough has been done to show how much more may be done by those who possess greater facilities for doing it.
A natural desire to cover the salient points of a literature that is little understood, and to enliven the course of discussions more addressed to the judgment than the taste, has led the Translator, in some instances, to enter upon debateable topics to a greater extent or a greater frequency than may prove agreeable to persons prepossessed with opinions of a different bent; — and if it should appear to these that the scale is sometimes inclined in favour of the absent party, when the evidence adduced is not decisive, let it be considered rather as a feint to promote inquiry, than as any deliberate defiance of received opinion. In most of these cases it will be found that, though judgment has been given, the issues were never fairly drawn; and to the advocates of a neglected cause it may be permitted to claim more than their due, where that is the only condition on which they will obtain as much.
It is to the Dissertation as well as to the Notes that these remarks are intended to apply. The questions opened in these speculative pleadings are often of vast and universal application. The familiarity with which they are approached need not be considered unbecoming in one of the élevés of Malthus and Mackintosh — the member of a profession, conversant, beyond all others, with first principles, because having little else to go by. The slenderness of the materials from which they are sometimes raised need not be objected to in the present state of Eastern knowledge, the interests of which, for many years to come, boldness will more promote than caution. In the ruin of Empires we dig for treasures concealed. The first step is to mark every spot where search may be feasibly conducted: to prosecute the mass of inquiry, and determine how far the hastiness of all the suppositions may be excused by the soundness of many, is the work of another and a later period.
I. IN an age when less communication and greater rivalry prevailed between the nations of the East and West, it was natural for each to regard the institutions of the other, and all that emanated from them, with depreciation and dislike. The lurking consciousness entertained on both sides, that either was involuntarily a debtor to the other, for social improvements of so important a character as to force their way into national use, either before national prejudice was awake to their origin or in spite of all the obstacles which such prejudice could oppose to their reception, must have tended to aggravate rather than appease this mutual irritation. To blind unreasoning animosity there is no greater spur than the suspicion that it is unjustly entertained; for to be compelled to condemn themselves is the keenest injury that antagonists can sustain from each other. At present the question of superiority is so fully determined in our favour, that on our side, at least, the jealousy should cease; and some readers would be indignant if they were told that its relics have any existence in their own minds. Yet if the attention which they would otherwise be disposed to pay to the subject matter of the following pages is, in the present instance, at all affected by the fact of oriental character and origin — if they suffer themselves to be repelled by the vague war-cries of heathenism and Muhammedan licentiousness, when they ought to be searching in the work itself to discover the extent to which these may really prevail, and the most hopeful means of correcting them as prevailing — they would do well to consider whether they may not be amenable to some such charge: whether, if the moral code here propounded, were that of some people equally misunderstood, but between whom and themselves no hostile feeling had ever prevailed, they would be equally indifferent to the sources of truth and the materials of amendment; and if not, whether the original bias is indeed so completely removed as the honor and interests of an intellectual age and country would seem to require. The mere rivalry so long and closely maintained by the Muslims, not so much with ourselves as with all the western nations, ought to be sufficient to bespeak our interest and attention, even if there were nothing else in their previous history or internal condition calculated to attract our notice. From the eighth to the sixteenth century the contest seemed to threaten the liberties of Europe. The Turkish and Egyptian dynasties — mere outposts of the great body of Islām — were able at different periods to encounter and baffle the united forces of Christendom; and while Europeans consoled themselves with imputing to their adversaries a social barbarism and vitiation inconsistent with their political power, they tacitly belied the flattering apology by borrowing1 that scholastic literature, which, however worthless as an end, was valuable enough as a means, to raise the borrowers to their present state of mental and physical superiority. Of a people once so distinguished in the opposite achievements of arts and arms, are the laws and habits of action to be counted among the contemptible phenomena of history? Look at their results as compared with those of other institutions; even (at one time) of our own. Are they worthy of authentic elucidation and remark? The following is their own exposition of them; formed in the age of their greatest prosperity, and received by their then most polished people as the completest ever produced.
II. During the infancy of the Osmānly empire, while its shocks were already felt to the remotest limits of Europe, but before it had completed the occupation of the fairest of European provinces, its energies were curbed and controlled on the east by the imposing aspect and vast resources of that great central monarchy, which, differing only in its limits and the blood of its ruling tribe, has always been paramount in the heart of Asia. In the days of which we speak it had lately been restored with unusual splendour by the arms of the great Timúr, and was still governed by the greatest of his descendants. The æra of Ulug Bēg and Husain Abulghāzy (or latter half of the fifteenth century) may indeed be considered as the Augustan age of Persian letters. Few potentates of that time but were themselves adepts in the learning they patronized. Ulug Bēg was a distinguished astronomer; Abulghāzy a poet and essayist of no mean rank. At the court of the latter, in particular, his excessive encouragement of the lighter literature to which he was devoted, had raised up a host of polished and enlightened writers, who seemed to make up, in elegance of expression and refinement of idea, for the want of that solidity and power, which is seldom to be found except in the train of re-action from the hardships of unmerited neglect. Over estimation proves in the end the most fatal form of discouragement.
While the Timúrian princes of this period were struggling with each other for paramount supremacy, or devoting themselves in supineness to an ostentatious rather than a wise cultivation of their subjects’ interests, a character of a far different school rose silently into power on their south-western frontier. This was Hasán Bēg, the representative of a house placed by Timúr in precarious authority over the province of Mesopotamia, and forced to depend for the maintenance of their position, not on the influence of a name, but on a perpetual and practical display of nature’s best title, the ability to maintain it. Called late in life, with the example of his brother’s inefficient reign before him, to defend a tottering throne against the assaults of surrounding powers, each his more than equal in all resources but those which lay within him, his short and triumphant administration presents a singular mixture of audacity and caution, each alternately pursued on their appropriate occasions to a successful issue, which stamps him as one of the most remarkable, though not (from the insignificance of his dominions) the most remarked, of the Asiatic potentates of his day. By this dexterous management of perilous junctures occurring in the early years of his short reign, two hostile princes, one of them the reigning Mogul, were captured and put to death; and such was the resolute demeanour he maintained, and the capacity on which it was known to rest, that Abulghāzy, the succeeding emperor, dreaded to attack though unable to conciliate him. His next attempt entitles him in some sort to be considered as an auxiliary of the Christian cause, being directed against the Turks, then hardened by yearly contests with the Hungarian chivalry, and led by the enterprising conqueror of Constantinople, Muhammad II. In an invasion of their empire he was repulsed; but the light in which he was held as an antagonist may be inferred from the fact, that his dominions were safe from reprisals as long as he was alive to defend them: and had his reign been one of longer duration, the words of the panegyrist2 who asserts his ability to become the paramount sovereign of Asia, might have been justified by the event.
Under the auspices of this prince, and in analogy, it may be said, as regards the prevailing literature of that period, with his political position, the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly” was produced: a work, which, in the importance of its subject matter, and the forcible character of its treatment and language, contrasts strongly with the empty elegance of the compositions most in vogue at the court of Abulghāzy. On this too, as on other occasions, the victory of letters proved more durable than that of arms. Long after the names and fortunes of their respective patrons had been consigned to the sepulchre of history, the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly” continued to afford delight and instruction to statesmen,3 while the polished essays of Kāshify and Suhaily were abandoned to the imitation of boys.
III. Those who are acquainted with the slow and laborious progress of human improvement, and who know how much more the individual is always indebted to the age than the age can be to the individual, will not be disposed to think less highly of the work when they are told that it is far from being an original one. Whether the knowledge of any writer or of any age can be said to be self-created, is a question that will recur in another place. For the present it will be sufficient to observe, that in modern Europe at least, where more has been done to solve the great problem of human felicity than at any previous epoch of the world, the successive changes of life and feeling have, all along, been only so many improved applications of what for ages have been given principles. In common then, at least, with the authorities to which we are all accustomed to appeal, the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly” is not the first but the best digest of the important topics on which it treats. The study of morals, indeed, being that which has the closest connexion with religious persuasions, was likewise that to which the attention of the Muhammedan world was earliest directed; and it seems that the stricter sciences were then recommended and introduced, only by the bearing they were found to possess upon this one.4 At a time when it would have been held impiety to propound any principles of conduct for which an authority could not be found in their Scripture texts, the ingenuity of the Muslim schoolmen was exercised in reducing to this simple standard the phenomena of a social state wholly different from that to which it had been intended to apply; and the result was, of course, a chaos of scholastic subtlety and jargon, which insensibly operated its own extinction.5 A simpler and sounder process came gradually into vogue; which was first to ascertain that course of action and that rule of duty which was most agreeable to the interests of the individual and the species, and, this being found, to assume it by self-evidence for that line of conduct which it must have been their Prophet’s object to instil. Having thus detached morals from religion, they found no difficulty in consulting and adopting the opinions of their predecessors in power, the Byzantine Greeks; and the works of pagan philosophers became the laws of action to a people who mastered half the world only to abolish paganism. Not only such universal authorities as Abú Nasar and Avicenna, but even the minor luminaries of provincial capitals, now made it their endeavour to compile and digest the systems of the Grecian masters (partly studied in translation, but more often transferred in extract from writer to writer,) into the form best reconcilable with the exigencies of their social system and the peculiarities of their religious belief. The most successful efforts of the entire people may be said to be concentrated in the work before us; but the treatise from which it more peculiarly originates is the “Kitāb-ul-Tahārat,” an Arabic work composed in the tenth century by Abú Aly Mashkovy, the minister of the imperial house of Búyah.6 The work being inaccessible in this country, we can only judge of it by what we find in its transcribers; but this is enough to convince us that it is an amalgam of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, carried out however to most minute practical applications, and this in a manner which leaves little doubt that the author, or those to whom he was indebted, had the benefit of lower classics not extant, or, at least, not in vogue among ourselves. Two centuries later it was translated into Persian, under the title of “Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry,” by the celebrated Nāsirodín Túsy; with the important addition, however, of treatises on the domestic and political states, mostly taken, we are assured, the first from Avicenna, the second from Abú Nasar,7 — themselves the most distinguished followers of the Grecian school. This improved compilation it is, which, re-written and revived with the additional acumen and experience of three more centuries, by a writer of whom no further particulars are at present known, again appears before us under the title of “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly. ” The comparative merits of these two latter works are characteristic of the æras in science to which the writers respectively belong: the first dealing more with principles than consequences — as clear and collected in the strength of his own convictions as he was diffident of the reception they might obtain from others — minute to satiety, and cautious to the sacrifice of his own advantages; — the second rather neglectful of fundamentals in his haste to arrive at that which they involved — impressing at a hazard on the reader’s mind that which was hardly ascertained in his own — familiar with mysteries which the other seldom ventured to approach, — and adorning them with an enthusiastic eloquence which the other was seldom at liberty to indulge in. This free and fervid character of treatment it is, as well as higher developement of subject, which more peculiarly qualifies the Jalāly for the task of advocating its own merits in the face of other nations, and winning, let us hope, for itself and others of its class, the tardy acknowledgment of an enlightened age. To those who are wise enough to welcome Truth on its own account, in whatever garb appearing, the Nāsiry might perhaps be the more valuable and congenial performance. But to most minds something is necessary to kindle as well as instruct. The Jalāly makes us sympathize as well as perceive. There is something Ciceronian in the veneration with which he encircles knowledge, and the delight with which he unveils it. He speaks not only with the certainty, but the exultation, befitting one, who strives to renew and perpetuate “the voice which has gone forth through all lands.”
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,8 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.9 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,10 the authenticity of Xenophon11 corroborated, and the triumphs of Cicero’s12 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.
VII. Another value the work may possess in the eyes of the curious, at least, inasmuch as it is a specimen — certainly a favourable but still a specific specimen — of those scholastic treatises by which the intellect of Europe was exercised and prepared for the paramount achievements of the present age. It happens, singularly enough, that the capture of Constantinople, and the dispersion of learning among the western states, synchronize within a few years with the publication of the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly.” So that at the very period when the earlier systems of moral philosophy were in course of communication to the confines of Europe, they were being promulgated afresh in Central Asia in the improved form given to them in the present compilation. Smile as we may at the crudity of their notions upon some points, and the extravagance of them upon others, there is an interest that must always attach to the ideal systems which have strongly influenced large portions of mankind, and our own progenitors among the number.
How far utility may combine with curiosity, and the wisdom of past ages be held to contain rules and maxims of conduct by which the wisdom of the present age need not disdain to profit, — is a question which those who glance over the version may answer for themselves. That which has once largely and permanently contributed to the interests of society must always contain something worthy of serious attention even from the most favoured and enlightened communities. Much as it is now the fashion to decry the moralists of the middle ages, there are certain imperishable monuments of their practical insight into the nature and interests of man to which the world is still paying an unconscious homage. The old English drama is the poetry of the Schools, originating just as the nation turned from its dormant to its active condition, and combining the advantages of both in a measure denied to the men of a more settled æra. The learning of the Schools, being inseparably associated with the monastic order and the papal religion, fell gradually into oblivion. But it was the learning of a shrewd and sagacious set of men — raised to influence on the condition of keeping watch over the follies and foibles of others — set apart from the common partnership of social life and social passion, that they might perform the condition with punctuality — and feeling that their position depended on the use they made of these advantages in studying, controlling, and improving their fellow men. Hence, in the writings of those who were early enough to profit by their influence, that unfailing richness of maxim and remark, which, when attributed, as it often erroneously is, to the individual acumen of the writers who repeat them, seems to indicate a more than mortal range of intelligence; — hence that consistent and dignified assertion of the eternal interests of man, which now falls with something akin to the majesty of revelation on the sickly impatience of an ambitious age. At present minds are disciplined by processes more congenial to the active and independent spirit of the times. But of moral expedients it often happens that the use is proportioned to the distastefulness. The wisdom which in Shakspeare we reverence is the immediate offspring of the scholastic morality which we despise; and well would it be in days like these, when passions are stimulated and restraints removed beyond all former precedent in the history of man, if we could be prevailed on to test and temper the knowledge of excitement by a reference to the sincerer knowledge of repose.
VIII. To go into any lengthened enumeration of the valuable but neglected lessons of antiquity that may here be recovered to the benefit of our own age, would be an endless and repulsive undertaking. But the purposes of a preliminary discourse would hardly be answered, if the reader’s attention were not especially directed to the great moral canon on which the practical part of the work is conducted,12 — the Aristotelian doctrine of extremes. In many respects the theory is open to objection. As it is only to be expressed and explained by the habitudes of matter, the dignity of the soul’s nature seems compromised when we resort to it. As it propounds a virtual proximity of right to wrong, the first principles of rectitude appear endangered by it. As it falls short of some of the highest forms of scriptural virtue, our hearts and consciences are at first dissatisfied when we examine it. For when we admit that propriety is determined by striking a balance between the claims of others and ourselves, we must first have admitted that there is an opposition between the two: whereas it is the great achievement of the science to establish their ultimate identity. For these reasons it is not surprising if the rule has been gradually dismissed from the minds of men in Christendom, conversant as they are with the laws and models of a superhuman excellence. And yet, when these objections are followed to their source, they terminate merely in this, that souls, being attached to bodies, are likewise restrained by them; and that not being able to do all we would, we make the nearest practicable approach to it. The fault is not in the standard, but in the objects to which it is applied. The modern rule of general consequences, the consistent developement of which constitutes an æra in the science of morals, is liable no less to the same line of invalidation, from which it must be delivered by similar means. Let the great rule of Christian charity be followed rigidly and literally out, and it will lead to a community of property. By reasoning on general consequences we learn that a community of property cannot be maintained; that any persevering attempt to establish it would be fatal to all habits of order and unanimity, charity itself being one of them: and therefore that charity is best pursued by adhering in the first place to the habits and institutions without which it could not be realized even in its present imperfect form.13 The contradiction then is only apparent; and we are bound, in some sort, to contravert the final aim, in order to secure the nearest possible approach to it. So in the theory of extremes. The limit that we abandon is one that we cannot attain: and if we attempt to attain it, we destroy the modification we secure by its abandonment. There are higher forms of virtue in which this expression seems to disappear; but on closer examination, it will be found still to possess a latent subsistence, and one that must be admitted to real estimation before any practical results can be obtained.
Thus tempered by the limitations which its nature requires, this formula will be found to present advantages, which, though not co-extensive with those of the modern standard, are, in their own sphere and for their own purposes, unequalled. The law of general consequences comprehends every thing; and, for that very reason, may sometimes comprehend too much. The elements may be too vast, the relations too complicated, to find a ready expression in the minds of young and partially informed inquirers. The law of extremes is liable to no such inconvenience; or at least a far slighter one: its operations are confined to a single line; those of the other extend over innumerable ones: its elements may be found without travelling beyond our own experience; those of the other must be gathered from points with which we have no, or only a fallacious, acquaintance. The law of consequences, in its severe indifference to the circumstances of the particular instance, is likely to dishearten its adherent, and end by losing him altogether. The law of extremes adapts itself to every variety of situation; and, professing only to be a re-statement of private interest, is sure to be applied, even in the lowest fluctuations of the moral sense. The law of consequences, as it dwells more on the interests of others than our own, tends to give false ideas of the insignificance of these latter. It contains no sufficient security against that most treacherous and pernicious form of error, extravagance in right; which the law of extremes, by the very terms of its nature, is certain to prevent.
Let it not be supposed that it is the aim of these observations to detract from the value of the modern standard, the very imperfections of which have themselves a sort of merit; inasmuch as the virtue that escapes uninjured from the difficulties of the ordeal is sure to be elevated and improved by them. The object is only to show, that though the new rule may have many advantages which the old cannot pretend to, the old has likewise some which the new does not possess. The new rule may carry out the science to a perfection unattainable without it; but it leaves vacancies, within which the old may continue, with advantage, to exercise concurrent jurisdiction. That the tests may be reconciled without prejudice to the higher of the two, is best evidenced by the simultaneous use of both in the treatise before us. Though no where expressly expounded, the law of consequences is often introduced as the basis of most important conclusions;14 and, perhaps, had the sciences of Asia been allowed to continue their advance, the next treatise on eastern ethics would have exhibited the combined application of the two on principles of mutual adjustment, such as a well sustained inquiry could not fail to establish between them.
IX. The subject of morals inevitably suggests the kindred one of religion. The utility of this and of all eastern translations in familiarizing us with the objects and associations by which the scriptural writers were surrounded and influenced, is too evident to require explanation. The Scriptures may not only thus acquire a significance which is otherwise lost to our perceptions; but that particular significance which would best enable us to introduce them to the knowledge of the eastern people. Those points upon which the persuasions of the Muhammedans are near akin to our own should also be particularly noticed and examined. For offensive as their misuse of sacred terms and symbols may often appear to us, before it can be superseded it must at least be understood. With this view, wherever coincidences of this nature presented themselves, the Translator has considered it one of his essential duties to point them out.
But besides these general bearings on the religious question, the present work possesses a third, peculiar to its own nature. False religions are most aptly and familiarly attacked by showing their rules and tendencies to be at variance with the real interests of man, of which the science of morals professes to be an elucidation. Hence, when we have mastered the morality of a people, we are in possession of the premises, on which, to be convincing, our arguments should be conducted; and where, as generally happens, the morality is sounder than the religion, it is easy to show the inconsistency of one with the other: and then the example of other and more favoured nations may be adduced to prove that the fault does not lie with the morality; that it is the religion which must be given up. A striking opportunity for the application of this line of reasoning we find in the second Section of the third Book; where the highest and purest form of morality is declared to be that resting on love or affection: the morality of interest, or even of equity, (which, unactuated by the first, is only a refinement of interest,) being only good as it represents or approaches to that of sympathy. It will at once be seen how difficult it will be for them, consistently with these premises, to deny that the great moral canon of the Gospel, which directs us to suffer injury rather than inflict it, is the only one that would or could characterize a universal and eternal dispensation. While the rules and practices of their own religion, constantly appealing to compulsion, and established only by the exercise of it, are alone enough to show, that if proceeding at all from heavenly authority, (which is what they will not at first be so ready to give up,) it could only have been with a view to temporary purposes, and in subservience to the final establishment of those universal principles embodied only by the other.
To persons more conversant with the subject many more instances will present themselves, under each of the three divisions, than have been noticed by the compiler. Questions of this nature, involving the honor of the national faith, are perhaps better left to those who are its constituted guardians. In this, indeed, as in every other department, it is not intended to exhaust the subject, but only to introduce it; a function, in the present instance, of no mean or secondary importance. Pages like these, to which few might otherwise care to devote the attention necessary to master their contents, acquire a certain awfulness of interest when we consider that they are calculated to afford material for the country’s last and best triumph over the vices and errors of less favoured nations.15
X. Lastly, the treatise is valuable as containing the opinions of a speculative people, in their most enlightened age, upon the everlasting subjects of human inquiry — the nature, purposes, and results of being. The propriety of mixing questions of every-day occurrence with these stupendous problems — the discretion of resting that which all should recognise on that which must always be open to debate — may well be doubted. And yet the latent connexion which kept the subjects together is of that undeniable kind that perfectly explains, though it may not justify, the arrangement. All that we arrive at by reasoning from the external relations of things is the mere form of that which we agree to call right — the interests of the several parties, the bearing of each upon each, and the adjustments whereby the highest amount of interest may be obtained throughout; and this is all that the science of morals is usually concerned in discussing. Another question remains, the foundation of all the rest. Why the right thus ascertained is obligatory? — why a person who may choose to prefer a given indulgence, with or without its attendant penalty, to all the immunities or gratifications obtainable from self-denial, — why such a person should still be bound to prefer the general will to his own? Here most systems of national morality abut at once upon religion either natural or revealed: he is bound to the general will, because it expresses the will of God.16 And it is a singular fact, that fanatic and intolerant as the Muslims are in maintaining the claims of their ritual and so-called revelation at their utmost height, they should yet go farther than any other people in arguing this great question on its abstract ground, and thus in a manner acknowledge philosophic religion, as the basis of their morality, to possess a force and validity concurrent with revealed. Not merely the relations of objects, but, in the last resort, their habitudes and natures also, are the ample grounds of duty on which these enlightened bigots delight to expatiate. They deem it the province of morality not only to affirm the will of God, but also to produce the considerations from which such sanction is to be presumed, and by which its scope and limits are to be determined. Nay, more, by keeping up a constant reference to divine pleasure as the source of life and feeling, no less than of the restraints upon either, and thus in a manner identifying right with existence itself, they seek to place the validity of duty upon higher grounds than the sordid considerations of personal interest can supply. Virtue, in this noble theory, is only a higher species of instinct; — the proper guide to virtue, not advantage, but nature itself. Systems of stricter limitation and lowlier range may perhaps be more tenable and more safe; but the very errors of this one are all of an elevating and redeeming cast.
Whatever may have been the influence upon the morals of the eastern people of this intermixture of morality with physics, to ourselves, with whom their views are only valuable as historical evidence of the workings of human intellect, the interest of treatises such as the present is much enhanced by the familiarity with which they exhibit this singular phenomenon in the form of what we may call the practical Pantheism of Asia. In this mysterious subject (here scientifically handled) it is, that we must look for the origin and force of almost all the peculiarities of Asiatic literature and speculative opinion. A principle of such extensive and influential range is entitled to a place among the political elements of the eastern world. No correct judgments can be formed, no creditable calculations drawn, in ignorance of its workings; and if these pages contained no other claim on public attention than the authentic insight they afford into this one metaphysical tenet, this alone would entitle them to go boldly forth as conscious vehicles of new and important information. One of the most singular facts attending its enunciation it is, that the student is all along presumed to be already in possession of its leading principles:17 and as many may be glad to see the theory expounded who may not have leisure or inclination to search for and compare the passages in which it lurks, and many more may be well pleased to enter on the search with precise notions of what it is they are to search for, a few pages may be advantageously occupied in giving, what is no where else to be found, a connected outline of this remarkable system; not with the view of exposing its inconsistencies, (which might be an easy task,) but of illustrating the opinions and practices of its professors.
Indeed it is more in this minute and elaborate application of the principle, than in its primary nature, that it carries any thing at variance with European views. The general assertion belongs to every religion, and to the familiar phraseology even of the irreligious. We every day speak ourselves, and hear others speak, of Nature as an intelligent and powerful agent: “Nature works, Nature provides, Nature dictates,” &c. though few by nature mean any thing more than a certain arrangement or influence, whose cause must be external to itself. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ is another popular approach, and a still nearer one, to the Súfy system.
Christian theology, to a certain point, bears it company. Deity is allowed not only to pervade, but actually to produce and maintain, all things.17 Scripture gives it a degree of sanction, and particularly that remarkable quotation by St. Paul of an earlier Pantheistic writer, “He is not far from every one of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The ardent temperament of the eastern people has not allowed them to rest satisfied with a distant acknowledgment of the fact. They have hailed it — exulted in it — canvassed and contemplated it in all its bearings — welcomed it to their homes and bosoms — carried it about with them in their journeys and avocations — in short, given to the impression the same preponderance in their ideas and feelings, that the principle professes to possess among the other functions and elements of being.
Better enunciations may perhaps be found for the doctrine, and the best may be open to ridicule; but the train of thought by which the Muslim schoolmen actually arrived at their conclusions seems to have been as follows. The universe being an entire whole, while its parts are different, those parts must be kept together in order to constitute it;19 and the mode in which they are kept together is this, that they may have a relation and respondence, in virtue of which one is not complete without another; nay, without many others: and therefore each part strives to meet and unite with its correlatives.20 How then is this mutual aptitude acquired? By the simplest arrangement adequate to such stupendous results; by the mere fact of their having originally belonged to a single and more compact unit, out of which the present is an expansion.21 Each being thus in a manner torn from its collaterals, each has something belonging to collaterals; and neither party can be complete till they are restored to each other. What then is the unit so ramified and expanded? It can be but one, the earliest of any; and if so, then that being of which the negation is least conceivable; that is, divinity.22
In this spontaneous resolution of the first cause into fragmentary portions, some will possess greater and some less dignity and power; but none can be equivalent, as regards either, to the whole to which they essentially belong. The qualities and characteristics of the fragmentary state cannot, therefore, be permanently attached to any portion, not even the highest of all, without permanently lowering the powers of a portion of divinity; and therefore of the whole of it: neither of which is conceivable. Since therefore no single portion can continue in any single state, all portions must alternate in all states; and the indefeasible title which each has to be all, is realized, without prejudice to the new arrangement, by each becoming each in succession; till the units of which all is composed have been passed over: and so on ad infinitum. That is to say, a constant transmutation is going on of being into being; lesser things passing into greater, and therefore the greatest of all back into the least, as the only conceivable way of passing into that whole, now composed of many less, which is greater than the greatest.23
The conversion of mind into matter, or homogeneity of the two, which is the great preliminary difficulty to the theory, we may perceive how they would dispose of, if we attend to their ideas upon the equipoise or equilibrium:24 not by the subterfuge of idealism, but by granting the reality of power (that is, tendency in opposite directions) and denying any entity of matter beyond or beneath it. Among the physical theories of modern Europe there is one which, by a very trifling alteration, may be made to supply all the postulates of their metaphysics. In the system of Boskovich the primary particles of matter are described as molecules surrounded by two contending atmospheres: — an outer atmosphere of attraction, by which intercohesion was maintained; an inner atmosphere of repulsion, by which the other tendency was countervailed and prevented from reducing matter to a single point. In this theory every one must see that the essential molecule of matter is entirely superfluous: let concentric powers be supposed, of opposite tendency and different distance, and we have atoms without matter — consistence without substance: solidity may be explained as a spasmotic state of elementary mind; and the important link usually wanting to complete the Pantheistic theory is at once supplied.
The next objection that presents itself they would palliate with equal skill. It is the old remark of Cicero,25 that if the social virtues are a form of want, that is, of weakness, virtue would argue natural defect; and the greater the virtue, the more, to be consistent, we ought to despise the nature that exhibits it. To this they would answer, that the more perfect a whole may be, the greater is the relative detraction of a given defect; and the stronger the incentive by which the residuum is urged to regain that of which it has been deprived. Where weakness is absolute, there is want not only of the adjuncts to be desiderated, but of the very energy to desiderate. Excessive virtue only argues excessive weakness, inasmuch as it first argues excessive strength: the weakness therefore can only be of a relative kind.
Another important difficulty there is which they do not equally elucidate; and that is the inutility of the vast and operose mechanism resorted to. If all end where it began, there seems to be no result in the process, and therefore no cause for it; or if the primum mobile is held to be under any physical necessity for carrying it on, or to derive any advantage from so doing, then is the divine nature not a perfect or self-sufficient one. These consequences are both alternately denied throughout the Treatise;26 but as they are negative of each other, these writers must have further means, though not here apparent ones, of reconciling or adjusting the two. Whether the Muslims had yet arrived at it does not appear; but the tendency of the theory certainly is, to admit that the vital principle returns to its source in an improved or amended form — that the great work of transmutation is carried on with an ever-increasing capacity for its own mysterious purposes.
How the Muslims contrived to reconcile this theory with their religious persuasions, we may learn at length from pp. 42, 43, and 44 of the Introduction; according to which, each separate revolution of this stupendous mechanism would constitute an analogous æra in the celestial dispensations, on the close of which, all the adjustments required by the state of existing relations between the Creator and created would be carried into effect, in conformity of course with pre-established engagements; and the order of nature would be left at liberty to commence a fresh, and probably, as we have seen above, an amended course. The scriptural account of human beatification, to which the allusions are so frequent, would only indicate an intermediate state or stage of being, as intervening between earthly existence and that final re-union with the supreme nature which is implied in the fact of original derivation from it. The pains of Hell they would admit; but only as a restorative process, the severity of which argued its completeness, and the eternity of which was evident in its effects.27 Though the lower natures, as we have seen, were held to pass into the higher, it was only to the last that immortality could be properly attributed. Any approach to the Indian and Pythagorean28 tenet of convertibility, — or return from a higher to a lower state, was stigmatized as a pestilent heresy under the name of Tanāsukh29 — scepticism, or invalidation of scripture truth. The survival was true only of the element: there was no survival of the meaner being; no lasting identity of the man with any pre-existent individual; except in a very few cases, where it was held of certain scriptural characters, that the earlier had re-appeared in the latter. The initiatory processes of vegetable and animal formation were indeed intended to invest the spirit with qualities indispensable to its further improvement in the human form; but they did not bring the spirit to that point at which the faculties and impressions could combine themselves into an inseparable system. This it was the intent, the privilege, and the responsibility, of human nature, and of no other, to accomplish.30 So understood, their doctrine is not without support from the greatest of Protestant divines. In his third sermon on the Immortality of the Soul, Archbishop Tillotson argues at great length,
“That the most general and common philosophy of the world hath always acknowledged something in beasts besides their bodies; and that the faculty of sense and perception, which is in them, is founded on a principle of a higher nature than matter. And as this was always the common philosophy of the world, so we find it to be a supposition of scripture, which frequently attributes souls to beasts as well as to men; though of a much inferior nature. And therefore, those particular philosophers who have denied any immaterial principle or a soul to beasts, have also denied them to have sense, any more than a clock or watch or any other engine. * * * * *
“This, I confess, seems to me an odd kind of philosophy; and it hath this vehement prejudice against it, that if this were true, every man would have great cause to question the reality of his own perceptions: for to all appearance the sensations of beasts are as real as ours; and in many things their senses much more exquisite than ours. And if nothing can be a sufficient argument to a man that he is really endowed with sense, besides his own consciousness of it, then every man hath reason to doubt, whether all men in the world besides himself be not mere engines; for no man hath any other evidence that another man is really endowed with sense, than he hath that brute creatures are so. * * * * * *
“Immortality imports that the soul remains after the body, and is not corrupted or dissolved with it. And there is no inconvenience in attributing this sort of immortality to the brute creatures. * * * Whether they return into the soul and spirit of the world, if there be any such thing, as some fancy, or whether they pass into the bodies of other animals which succeed in their rooms, is not necessary to be particularly determined. It is sufficient to lay down this in general as highly probable, that they are such a sort of spirits, &c. * * * *
“Immortality, as applied to the spirit of man, imports that their souls are not only capable of continuing, but living in this separate state, so as to be sensible of happiness and misery. * * * And this is that which constitutes that wide and vast difference between the souls of men and beasts; and this degree of immortality is as much above the other as reason and religion are above sense.”
The continually contracting space within which these speculations could be canonically conducted received its last limitation in the airy regions of idealism. This subtle doctrine it has been usual to consider the offspring of a more accurate philosophy than that of the Peripatetics: and yet if ever there was a system which contained undeniable elements of the purest idealism, it was this of the Muhammedan Súfies.31 For, holding all visible and conceivable objects to be portions of the divine nature, it was impossible that they should admit the imperfections observable in them to have any real existence. Thus, far the greater part of all assignable qualities, as they could only exist in the perceptions of those observing them, passed at once into the precincts of a quasi delusion.32 Here however the danger was imminent. Sin and evil were the most notable of the qualities thus disallowed: and this being granted, the distinctions of virtue and vice would be rendered in a great measure nugatory, and the foundations of morality dissolved.33 This difficulty, which is no more than what all ideal systems have to contend with, as we know the Muslims utterly repudiated and condemned, it is fair to suppose they met, as other idealists do, by insisting on the palpable distinction between the nature and relations of objects. It is only by reasoning from relation that we have all along determined nature; and if we withdraw the first, we can no longer maintain the second. But in point of fact the contradiction cannot really take place. All that we do is to change the modus of existence; we do not and cannot affect existence itself, or any the least of its consequences. The whole system of relations, therefore, with all their train of rights and duties, virtues and vices, punishments and rewards, must be preserved and observed to the last, precisely as if no such discovery had ever been arrived at.
So completely, however, are men the creatures of habit, that it proves difficult to change the grounds of reality, without bringing reality itself into suspicion. The heresies were in every instance so much more palpable than the arguments which rebutted them — the cause of moral laxitude and neglect meets with such a powerful advocate within us — that the dangerous tendency of the Súfy metaphysics was commonly admitted to form a serious objection against their profounder cultivation.34 A yet more cogent dissuasive lay in the difficulty of satisfying others as to the soundness of those limits, which it was sufficiently troublesome at all times to maintain to their own conviction. The princes and commanders, who, like our own Henry, were invariably dabblers in scholastic science, could hardly have pursued its conclusions to equal lengths with the recluses over whose opinions they never hesitated to arrogate a jurisdiction; and many a profound theologian must have suffered in reputation, fortune, and even life, for the incapacity of his self-created judges. Hence, in this very work, the reserve and ambiguity with which the subject is treated.35 But it is chiefly in the works of the Poets that neophytes are warned of the perils that await them in this treacherous path. The vast and recondite nature of the subject, supplying those conversant with it with sources and symbols of feeling only distantly to be apprehended by others, made it the very food on which poetry would delight to feed. A connexion was at once established between the minutest and the vastest considerations. The simplest details of fact or feeling acquired an importance which nothing else could give. What to ordinary hearers might be an indifferent subject, to them became an awful one. What to others were metaphorical devices, the ordinary type and figure of poetic ingenuity, to themselves became sober assertions of a stupendous truth; the particular instances of one universal rule, giving to all things in heaven and earth their significance and their worthlessness — their immeasurable value and their indescribable emptiness. But while the Poets themselves seem labouring with the burden of thoughts too big for utterance, revelling in the conscious possession of treasures too rich for every-day expenditure, to their imitators and admirers the pursuit of similar attainments is represented as fraught with certain labour and sacrifice, very uncertain success, and possible perdition in this world and the next:36 expressions too readily explained by the bold and impious tendencies of the opinions we have just examined.
The general influence of the Pantheistic theory upon
the minds and morals of the many, is of course not to be
estimated by its liability to abuse in the hands of the few.
Though here too, it must be confessed — politically as well
as scholastically — its effects would be, and were, of a
chequered and questionable character. All that the great
mass of mankind would have leisure or inclination to
receive, would be the broad fact, that the objects of
creation, in its every department, were so many portions
of embodied divinity: a persuasion singularly calculated
to refine and elevate the thoughts and feelings; to inspire
men with high ideas of moral obligation, and warm
emotions of fraternal regard for every part and parcel
of animated life.37
In this, in fact, as in every other
instance of the moral impressions, whenever and wherever
prevailing, we trace an intimate and inevitable connexion
between opinion and the circumstances under
which it is entertained. It is the creed of a people more
conversant with the phenomena of nature, than with
those of society; experiencing more the bounty than the
rigour of the elements; free to explore the beauties of
the earth, and appropriate a sufficient portion of her
products, without being interrupted in their enjoyments
by the conflicting claims of a dense and redundant population.
On the other hand, the apathy and improvidence
which unearned comfort never fails to engender (often to
its own destruction) would draw from such a doctrine, as
by them interpreted, a support and sanction to their own
anti-social tendencies. Where all was deity, all must be
right; to innovate would be impious, to improve impossible;
the world and all its constituents must be left
as they were found: thus all abuse becomes incurable,
and most of all the abuse of power, already, in its own
right, possessed of an imposing aspect. This is the
passive injury, the active one is still more serious —
Neither the use nor the abuse of the theory, in these its wider applications, can be attributed to the Muhammedans, who, while on points of metaphysical discussion they made it peculiarly their own, had the better fortune to be guided, on points of popular practice, by a science taken from the Greek, and a religion that imitated the scriptural. But from this extended view of the doctrine as the product of local causes and social exigency — the temporary organ of functions indispensable to national economy — we may perceive that this, at least, the purely speculative portion of their philosophy, was indigenous to the Asiatic people: and hence one cause and one justification of the length at which it has been discussed. The same principle occupying an analogous though a less prominent position in the Grecian school, it is natural, in the first instance, to suppose that it was communicated to the Muhammedans, only as an ingredient in the drafts they were so constantly making on the latter. The conclusion, however, is at variance not only with the nature of the doctrine, but the characteristics of the people, and the general analogy of nature. The aim and genius of the Greeks, as growing out of their political energy, lay, indeed, in every direction, but in the practical more than any. From the example of surrounding nations, they saw that every thing was at stake; that all depended on their discovering a remedy for the approaching abuses of the civil power. Their legislators and philosophers travelled,38 so we are assured by themselves and their successors, to collect and mature principles, which they applied, on their return, in that brilliant series of political experiments from which the constitution of society dates afresh. Unless they had commenced at the outset with that preponderating bias to the speculative which the pre-existence of this doctrine explains, in the process of their national development there was nothing to generate it: the tendency lay all the other way. As part of the great Asiatic family, of course they originally shared in the great Asiatic persuasion. The very different lengths to which they pursued knowledge, and the very different results that attended their cultivation of it, make it only more indisputable that they must have bottomed upon some latent principle common to the whole: or how at a later period were their conclusions so easily incorporated with the rudimental science of the East? As the Asiatic nations could not have waited for these gallant borderers to initiate that, without which their corrupt society could not long be held together, so neither could the exacter notions of these last have proved reconcilable with Asiatic institutions, apparently so opposite, if the opposition had not been merged in some more elementary, and therefore less noticed, resemblance. In this very Treatise, it is easy to observe, that while the practical portion retains the form and pressure of the foreign school, the Pantheism transpires with a redundance peculiar to its native assertors. There is no constituting a whole out of parts that have not a natural and pre-constituted correspondence. For her physics and ethics western Asia is indebted to Greece, as what western country is not? Her metaphysics were her own, before they became another’s.
It is usual to burden the merits of Muhammedan science, as well adoptive as indigenous, with the demerits of Muhammedan politics; — to argue that if the people had possessed sound knowledge, they would have been sure to apply it, in the first place, to the proper adjustment of their own internal relations, — in other words, that if the best use is not made of a given advantage, its existence cannot be admitted. A certain vague and general presumption this argument might be sufficient to raise, in cases where the knowledge in question could be fairly held to subsist in the people, and not in a very limited portion of them. But as nations do not commence their careers together, but alternate with each other in opposite epochs of prosperity and decline, it must always happen, that some are at the height of knowledge, while others are in its commencement. Thus there will be a portion of exotic knowledge, always in advance of their own, which rising states will continually adopt from those already risen. But how — through what channels — by whose means? Obviously through the enlightened and observant classes, which, in nations so circumstanced, (not being commercial ones,) are both few and scanty; priests and statesmen being all upon the list. To these, or rather to the most intelligent portion of these, the improvements are long restricted. On the general mass, then occupied only with the material objects of want and desire, and averse from pursuing any speculations, most of all such as originate with foreigners, the influence is slow in extending, and partial when it extends. A continually increasing hoard of intelligence lies dormant at the extremity of the body politic, until the time arrives when the general system becomes capable of absorbing it. Now this time never has arrived with the Muhammedans, or with any other nation of modern Asia. With them, and with all people, its arrival depends upon other contingencies. Knowledge, though the great instrument, is not properly the element of political strength, which must have obtained a foregone existence, before the other can be welcomed or applied. Where knowledge is entirely of home production, its prevalence will, indeed, always argue a proportionate soundness and security in the grosser elements, on which its use, and therefore its cultivation, depends. But where, as with the practical portion of the science we are now considering, it happens to be a foreign exotic, it can no more supply the room of political powers, proper so called, than medicine can create the organs it is intended to regulate, or any exercise of mental faculty can alter or remedy a constitutional failure in the body through which it acts.
Yet, if any improvement short of complete political regeneration may be admitted as evidencing the presence of an ameliorating principle to which the Asiatic nations had previously been strangers, such may with certainty be inferred from their rivalry so long and closely maintained against the more favoured and durable institutions of Christendom. National energy, as it is the infallible consequence, must also be the sure evidence and test of an analogous step in the scale of social worth: the first being, in fact, only the sum of units which the latter supplies. Systems may indeed be adduced, like those of ancient Sparta, where, by a partial and misdirected cultivation of its elements, such worth was drawn from sources, which, ere long, gave birth to hostile products: and then both the unit and the aggregate were necessarily short-lived. But, as long as either may endure, it argues the existence of the other. Tried by this test, the question is merely this: Had the chivalry of feudal Europe immeasurably degenerated, in both respects from the standard of the Greek and Roman pagans; or had that of Muhammedan Asia immeasurably advanced beyond the standard of the old Asiatic barbarians, whom the contemporary soldiery of Europe despised? Even supposing the first of these suppositions to be to a certain extent affirmed, it will never be maintained that the vast difference in the ratios of equality can be attributed wholly to an inferiority in all modern to fractions of ancient Europe; and if not, then to whatever extent this inferiority may be denied, to the same extent the superiority of modern to ancient Asia must be affirmed: superiority dating only from the forcible assertion of the Muhammedan faith, and maintained under a careful cultivation of Muhammedan science.
But even if the inefficacy or worthlessness of their science were as clearly established, as they have here been disproved, neither the one nor the other, we have already seen, would militate against the peculiar value attributed to this its solitary specimen. It is not for the information it contains, but for that which it affords, that it is now offered to the attention of the learned; as an accurate index of views and feelings little understood, — a comment on some of the greatest revolutions that the world has ever seen, — a repository of novel and authentic characteristics, often interesting and always important. Among our obligations to it in the last particular, let us reckon our acquaintance with the better qualities of a class so bold as to maintain these principles, and so ill-fated as to see them constantly outraged. The defects of social science or of social system, to whatever degree prevailing, (and in the latter instance the degree was great,) seem to shed an equivalent lustre on the character of a priesthood constantly engaged in unavailing attempts to improve the one and reclaim the other. The social feeling of men in immature society, may indeed, as before remarked, be generally of a freer and warmer order than that prevailing in a civilized community; but only because it is less strongly tried. The moment that keener incitements to abuse arise, the defects of their institutions are betrayed; and the community must either amend its systems of self-control, or lose, by the action of vicious indulgence, the opportunities of amelioration which time and fortune may present. The consolidation of political authority is the first form in which this great national trial is induced. The power which is given for the good of the whole is too often applied to the enjoyment of a few. Intelligence and determination in the mass are the true and only correctives of this abuse; and where these were nationally wanting, those who could realize them in their own bosoms, scattering, not all in vain, the seeds of popular regeneration, — pleading, not always unsuccessfully, at the bar of arbitrary power, the cause of a public that deserted its own; — and this too, in spite of thanklessness from the client and danger from the judge; — the men who could so act are surely entitled to rank among the disinterested benefactors of the human race. Such a piece of pleading is the following Treatise: crude and extravagant perhaps in its doctrines, as compared with the productions of more favoured countries, but embodying at least some principles sacred to the interests of right; — capable in most of being reduced to the purer standards we ourselves enjoy; — and, above all, teeming with that ardent enthusiasm for the cause of right (however dimly apprehended) which gives to wrong itself some of the best attributes of virtue.
OUR book opens,1 as it ought, with the name of that glorious Power, who, marshalling by his mandate, issued before time began, the “thronging squadrons”2 of conceivable objects from remotest inexistence to the very capital of being, assigned in his bounty their vice-regence to Adam the earthy,3 invested him with a title to his friendship and approbation, and ennobled him by admission to his presence and his regard; — that gracious Creator, who made human nature as a page whereon the names of all things were recorded, and gave it to be worn4 for an amulet by the capacities of the reasonable soul; to the end that the intent of his own divine appellations and eternal attributes, together with all the minutiæ of scientific and practical wisdom, might thus be mastered (according to the text,5 God taught Adam the names, even all of them;) that in the gradual developement of its energies the heights of lofty acquirements and splendid faculties might one by one be climbed, and the elevated fruition of paramount exaltation in the school of spirits (according to the text, God said, O Adam, distinguish them by their names,) be merited as well as enjoyed.
Hail, too, to that perfect one, who, in the divine lucubrations, is as an opening to the volume of production and design, or, in the chapter of humanity, is as an exordium to teach the commendable in disposition and the becoming in act; — that perfecting one, by whom, from the guidance of propriety in the shape of “institutory distinctions”6 and less explicable7 observances of ritual, all who were seeking after the paths of divine direction were brought out of the perils of bewilderment to that perfection which they wished to reach, — all who were fainting with thirst in the moral deserts they had rashly entered were supported by means of right instruction, as it were by the beasts of a friendly caravan, to the limpid waters of reconciliation with God.
Hail, also, to his family and his companions:8 champions are they of our pure faith; guides are they of our bright path; chevaliers in the religious arena, and sentinels of our transcendent institute.
Next to the praises of that king whose bounty surpasses all others, and to our prayers and benedictions to the Prince of all mankind, (ever-blessed be he!) it is but right to adorn the ruggedness of our discourse with a few commemorations of an earthly potentate,9 the light of whose extended equity lends new lustre to the luminaries of heaven, and banishes all the obscurities of earth. * * * * * * * * * * And that is the greatest of sultans and highest of khācāns,10 in whose hands are the keys of the age, in whose grasp the reins that guide the interests of the human race, the protector of the land of God from assault and disaffection, the extirpator to their last remnants of oppression and aggression, sultan in the right of three generations, the glory of temporal and of spiritual dominion, alike of the world and of the faith; Hasán11 Bēg Bahādar Khān, the shelter of whose caliphat12 and the lustre of whose clemency may the Almighty make eternal, and never may the exalted standards be lowered which now float over the earth’s fairest portion, or his enemies cease to be raised — above all connexion with terrestrial affairs.13 * * * * * * * * * * * * * Among other marks of divine favour the greatest is, that this Lord of the conjunction14 has been favoured by the bounty of Providence with a virtuous son,15 who (according to the text, a good son takes pattern by his father, and not by others,) appears in justice and equity, and the other rules of government and administration, to take his father’s glorious character for his own model; like him, leaving no one of the minutest principles of church and state without its due observance. * * * * * * * * * * * * * Of his highness’s exalted nature and destiny a remarkable sign is this; that in spite of the freshness of youth, and the demands of youth and royalty, unlike those headstrong wassailers in arrogance who pass their leisure time in animal enjoyments and the encouragement of their passions, the greatest part of his auspicious moments (after the discharge of his religious duties, and attention to the claims and interests of his subjects,) he condescends to devote to the principles of science, the wonders of art, the exhortations and parables of the masters in wisdom and virtue, the histories of kings who were guided by justice, and of fathers who were pillars of the faith. This is sufficiently demonstrated by the book of choice precepts and rare apophthegms culled from the discourses of famous kings, pious fathers, and eminent philosophers, which (agreeably to the text, well is it for the assiduous in study,) he so constantly makes the companion of his enlightened mind.
Doubtless it is a book of valuable uses and lofty truths; and, as such, was deservedly kept by his highness’s great predecessors in the rich repository16 of their choicest jewels. Yet, as it was compiled by some ancient writer,17 and contains terms no longer known, and curious metres such as are now not current, his highness was pleased to direct even the unprovided author18 of the present to correct and complete it. On examining it for the purpose, it proved to be complicated and diffuse, as touching the unity of parts in the composition; and deficient, as touching its material, in not embodying the entire authorities on the science of morals and politics. Hence it was that the writer’s mind became impressed with a different plan; which was to form a fresh compilation, such, as while it contained the radices of the active science, might be illustrated as to evidence and proof from the shining light of Scripture passages, from the loop-hole where the lamp of prophetical tradition is preserved, from the torches gleaming amidst the language of the Prophet’s companions and followers, the elders and leaders of the faith, and from the rays of explanation scattered in the writings of the foremost divines of nature;19 adhering as far as possible in appropriate places to the scope of the former treatise,20 and, where congenial sentiments occurred, giving prelibations from the striking passages of those who look beneath the veil, in order that the whole may be supported by the conspicuous authority of the age’s chiefs. Such a work, with the Almighty’s assistance, and under the countenance of our glorious prince, I hope it may be rendered, that neither the principles of science, nor the ways of practical wisdom,21 may be inadequately or unworthily supplied to their respective votaries.
Now since it is the object of this work to ascertain the principles of the active wisdom, (which implies a knowledge of the nature of the human mind; because it is from this, through the medium of the will, that actions, whether praiseworthy or culpable, proceed,) in order that by means of such knowledge it may be cleared of vice and graced with virtue, and so arrive at the due perfection of which it is in search; and since these actions are divided into two classes,22 one that which relates to every person in the individual, (which we call the science of morals or propriety,) and the other that which relates to domestic society, or that which leads to the arrangement of domestic affairs and the unity of families, (which we call the science of housekeeping and management of home,) and a third, that which relates to the society of city and country, or empire and dominion, (which we call the science of government or political control,) such objects of such a work (which is named ‘Glances of a Speculation on the Commendable in Morals’23) are necessarily comprised in three divisions: and since the courtesy of composition requires the prefixing of a preface embracing sundry matters connected with the science, such as may enlighten the reader and assist him in mastering the subject, the whole has been distributed into an Introduction treating of the said matters, and three Books24 on the three subjects of inquiry, with sections and explanatory divisions at the writer’s pleasure. — Grace is from God; we serve not, we turn not, to any but to him.
GOD saith, The heavens, the earth, and all that is between them, we created not in sport; — and again he saith, Then think ye we have created ye in jest, and that ye are not to return to us? From the light thrown by these two important passages on each other, it is clearly evident to the eye of investigation, that all the particles of being, all the essences of this existent world, which have been wooed and won from infinite nothing to the consummation of sensible presence, and ushered into the state of being in all the glitter of God’s own baptism, (and who is better to baptize us than God, whose servitors we are?) have each and all (agreeably to the text, I gave every thing its nature, and direction moreover,) an end as regards others, and an interest as regards themselves, which may be considered as their respective fruit. For the act of absolute goodness, and all justifiable acts, though not perhaps resting upon any design, are yet never void of influences, advantages, ends, fruits: both which propositions are established in the science of divinity25 by proofs of definite nature and arguments of wide application.
Now the proper end of man,26 who is the abstract of all things, the model of models, and the quintessence of the world, is the vice-regence of God, as is clear from the text, Verily I am about to place a vice-regent upon the earth; and again, He it is who placed ye as vice-regents upon earth; and that noble passage, We offered our trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains; but they were loth to undertake it, and sought to be excused: man undertook it, and now hath he become ignorant and unjust. This trust if we impute to man’s reason or exertions, (as we find in the received commentaries,) let it be considered, as to the first, that both genii27 and angels partake in reason with mankind; and as to the second, that the genii may vie with men in labour likewise: so that this undertaking would not be peculiar to mankind; whereas from the tenour of the passage we perceive such peculiarity to be intended. We must impute it then to its connexion28 with the vice-regence of God, the difficulties of which none but weak man was fitted to support:
Now man’s title to the office of this vice-regence lies in his entire capacity for supporting contrary qualities, in such wise as to represent the contrary29 designations of God, and embody the twofold structure of this figural and intellectual world. As to the angels, although on the side of spirituality and its concomitants, the intuitions of knowledge, and all to which these lead, they are physically susceptible of the delights of reason; yet on the side of coporeality and solidity of substance they are entirely unprovided.30 The heavenly orbs again, although according to the principles of philosophy they possess a reasonable mind,31 still the virtues of such their minds are constitutional and innate, and their bodies exempt from conflicting conditions and differing propensities; so that they enjoy not that fluctuating movement through various steps and in divergent directions, that circum-lation32 through all the limits of imperfection, that shifting with the revolution of all things, so as to master the whole mass of reality in all its ramifications, which forms the essential peculiarity of human nature. In the outset of existence, advancing from the state of concretion to the stage of growth, and from growth to the state of animation,33 it passes on to consummation in the rank of humanity. Here, when graced with equability of temperament and the due adjustment of bodily and spiritual powers, he becomes like to the celestial orbs as touching both spirit and body; for to be intermediate between opposites is to be void of them.34 In the course of such his purification, his mind becomes figured with the pictures of past and coming events in their fragmentary aspects, even as are the spirits of the orbs: and this either35 from insight exercised into the world of patterns (for this world, in the opinion of the chief philosophers, may be perceived as well as conceived), or else from a retroversion of these pure pictures or ideas continually thrown off by the reasonable soul to illuminate the conception; after the fashion (as many philosophers think) of man’s bodily make, which rests on a principle of detrusion and propensity to revert. Advancing from this stage he practises a mental negation of all being but God’s — gains admittance to the transcendent rank of seeing unity36 and nothing else — and is classed with the angels of the presence, nay, in a higher order even than they; and this withal, not confined or limited to a single spot, but empowered to pitch his tent and carry on his inquiries in any quarter he may choose.
And hence the fathers of our Catholic38 persuasion, whose powers were equal to any discussion, are unanimous in determining that the best of men are superior to the best of angels:
As to ordinary men compared with ordinary angels, they give it the other way; as we find in the most popular treatises, though some have pronounced differently. At any rate, that the best of angels are superior to ordinary men, is not to be questioned. There is a saying of his reverence Aly the accepted (who may be considered as a gate in the city of knowledge, and a gate to which the aspirants after certainty should particularly resort — blessings and peace be with him!) that the Almighty had given to angels reason without desire and anger; to brutes desire and anger without reason; and to mankind gave both: so that if a man make desire and anger subject and obedient to reason, so as to reconcile them with reasoning perfection, he will rank above the angels: for into their perfection no inclination enters — nay, no choice; while men40 attain to it in spite of difficulties, and at the expense of labour and exertion. But if he allows his reason to be vanquished by desire and anger, he degrades himself beneath the brutes: for these in their failings are excused by the absence of an intellect to restrain them; which excuse men have not.
That contradiction which philosophers have acknowledged in the preference of men to angels, the author of Súfy41 idioms has shown us how to remove by adopting a middle course in this wise. Eminence differs from perfection; being determined by proximity on the chain of being to the common source — by the prevalence of spirituality and the purity attending it; whereas perfection depends on mastery. Although, therefore, being less subject to interpositions and more governed by severalty, the angel may be the more eminent being, man, by reason of his mastery and comprehensiveness, is the more excellent and perfect one. Thus, on bringing together the opinions on both sides, opposition is turned into harmony, and difference removed; Grace is from the Most High.
Now for men to realize this vice-regency, two things are necessary. 1. Mature wisdom, which is a term for perfection in knowledge. 2. Eminent ability, which is a term for perfection in practice. This position, however, is good only in case of their defining wisdom to be simply acquaintance with the condition of things; the nature of action taking it out of the class of things wherewith wisdom is concerned. In case of their defining it to be the arrival of the soul at the utmost perfection attainable by it in the direction both of knowledge and practice, there would be no occasion for the last term. The vice-regence would then be accomplished by wisdom only,42 inasmuch as practice is included in it; which second definition is indeed the preferable one, because more agreeable to the original meaning: for wisdom, in its philological sense, would reside in the use of right language and right acts. That text likewise, Whoso gaineth wisdom, verily he gaineth great things, is more consonant to this latter explanation. Then, under the first definition, such expressions as, Verily thou art the knower and the wise, would belong to the class of largesse in consecutive terms: now surely it were better to take the collocation for an expansion rather than a repetition of the sense. That eulogy, too, which ancient philosophers used in respect of philosophy, that, as far as might be, it was an imitation of God,43 comes likewise under the second meaning: for a complete imitation can only be effected by adopting all the properties of the divine nature; whereas it is clear that man by mere knowledge without practice44 reaches not the height of that perfection: indeed we are told as much by that prophetical tradition, Knowledge without practice is a burden, and practice without knowledge a mischief. His holiness, the refuge of revelation,45 prays God to save him from knowledge without practice when he says, Deliver me, O God, from knowledge that availeth not. Moreover, the meaning of that knowledge referred to in this interpretation of wisdom, is not the mastery of universal and received propositions, but an ascertainment of the ends of wisdom; whether acquired by experience and demonstration, as with the observative school, whom we call men of science, or by means of purifying and perfecting self, as practised by the school of self-denial,46 whom we call men of attainment and merit. Both these classes are equally entitled to the appellation of wise; or rather the latter is the most eminent and exalted class; inasmuch as their advance on the steps of perfection is entirely due to divine favour — a graduation in that highest of schools, We made him learned, in learning from ourself, that approaches nearest to the inheritance of the Prophets, who embody the purity of all creation. In the latter path the thorns of doubt and the pitfalls of suspicion are less plentifully scattered; yet do both reunite in the termination at which they arrive, neither can any discrepance prevail between the professors of the two.
Thus we are told that when Abú Saäíd Abulkhair47 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:48 “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,49 too, declared that he held a thousand propositions which he could not prove. Shaikh Abú Seenā says, in his Makāmāt ool Ârifína50 (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,51 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 abstraction52 ) 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.53 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,54 such as Janíd of Baghdad,55 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,56 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 worlds58 along the path of rectitude, — Never would God take the ignorant59 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;60 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 eminent61 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;62 to proceed next to logic;63 next to mathematics; next to physics; and lastly, to theology. Hakím Abú Aly Mashkovi,64 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 khuitarāt65 (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,66 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 reprobation67 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 vehicles68 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.69 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,70) such a disposition undoubtedly it were wrong to attempt altering.
“No washing can whiten the Æthiop’s skin.”71 Thus, among the sayings of the Prophet, we find the following: Men have their metal like the metal of gold and silver:72 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.
Such is the statement of the difficulty in its fullest aspect. To remove it, we must premise that a disposition is a mental attribute, occasioning facility in some certain act, without necessity for thought or reflection. An attribute is a quality that is rooted in the mind: as we know in inductive science a condition, if quick to alter, is called state; if slow to alter, attribute. Now the cause of this disposition existing in the mind may be either of two: 1. Character74 — where, from original make, a person’s temperament is such that the aptitude for a particular quality is greater than for others; so that he is possessed by that quality on the slightest occasion, — as in the dry-hot for anger,75 — in the moist-hot for desire, — in the moist-cold for forgetfulness, — in the dry-cold for stupidity, and so on, as explained in treatises of philosophy and medicine. — 2. Habit: when in the outset having willed to accomplish any act, it repeat and practise the same till it is worn and used to the operation; so that the act is performed with ease in the absence of reflection, and, in short, becomes a disposition.76
Some think that all the dispositions are characteristic, that is, are constituents of character, and incapable of change; as we have explained in stating the difficulty. Others are of opinion, that some dispositions are constituent of character, and incapable of change; and others, adscititious and changeable. Others again think that no disposition is either characteristic or contrary to character, but that the mind has absolute power over its own constitution, and that, in both the opposite directions; whether with ease, which is when it is agreeable to temperament; or with difficulty, which is when it controverts temperament. Others again hold that in their original constitution men are linked with good; acquiring evil qualities and becoming wicked only by the gratification of their desires and the prosecution of gain. This opinion also was reversed by that of an ancient school,77 who maintained that men, in their original constitution, were formed of an imperfect character — the soul in its own essence being of light mixed with darkness; so that evil is implanted in its elementary material, and good it only admits by the intervention of instruction and discipline; and this, provided the evil portion be not in excess, and the dark prevail not over the light element. Galen’s opinion is, that some by character are good men, and some by character bad men, and some capable of both; which opinion of his own he thus demonstrates. If all human individuals were physically good, and evil be only an accident, still, that evil which is in them they must necessarily derive either from themselves or from others. In the first case, there must be in them some power necessitating evil; that is, they are not good in original character; for this would be contradictory: or if there were in them both a power to good and a power to evil predominating over it, the same repugnance follows to the proposition. In the second case, that of evil being derived from others, the same contradiction follows; for those others must be physically bad: man therefore cannot be entirely good. Precisely the same argument he applies to disprove the proposition of their being all bad; and after mastering these two points, he goes on to say — With ocular demonstration, I can perceive that the character of some men compels them to good, nor can they in any way depart therefrom; and these are few; and the character of others compels them to evil, neither can they in any way admit the good; and these are many: the remainder are intermediaries; good in the society of the good, and bad in the company of the bad. Such is the demonstration of Galen, as adduced in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry78 — the subtlety of which, however, will not escape an intelligent mind. For, according to the principles of his philosophy,79 no determinate origin can be assigned to human individuals: in which case the incidence of evil in every individual instance might be from others, and so on, till its primary origin is never fixed upon any individual who is to be considered bad in his own nature: for the connexion of causes is maintained unbroken; and this not supposititious, but actually in operation. And so of the second division, where the incidence of good might be accounted for in the same manner.
It has been suggested as probable by Shaikh Abú Seenā in his Shafā,80 that in consequence of elementary convulsions81 occurring at the great cycles,82 or of collapse, or something approaching to collapse, of the zones,83 (supposing it to occur), or of intersubstitution of the heights and depths, &c. &c.,84 those parts of the earth which admit of being populated and inhabited by living creatures (that is, the parts contiguous to the equator,)85 may remain till a determinate juncture overwhelmed by sea, and the earth consist only of parts so swallowed, and an expanse unfit for habitation by reason of excessive obliquity;86 and in such case animals and vegetables may be destroyed, and may afterwards originate by spontaneous production,87 and not by generation. For there is nothing to discredit the possibility of these species being spontaneously produced; since in many other species it is matter of ocular demonstration, that they do originate as well spontaneously as by generation; as certain worms that are producible from human hair88 — scorpions from exhalations — field-mice and sundry herbs from mould — frogs from rain, &c. Neither does it follow that because of others the spontaneous production does not take place during long intervals, that it should not take place at all; for it may depend upon a determinate juncture occurring only after such intervals. The probability is, indeed, that universal epochs of this nature do occur to the world, and that the great resurrection is such an one. Nay, as succession and generation are dependent on voluntary acts, such as coition, and not on irresistible tendencies, man must necessarily be provided with a capacity for spontaneous production to prevent the possibility of interruption to the species; for it is not absolutely certain that every individual will leave issue, nor therefore that any will. He then goes on to say, if any one will reflect on the principles of arts and sciences, he will perceive that they are all innovations ascribable to the reflection of a particular person; the proof of their novelty being in this, that they are all in daily process of improvement; which quality of theirs he urges in proof of the human race recommencing after succession by generation has been interrupted. For many of the sciences are of such sort as could only be originated by peculiarly favoured persons, or by divine suggestion, exceeding the established bounds. The person that invented them, therefore, must clearly have been independent of them in his own behoof, and must have originated such inventions for the sake of others his fellow-creatures.89 So far our Shaikh; — and in this view, the argument of Galen is deserving of consideration; though, after all, signs of contradiction may be found in it, and ample scope for differing remains.
The modern school of philosophers incline to the opinion, that no disposition is either characteristic or contrary to character; because, as there is no disposition but admits of alteration, and no disposition admitting of alteration can be characteristic, it follows that there can be no characteristic disposition.90 A minor proof is that we see by ocular demonstration, that men acquire virtues or vices according as they keep company with good or bad: as in forming the behaviour of children, particularly such as may be kidnapped and carried from place to place, it is clear that discipline has immense influence on them; and that, with greater or less ease, according to their ability, they take up the dispositions of those about them. Indeed, were dispositions incapable of change, the faculty of discrimination and reflection would be utterly useless; discipline and punishment would be criminal, and the laws of institute and ceremonial void. And then Aristotle’s opinion was,91 that the bad, by instruction and discipline, may be rendered good. That nothing really characteristic admits of change is clear; for it cannot be questioned that nothing can alter the character of fluid, so that on the removal of obstacles it tend not downwards; nor the character of fire from the opposite of this. The assertion is indeed absurd, and these illustrations are adduced to show its tendency.
Such and so put is the argument in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry, which, likewise, as any proficient in observative philosophy will perceive, is open to controversy. For as to that association which he cites, in congenial instances however certain it may be, from ocular evidence, that dispositions are altered, it is equally so that certain dispositions in other persons are entirely unalterable, and particularly in regard to the perfections of the observative faculty; such as induction, retention, facility of comprehension, and the like. We may see that some persons, however much they may labour after them, effect nothing whatever; which is the case with most students in our own time.92 On the strength then of this argument only, how can we affirm that no disposition is characteristic, and all dispositions are capable of change? In short, to admit it invariably is out of the question; and to admit it partially would be of little use; and then what they allege as to the absurdity of the opposite inference, and the adduction of instances to show it — with respect to the discriminative faculty being contravened and suspended, discipline and castigation being abandoned, and their nullification following the notion that no disposition admits of change, — all this is on a par with asserting that the science of medicine is nugatory, if every ailment admit not of cure: that the assertion is nugatory, there can be no doubt.
On the whole we may conclude, as Aristotle long ago affirmed, that the bad may become good by discipline and correction: and although this influence be not a paramount one, yet by repetition of the means some effect must follow on the object; and if the evil in them be not altogether extinguished, it will at least be diminished. We find then, that in order to establish the advantages of this science, it is not necessary to assert that all dispositions are capable of change; it is sufficient if there be any yielding of disposition generally among mankind: just as in the science of medicine, any refusal to yield, if it occur, must be in rare dispositions and rare instances. And similarly the benefit of this science to mankind in general is evident from its tendency to diminish the amount of evil. In no wise then does it involve any supercession of the penalties and restraints of the institute; because the inutility of remedy to one ailment or one person is no opprobrium to the science of medicine at large. If they say that on this showing there is no ground for troubling every person for the alteration of every culpable disposition, since possibly the particular disposition in the particular person may be incapable of change, I answer that, till the refusal to admit alteration be ascertained, it is the dictate of reason and religion to endeavour its alteration. In fact, we are told as much in the words, symbolic of truth, of the Prince of Men,93 when he says, — Strive ye; for every one may attain to that for which he was constituted.94
That the reasoning of most writers in this science has been grounded on an assumption,95 must have been apparent in the course of this discussion. In another place this will be more clearly stated,96 together with an apology for the practice of such assumptions — always under reference to the will of Almighty God,97 with whom rests all protection and all grace!
WE must state, as has been established from the researches of wisdom into the psychological branch of physics, that the reasonable2 mind has two powers,3 the power of perceiving and the power of impelling,4 and each of these powers has two divisions: in the percipient power, 1st, An observative intellect, which is the source of impression from the celestial sources,5 by the reception of those ideas which are the materials of knowledge; 2nd, An active intellect, which, through thought and reflection, is the remote source of motion to the body in its separate actions.6 Combined with the appetent and vindictive powers,7 this division originates the occurrence of many states productive of action or impact, as shame, laughing, crying: in its operation on imagination and supposition, it leads to the accession of ideas and arts in the partial state; and in its relation with the observative sense and the connexion maintained between them, it is the means of originating general ideas relating to actions, as the beauty of truth, the odiousness of falsehood, and the like. The impelling power has likewise two divisions; 1. The vindictive power, which is the source of forcibly repelling what is disagreeable; 2. The appetent power, which is the source of acquiring what is agreeable.
Now the first of these two leading powers ought to have dominion over all the powers of the body, so as to be itself entirely unaffected by them: or rather they ought to remain vanquished and subdued under its influence, betaking themselves each to the employment it may assign. In fact, in their prostration and subjection before the authority of this faculty, consists the proper government of man’s internal kingdom: no one bodily power having license to enter upon any undertaking without its orders, or general disturbance must ensue. When each several power thus betakes itself to its own peculiar function in the manner which the judgment prescribes, then from the culture of the observative intellect (the first branch of the percipient power) is obtained wisdom; from the culture of the active intellect (the second branch of the same) equity;8 from the culture of the vindictive power, courage; and from the culture of the appetent power, temperance.
Under this distribution equity would be the perfection of the active faculty. Some however have derived it differently; holding that the reasonable spirit has three distinct powers,9 by the operation of which its various influences emanate agreeably to volition; and when one of these powers prevails over other, such other is subdued or restricted. 1. The reasonable power, which they call the paramount or imperturbed spirit; being the source of thought and judgment, and the desire to spy into the minutiæ of things. 2. The vindictive power, which they call the brutal and passionate spirit; being the source of anger and bravery, the entrance into dangers and the craving for predominance and elevation of rank. 3. The appetent power, which they call the bestial or urgent spirit; being the source of lust, hunger, and the desires of sensual delight in eating, drinking, and sexual connexion. The number of the virtues then will correspond with the number of these powers; for when the action of the reasonable spirit is maintained in equipoise, and the desire of acquiring knowledge becomes established, from such its action knowledge is obtained, and, by consequence, wisdom; and when the action of the brutal spirit is at equilibrium, and, in subjection to the ruling spirit, it contents itself with what the judgment apportions to it, from such its action the virtue of coolness is obtained,10 and, by consequence, courage; and when the action of the bestial spirit is at equilibrium, and, in obedience to the intellect, it limits itself to what is assigned to it by the decree of judgment, from such its action the virtue of temperance is obtained, and, by consequence, liberality. Then when these three sorts of virtue have been realized, they become connected and blended together, and from the mixture of the three a condition results analogous to each, but presenting them in their highest perfection and completeness; and this they call the virtue of equity.
This exposition is from the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry,11 where the previous one is likewise given in brief.12 The wary and intelligent reader, however, will quickly perceive that in the first exposition equity is a simple quality; while under the second there is ground for predicating of it either way, as simple or compound. The simple, however, is nearer to the word; the obvious sense of equity being an equipoise of the nature analogous to that equipoise of the temperament which results from the harmonious combination of the diverse-natured elements composing it. Now it is agreed among the radices of science that the temperament is a simple quality: and from the language of philosophers on the present subject, it would seem on the whole that they understood equity as simple; although in other passages they appear to explain it as a compound one. Again, in the first exposition equity is the perfection of the active power;13 while in the second it is not confined to that, but is what they call the exercise of every one of the powers: such exercise belonging more to the observative power, yet having a connexion with the active one. So too under the second exposition the attributes are parts of equity, or equivalent to parts, like as the qualities of the elements are parts of the temperament, wherein likewise there is ground for predicating either way; philosophers, however, inclining to the simple. But in the first exposition the three-fold attributes are substrata to equity; because the perfection of the active power lies in the subservience to it of every other power, so that each may be employed in course of equipoise. Now equity itself is only a term for this: for the attribute of so employing the entire powers, on their appropriate occasions, in course of equipoise, according to reflection and expedience, can only subsist by that attribute which makes one power actuate another.14
According then to the prevailing acceptation, namely, that when the three-fold attributes have been secured the active intellect will necessarily possess a power of prevalence over the bodily powers, so that the entire powers are under its rule and guidance, itself remaining unaffected by them, (or, as the defender of the faith15 has laid it down, and explained it in his Ihyā Ikhtiyār, “equity is a state and power of the spirit by which this baffles resentment and desire; guiding them by the dictates of wisdom, and confining them in exertion and restraint to a conformity with expedience,”) — equity would be a thing simply implying the possession of the three-fold attributes; and constituting the perfection of the active intellect. Nevertheless, in its other aspect this same attribute is the head of the observative power, and the collective powers are its servitors: for in this power it is that the highest point of elevation is placed in that intuition into the essences of things which constitutes the supremest of felicities. And if we are to apply equity to the essence of the three qualities, it is composite, and there is no need to count it among the number of the virtues; for the whole of parts is not a separate part; a well-known corollary to the inherence of part in unity. Then too the separate vices (distinguishable only by their contrariety to it and its parts) are not easy to be assigned; because by these premises its species are merely the collective species of its parts, and its opposites are only the opposites of these; for any assignable peculiarity empowering it to make up a distinct genus out of the three coexistent qualities, we cannot discover in it. Hence it is that the first of Shaikhs, in his treatise on Morals, after taking up equity as pervading the collective powers, has paid no attention to its species and opposites, but has limited himself to treating of the species of the three qualities and their opposites: and all that others have brought forward as species of equity he has mostly included under the head of wisdom. — The realities of things are known only to God; but the Ihyā above quoted teaches us to question the position assumed by most books of this science, that namely of equity being the essence of the three attributes, and its species being nevertheless possessed of integral qualities.16
Some again have pointed it out as an involution of the argument,17 that they first divide wisdom into observative and active, one of which is identical with the science of morals, which comprises four virtues, of which the aforesaid wisdom is one; so that wisdom would here be a division of itself. Now this involution may be easily got rid of. For the wisdom so divided is acquaintance with the conditions of all things. In such a science it may itself be well the subject of disquisition, and yet no contradiction be incurred. Nay, the same holds good of the first philosophy which treats of all things,18 and the science, being one of them, may itself be the subject of one among its own propositions. Neither does it at all follow upon this that a thing may be part of itself: for science may mean either the proofs or the propositions. Now it is itself the subject of a proposition as regards the hypotheses, and not as regards the proofs. Assuredly it would be contradictory to say that either the propositions or the proofs (regarding them alone) constituted the science of wisdom: neither does the discrepance at all follow from the statement. This is giving the true and perspicuous answer which admits of no rebuttal. But they have likewise given a second, which is this: The meaning of wisdom in this place is the proper exercise of the active intellect, which is likewise styled active wisdom: and so the discrepance in distribution is obviated by the discrepance in meaning. It follows from this answer, that equity is not the collective of all the virtues; and yet they enunciate it the other way. The truth is, that in fair play, they have grounded their statement on an assumption; not choosing to embarrass the incipient moralist by defining his pursuit in an abstruse manner, but contenting themselves with what should engraft certainty on the channels of action, and be the means of delivering the inquirer after rectitude from the destructive wilds of vice. For it is at the outset of his studies that they direct him to this science, when, to embarrass him by certifying its intents secundum artem, would only serve to perplex and baffle his endeavours: certainty of this sort being only attainable in other branches of science which are beyond a tyro’s depth.19
In this summary way the generality of writers have explained the difficulty. The first of Shaikhs,20 in his treatise on Morals, has likewise noticed it, saying, in many parts of Shafā, that the perfection of intellect (active) consists in the elaboration of complete ideas upon the virtues and vices, as built upon the popular notions, which, after all, are agreeable to proof: but the adjustment of the proofs has to do with the perfection of the observative intellect. Agreement is the Lord’s, and in his hands are the reins of certainty.
This is admitted even by Gillie (Anal. Suppl. p. 216), who denies all he can to the Arabs.
↩Akh.-Jāl. Exordium, in the passage omitted at p. 6.
↩See the motto of the title-page.
↩Pages 31, 32, 63, 64, of the Version.
↩See in the preliminary discourses to Sale’s Kurān.
↩Akh.-nās. Proems to the first and second Books.
↩Ibid. Proems to the second and third Books.
↩Tusc. Disp. iii. 1—4. and 34. iv. 5. and 19. Hor. Ep. I. 1. 32.
↩De Am. xiii.
↩Particularly pages 128, 202, 265, 310.
↩Pages 279, 286, 293, 296.
↩Pages 223, 429.
↩Pages 56 and 57, 107, 277, &c.
↩“Strictly speaking, that cannot be evil from which good comes.” Paley, Mor. Phil. Book ii. c. 8.
↩See pages 191, 384, 394, 396, 398, 436, 447.
↩Muhammedan philosophy might be reduced to a partial and scientific interpretation of the following passages: Metaphysics — Gen. ii. 7. Job xii. 16. xxxiii. 4. xxxiv. 14, 15. Ecclesiastes iii. 11. 1 Esdras iv. 33, 40. 2 Esdras iv. and ix. Wisd. Sol. vii. 22—27. xii. 1. xv. 16. Ecclesiasticus xlii. 23. xliii. 27. Morals — Job xxviii. 7. 2 Esdras vii. 1—14. Wisd. Sol. viii. 7. Ecclesiasticus xvii. 1—12. xli. 1—8. xlii. 24, 25. Physics — Ecclesiastes i. 4—11. iii. 1—10. Ecclesiasticus xiv. 17, 19. xviii. 7. xxxix. 21. xl. 8.
↩Paley, Moral. Phil. Book i. c. 7. Book ii. c. 3.
↩Pages 80, 81.
↩Asserted at length in Archbp. Tillotson’s Sermons on the nature and attributes of God. Grotius is more concise: “Quæcunque autem subsistunt, a Deo existendi habere originem, connexum est his quæ ante diximus. Conclusimus enim, id quod per se sive necessario est, unum esse. Unde sequitur, ut alia omnia sint orta ab aliquo diverso a seipsis. Quæ autem aliunde orta sunt, ea omnia, in se aut in causis suis, orta esse ab eo quod ortum nunquam est, id est a Deo, jam ante vidimus.” De Ver. I. c. 7.
↩Pages 191, 436.
↩Pages 122, 229, 231, 233, 330, 331.
↩Pages 79, 145, 223, 338, 358, &c. 420.
↩Pages 17, 72, 112, 113, 192, 339, 349, 415.
↩Pages 16, 118, 331, 363, 364.
↩Pages 118, 122, 228, 336. They might urge the old Epicurean argument, never yet answered, that if mind and matter were heterogeneous in the last resort, they could not act upon each other; but instead of concluding with the Epicureans that mind was a form of matter, they would use it to show that matter is a form of mind.
↩Am. c. viii.
↩The first, pages 145, 416; the second, pages 301, 448.
↩Pages 102, 103, 450. Cf. Plato, Rep. x. ad fin.
↩See the concluding portion of Plato’s Timæus.
↩Tanāsukh seems conventionally confounded with Tamāsukh; which is strictly metamorphosis.
↩Pages 16, 17, 315, 317.
↩See in pages 26, 200, 237, 360.
↩Cf. Grotius, De Ver. I. c. 8. “Nam cum diximus Deum omnium esse causam, addidimus eorum quæ verè subsistunt;” from which category he proceeds to exclude evil.
↩See in page 416.
↩Pages 27, 28, 33, 34, 171, 235, 376.
↩Page 80.
↩The preface to Saädy’s Bostān is a familiar and accessible example.
↩Pages 79, 304, 305.
↩ Most of their early states were founded by Egyptian and
Asiatic fugitives. At a later period, see in Herodotus, Clio, cs. 27
and 29, and in Herodotus’s conduct, instances of their sagacious
system of inquiry. References might be multiplied
Eastern writings all commence with an appeal of some sort to the Divinity: to this Muhammedans add another to their Prophet, and Persian Muhammedans a third to their king or other temporal patron, for reasons to be found below.
↩Words used by Muhammad to describe the flocking of souls to judgment at the last day. See Kurán c. xxxix.
↩Earth-red is the exact signification of Adam’s name in Hebrew and Arabic (Josephus, Ant. i. 1. 2. upon Genesis ii. 7). Edom and Idumea had the same derivation (ib. i. 2. 1). Hence St. Paul, in his learning, says, “The first man is of the earth, earthy.” The same connexion may be observed in the Latin homo (and still more in its derivatives) with humus.
↩In all the schools of Eastern philosophy the connexion between the soul and its human state or nature is not a necessary but an arbitrary one; the world and life being a peculiar process to which soul is subjected for certain ends. See Introduction.
↩For this and the following text see Kurán c. vii. vs. 10. 26. according to which Adam was taught by God the names of all things, and then made to display his knowledge before the angels, who, having no terms of their own for them, were thus compelled to acknowledge man’s superiority to themselves: see, in continuation, Kurán c. xv. vs. 26. 49. ii. 30—6. xvii. 62—6. xviii. 50—4. xxxiii. 2—16. which are all so many expansions of the Scripture account, adopted from traditions of the Talmud. The two texts above are founded on Genesis ii. vs. 19, 20. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names,” &c. Muslim commentators, knowing little of Scripture, suppose the names of God to be partly intended by the Kurán; and hence the allusion to the divine attributes, &c., which are subjects of superstitious attention in their schools: see an instance in Sect. 5. Book i. “The perfection of every quality lies in its meeting and embracing its opposite,” &c. See note 29. The doctrine of innate ideas, though held by the Muslims, is not to be inferred from this passage, which alludes to divine instruction given after the creation of Adam, and to him only.
↩The words so rendered are taken from the proëm to the Hidāyat. Institutory, — belonging to the institute or body of national persuasions and practices, which they held in every instance to have been originally appointed by an inspired delegate of God, and which, when perverted and corrupted (as in process of time they generally became), were renewed in the case of more favoured nations by a fuller dispensation. See Sect. 1. Book iii. on the Origin of Government.
↩Not inexplicable, however, or purely arbitrary, since in the later ages of the faith attempts were made to resolve them into systems of moral discipline. See an instance in Sect. 3 of Book iii. on Affection.
↩Companions, technically speaking, were those who fled from Mecca with Muhammad; the converts of his prosperity being termed only Ansārs, or supporters.
↩Such are the taxes to which learning is subject in an immature and unsettled society, where it must live by flattery or not at all; the subject will recur in Sects. 4 and 5 of Book iii. Most of the panegyric has been omitted in the version, as denoted by the asterisks; indeed, this sort of adulation, being always expected and always given, passed in fact for nothing at all but a display of the writer’s graceful ingenuity.
↩A Tartar title, at first peculiar to kings beyond the Oxus.
↩Sixth of the White Sheep dynasty of Turkmáns, then reigning in Irāk or Mesopotamia. He defeated and put to death Jahān Shāh of the rival dynasty, and Abú Saäíd the Great Mogul; was himself afterwards defeated by Muhammad II., who took Constantinople; called by European historians of that age Ussen Cussen; reigned 1467-79. (Khondemir, Hist. x. D’Herbelôt.) His love of letters may be presumed from the praises of Dowlat Shāh, his enemy’s partizan, and from one or two letters addressed to him by the poet Jāmi (Tazkarah Dowlat Shāh at Mahmood Barsā): the progenitors mentioned just before were Hamzā Aly Bēg, Karā Ilagh Bēg, and Karlu Bēg, of which the first only (his father) would be termed sultan by any but a dependent.
↩Properly speaking, the empire of Muhammad’s successor: which, after the downfall of the legitimate caliphat in 1258, every prince assumed his own to be; and the term became a general one. Hasán Bēg, however, was better entitled to it than most princes, as he reigned in Irāk, the last seat of the caliphat.
↩Alluding to the princes he had destroyed: another passage is omitted at the asterisks.
↩Of the planets, Scil; a title originally assumed by Timúr, and properly belonging only to his representatives. Hasán Bēg however claimed equal rank with these, as we learn from his reception of Abú Saäíd’s ambassador (Khondemir). The language of astronomy was just then in fashion, in consequence of the late emperor Ulug Bēg’s devotion to the study; and all titles derived from that would be eagerly caught up and applied to every potentate. The propensity of the Asiatics to exalt their own immediate sovereign into the highest of any is one cause of the confusion reigning in their early history.
↩The heir and successor of Hasán Bēg was Khaleel, who reigned only six months, when his younger brother Yúsaf Bēg killed him, and took his place. In the khātimeh, or conclusion of the work, he is spoken of as discharging most of the functions of government during his father’s life, then probably one of seventy years, his brother having reigned before him.
↩The highest compliment a work could receive. The prince’s treasury, to an Asiatic, was like the temple of Apollo to a Roman writer.
↩The writers of the fifteenth century made constant use of the terms of ancient and modern, applying the latter to themselves, and the former to those who preceded the century of Mogul dominion. The depression under which letters then laboured (about 1250-1350) suggested the division. Saädy, Imāmi, and a few others, who flourished within this period, under the precarious shelter of the Atābeks, are ranked with the moderns.
↩Stated in the khātimeh to be Jāni Muhammad Asaäd, of whom no further particulars are known.
↩The Greek philosophers, from whom their sciences were entirely taken. The leading principles of these were indeed common to the Arabs and to all the people of the East, from whom the Greeks originally derived them. At a later period, but prior still to the age of Muhammad, they were given back to the East in an improved form, by the schools of the lower empire; and lastly, when compelled by the mastery of the Eastern world to carry out leading principles into practical details, the Arabs were glad to find it done to their hands in the works of a subject language. In the reign of Māmún (ninth century) they gave themselves fully up to the study of the Grecian masters (in translation), and have ever since adhered to them, holding with Plato in metaphysics, with Aristotle in physics and logic, with Euclid in geometry, with Ptolemy in astronomy, and with Galen in medicine; allowing the highest place to the first, but being most influenced by the second. Their digests and adaptations were then once more given back to the West (through the Spanish and Italian schools) in the form of the Aristotelian philosophy of the middle ages. (Supp. Gillie’s Anal. ad fin.) Their knowledge however was limited to principals. Theophrastus and Diogenes are the only secondaries included in Khondemir’s account of the Grecian sages. Of Pythagoras they knew nothing but the name, of Porphyry only the Isagoge.
↩From this it would appear that the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry is the former work, on which the present is founded, that being adhered to throughout in the order and manner of the treatise. Having been composed too in the province of Irāk, under the auspices of a former governor, no work was more likely to have gained possession of the royal attention. Muhammad Asaäd hardly does justice, however, to the work or its author, considering that the latter was the foremost of his age (the thirteenth century) — Nāsirodín Thusi.
↩ Alluding to the two leading schools, the experimental and the
speculative, on the respective merits of which he enlarges in the
Introduction: called also
Under the last of these two he silently introduces a third, which, however, is only a subdivision of the second.
↩The title of modern Oriental works is always of this figurative sort. How the work became known by its more convenient name, we are not told; probably from the esteem in which it was held, as Akhlāk-i-Jalāly may without violence be rendered, Transcendental Ethics.
↩ The original word signifies a pencil of light or ray, and
thence any divergent extension of a particular idea or subject.
The term is peculiar and affected, and seems suggested only by
some temporary preference for the images and phrases of astronomy
(see note 14); possibly however by its phonetic resemblance
to the Greek word
Such appeals to the conclusions of other sciences are of constant occurrence throughout. See end of Introduction, note 97.
↩The first two texts are from the passages referred to in note 5; the third from chap. xxxiii. (Kurán.) The idea is characteristic of the Muslims and their religion — too daring throughout. The vice-regence was destined however for man in his purer state. After his fall, it could only be accomplished by a new adjustment of his circumstances and expectations, by subjecting him to the trials of life and the exactions of religion. In their ideas of natural corruption they go further perhaps than the Christian Church; holding (as we shall see in Book iii.) that men are incapable of constituting society, unless this be arranged in the origin and supported in the process by divine favour.
↩A powerful, passionate, and only half-reasoning order of creatures, more or less employed in modifying defective arrangements of matter. These fancies of the Arabs are sanctioned by the Kurán, chaps. xxvii. xlvi. and lxxii., where some genii are said to have been converted by passages of the Kurán which they accidentally overheard.
↩See note 4. In order, that is, to accomplish the vice-regence.
↩In the Exordium to Sect. 5. Book i. an instance is given, “He is the first and the last, the manifest and the hidden.” In Plato’s Parmenides the idea is worked out through every relation. The passage in the text contains their interpretation (from the Talmud) of the words of Genesis ii. — “God created man after his own image.” This notion of theirs involves, if not the materialism of the Deity, at least the subsistence of matter by and in him; which indeed is a leading point in their pantheism.
↩Contrary to the persuasion of the Christian Church: all Scripture passages implying the materiality of angels are resolved by the Muslims into illusion exercised on the witnesses. Milton however holds their dimensions reducible at will (Pandemonium), which notion, as well as the passage “millions unseen,” &c. agrees very well with a verse of the Kurán, where we are told that, “there is no span in air or æther unoccupied by a worshipping spirit.” Two angels, one to tempt and the other to support under temptation, attached to every man. (Kurán c. l. and c. xiii. v. 13.) Two others were to raise them at the last day.
↩ Inferred from continuity of motion and influence without
perceptible external cause: this seems men’s earliest conclusion,
and the origin of star-worship. Next comes the indefinite suspicion
of some ratio of forces, (see Sect. 5. Book i.) though at
the end of Sect. 2. Book iii. the motion is again said to be
appetent: the opinions may indeed be held together. Plato
(Anima Mundi), after resolving every thing into proportion, considers
the orbs not only as vital, but the cause of vitality upon
earth,
Circu-lation has come to signify a voluntary rather than a passive movement, which is here essential.
↩See two passages, middle Sect. 5. Book i. and Sect. 2. Book iii. ad fin. The words here used are carefully adapted to signify change either from previous states, or in the gradations of this one; hinting rather than affirming the transition they seem to have held. See the passage on Tenderness in Sect. 2 of Book i.
↩Provided the opposites are states — not when they are faculties, still less when they are natures. Horace (“totus teres atque rotundus”) intends the same comparison.
↩The first being the opinion of the speculative and the second of the experimental school — the first Platonic (Phædrus), though only developed by the later Platonists — the latter Aristotelian. — See Gillie’s Analysis, chap. ii. (on Imagination and Memory), with references. — Cf. Sect. 3. Book iii.
↩ This, the transcendental doctrine of Platonists as well as
Pythagoreans, it was the object of Plato’s invaluable Parmenides
to develope: take the conclusion —
An allusion to servitude for debt which all early communities seem to have held legitimate. Tacitus, Germ. xxiv. 5. Modified among the Jews, Exod. xxi. Levit. xxv. Deut. xv., and Egyptians, Genesis xlvii. 18—23. But then, as Tacitus observes, such slavery was very different from that of more advanced society. Muhammad discouraged the slavery of believers to each other, but it has always prevailed among his followers. In Turkey liberty may be publicly claimed, but the privilege is often waived.
↩A tacit allusion to their sectarian denomination of Shíites, from a root signifying conformity in multitudes. Their opponents are the Sunnites, the former discrediting all representatives of Muhammad other than in the line of Aly; the second paying equal veneration to his predecessors and successors, and receiving for authentic the Sunnah or digest of traditions compiled by them. The stronghold of Sunnetism was in Syria, where the Ummíyan caliphs reigned to the prejudice of Aly’s line. The Turks, from their vicinity apparently to that quarter, adopted its persuasion. The prevailing feeling of the rest (far the majority) of Islām is, and always has been, to Shíitism.
↩See note 5. After Adam’s display of knowledge, the angels were commanded to fall down and worship him. All obey but Eblis, who is thereupon driven from heaven, and becomes the enemy of God and man. This old Arabic tradition is borne out by the opening to the book of Job. The author’s object in dwelling on these topics is to raise the reader’s mind to the level of the subject.
↩Not absolute perfection, but the nearest attainable approach to it. They very properly contemplate every thing that is in connexion with what it might be, and what it ought to be. See a passage in Sect. 4. Book i. on the real and virtual equipoise, from which it is clear enough that they do not hold the doctrine of perfectibility.
↩ Súfy: a term for the erotic and pantheistic school, borrowed
apparently from the Greek
The paramount and universal virtue is here denominated
Wisdom. Elsewhere, as in Sect. 5. Book i., it is taken to be
Justice: this vagueness (which is only one of terms) will there
be explained. The perfection of either implies the other, and
perfection itself may be properly considered one or the other, according
as man is regarded in an individual or social aspect. Plato
and Aristotle, when writing politically, have in many passages
given precedence to the latter; Plato, most specifically, Rep. iv.,
Is this said in the old philosophy, eisdem verbis? I think
not; though implied in a hundred places. Plato comes very near
it (Phædrus),
Herein lies the banefulness of natural knowledge. Man is not so able to imitate as to understand — to execute as to devise. — “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. ” This imperfection it is the object of revealed religion not only (as above) to affirm, but in some respects to remedy, and in more to console. The imitation of God is an inspiring thought, but it can be nothing more.
↩One of Muhammad’s most frequent designations, meaning that he was sent to punish the world’s dereliction of former Prophets: refuge of Prophet-hood is the technical rendering, a Prophet being that inspired person who is especially delegated to convert a people.
↩Self-denial — a school which combined the Platonic love of virtue with the Stoic indifference to every thing else. Dowlat Shāh tells us that Hakím Sanāi, one of the earliest practical instances of this class, carried his carelessness about person and property to such lengths that his friends wept for him. In later times austerity was a sure road to veneration.
↩ A much celebrated saying of his was
Ethics, vi. 6. is on this subject. “Since the object of science is universal and demonstrable truth, and whatever is demonstrable must be founded on principles, it follows that there must be primary principles which are not science any more than they are art or prudence. * * * * It follows that intellect, operating on experience, is the only source from which these great and primary truths can be expected to flow.” (Gillie.) Some other passage is referred to in the text.
↩So Plato is called, as being the greatest of natural divines. See note 19.
↩Ârifína — a translation of the Greek word Gnostic, a school which, in point of fact, they much resembled.
↩Shehrwerdy, thirteenth century, put to death by the Syrian Saladin for being more philosophic than orthodox (Stewart’s Catalogue): hence his epithet Maktúl, which means killed.
↩See their notions of this in a passage of Sect. viii. Book i. Cure of Pride.
↩A blind veneration for names is the besetting weakness of Muslim philosophers, old and recent.
↩ So I have throughout rendered the expression
Janíd was spiritual representative of Aly Razā the 8th Imām, as being head of a religious institution founded by him — (Dowlat Shāh at Jalālodín Rúmy). He and Tústery were both hearers of Zul Nún, a still more celebrated mystic of the third century, A.H., or tenth A.D. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩The words in italics belong to a passage in the Kurán, interlaced as above with the author’s own.
↩Alluding to some fabulous legends, of which the Arabs had as many connected with the notes and demeanour of their birds as the Greeks had of theirs.
↩Men and genii; see note 27. Aly Razā, their eighth Imām, is usually styled Imām of men and genii.
↩Said by Muhammad, in order to impress his followers with high notions of his infallibility. See Kurán, chaps. xxxiii. and lxvi. Far different is the language of real inspiration, Job c. iv. 18. “Behold, he put no trust in his servants, and his angels he charged with folly.”
↩ A metaphor constantly used by the ancients, with whom it
was likewise a general position, that passions were diseases of the
mind. Cicero, Tusc. iii. 1—4. “Est profecto animi medicina
philosophia; quæ Græci
Particularly Ghazāly, the most orthodox of all their doctors.
His work on ethics is named
Only the scientific department. They began as boys with learning Arabic, the language of their Scripture, and of all standard works on science. The notion of beginning with morals as a science is very unsound. We are not to reason before we know how to reason. Moral is application — abstract science, exercise and method; and then their science of morals was confessedly deficient. — See end of Introduction, and of Sect. 1. Book i.
↩This is the most general object of attention in the Muslim schools. The Arabs, being suddenly called from their deserts to all the duties and dignities of civilized life, were at first much pressed to reconcile these with the simplicity of their Scripture. The multitude of distinctions they were obliged to adopt gave dialectics an importance which they never lost.
↩A writer on education in the tenth century, treasurer to Azdodoulat, the greatest potentate of his time. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩ Meant to represent
In a hundred passages in the Kurán, Muhammad disclaims miraculous power; visions he professed to have sometimes, but no more. Chaps. xlii. and liii. The angels that fought on their side were wholly invisible. His followers, however, being pressed on this point by the Jews and Christians, searched his life for incidents which they could conveniently magnify into such.
↩The passage resembles one in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where the same charge is brought against the Greek sophists: so much for the supposed fanaticism and intolerance of the Muslims! They too, it seems, had early their infidels, non-conformists, and free-thinkers.
↩Meaning their Scripture or Kurán. He opens the case with scripture quotations, because it is the doctrine of the fanatic school, particularly of the Jebbāries or fatalists, who utterly denied free agency, and merged every thing into a series of actuations from the divinity. The real state of the question is well put by the author a little below — “Every one has a latitude of temperament,” &c.
↩See further on, at note 75.
↩This is not an admitted point, as he seems to suppose; — it would be argued on the other side, that if the intended identity were vicious, it might be superseded not only without prejudice to life, but with advantage to it. Identity of being has often been doubted.
↩From Firdúsi’s celebrated satire on Mahmúd of Ghuzni, whom he taunts in these words with being the son of a vassal. These metrical passages, so constantly occurring, are all quotations from established authorities, though Persian reading is not yet exact enough to enable us to recognise many. This is what is meant in the Exordium by “giving prelibations from the striking passages of those who look beneath the veil.”
↩ Plato had said before him, not only metaphorically but
allegorically, —
Jamshíd, fourth of the Kaianian dynasty, the Solomon of the Persians. His cup was said to mirror the world, so that he could observe all that was passing elsewhere — a fiction of his own for state purposes, apparently, backed by the use of foreign mirrors. Nizāmi tells us Alexander invented the steel mirror, by which he means, of course, that improved reflectors were introduced by the Greeks. Mirrors or reflectors were used for telescopy in the days of Archimedes, but not early enough to have assisted Jamshíd, who belongs to the fabulous and unchronicled age. In the romance of Beyjan and Manija in the Shāhnāmeh, this mirror is used by the great Khasrú for the purpose of discovering the place of that hero’s imprisonment.
↩ Used in its proper sense of moral mould or shape, from
These terms belong to the humoral (which was once the universal) pathology: the last popular treatise on this is to be found in the discussions in Tristram Shandy on radical heat and moisture. It is now exploded, not because it was not true as far as it went, but because other influences have been brought forward, which reduce these to the class of symptoms and intermediaries.
↩Almost the words of Locke, II. chap. xxii. Sect. 10. “Power or ability in man of doing any thing, when it has been acquired by frequent doing the same thing, is that idea we name habit. When it is forward and ready upon every occasion to break into action, we call it disposition.”
↩The old Magian, — the leading principle of which was revived in the heresy of the Manicheans, and entered likewise into the Gnostic system.
↩The writer’s difficulties here arise from following the ancients in their erroneous mode of arguing upon ideas instead of phenomena. Evil (which is here injurious inclination) arises not from the nature of man, but from the nature of his relations with surrounding objects; that is, from material limitations and privations, which teach him to find his own gain in others’ loss; and thus by habit and association to take pleasure sometimes in others’ loss, even when unattended by any other advantage than the indulgence of such habit. Now habit being peculiarly under the influence of discipline, so is this last species of ill-feeling, — the only one of the two which is properly anti-social. The passage in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry is first section, second division — On the Definition and Nature of Disposition.
↩ The Grecian or natural philosophy, scil., unenlightened by
revelation. Avicenna, in the subjoined theory, attempts to reconcile
the two: the word in the original is filsefia, representing of
course
One of Avicenna’s most celebrated works, comprising the whole round of the sciences.
↩ In the original
Those of the equinoctial precession.
↩According to the Ptolemaic system (which is still in vogue in the East), the heavens are a solid cylinder or firmament, the fall of which was contemplated as possible. Hence Horace: “Si fractus inlabatur orbis.” “If the crystalline orb break up and drop upon him.”
↩ By gradual detrition and deposit. The process so much
built on in modern geology; yet familiar it appears to Avicenna
in the tenth century. Plato has indeed hinted at it in his Critias,
though with specific reference only to Attica:
That is, one of the two zones adjacent to the torrid one.
↩Obliquity in the sun’s rays that is; the old notion of the torrid and frigid zones being uninhabitable: it is amusing to find it held by persons writing perhaps in the torrid zone.
↩ The periodical destructions we have in Plato’s Critias, (passage
above, note 84) and Laws iii.
It is said that hair confined in running water becomes vitalized.
↩That is, at the first origin of art and science many persons were already in the world to profit by it; that is, many were originated at once. This argument rests on a standard principle of their political reasoning (Sect. 1. Book iii.); namely, that without art and science not only society could not subsist, but not even a single individual. Hence it follows, that if art is invention, and the invention be not for the inventor, art, the inventor of art, and the multitude to profit by it, must all have been produced together. This reasoning would not apply to Adam, whom we see, in former notes, they suppose to have been divinely instructed in the necessary arts. The scriptural account of creation they hold intact; seeking, however, by this theory, to engraft these traditions respecting the progress of early society, which they found so fondly recurred to by their masters in philosophy, the Greeks. Of the priority of Egyptian and Phœnician civilization, by which these traditions are explained, they had no idea.
↩This passage seems a sort of traditional extract from Aristotle, transferred from writer to writer till its real author was unknown. “Properties given by nature cannot be taken away, or altered by custom: thus the gravity of a stone, which naturally carries it downwards, cannot be changed into levity, which would carry it upwards, were we to throw it in that direction ten thousand times; and fire, which naturally seeks the extremities, cannot be brought by custom to tend towards the centre. The moral virtues, therefore, are neither natural nor præternatural: we are born with capacities for acquiring them, but they can only be acquired by our own exertions.” (Ethics, Arist. ii. 1. Gillie.) This conclusion he was the readier to arrive at for his distinction (abandoned by these writers) between the intellectual and moral virtues. (Ethics, v. 1. and vi. 7.) He never means to deny that intellectual habits are largely determined by unalterable constitution of intellect. Now moral habits being partly determined by intellectual ones, if the last are unchangeable in a greater degree, the first will be so in a lesser.
↩Aristot. Pol. iv. c. 14. “Man only is disciplined by reason, and may be persuaded even to change bad habits by the influence of example and the conviction of argument.” The fault indeed of Grecian theories lay in attributing too much influence to law and discipline, and too little to circumstances of nature and situation: and hence, though for a time they achieved splendid victories over nature, their systems had no endurance, but were speedily overwhelmed by higher agencies.
↩So universal among all literary classes in all places is the depreciation of the age they live in: the more invariable the less just. — 1. They compare the achievements of innumerable ages with that of their own single one. — 2. They see only the achieved, and not the achievements in preparation.
↩Meaning the inspired words of Muhammad: a short ejaculation or benedicite is omitted here and everywhere else where his name occurs. The Muslims never mention the name of any distinguished character without inserting a benedicite after it. In the version these are generally omitted.
↩That is, the vice-regence: see beginning of the Introduction.
↩The word in the original is the very converse — a concession: but this, by a technical use, they understand as coming from the antagonist, not from the party applying it; it is in fact equivalent to our petitio principii.
↩End of Sect. 1. Book i.
↩ In verse 25, chap. xviii. of the Kurán, Muslims are forbidden
to say they will do any thing without adding, “If it please God.”
For this reference to divine pleasure they have a particular term
Powers of animal as well as human nature, according to Akh.-nās. i. 3, where reason constitutes a third power. According to the text, reason would not be a separate power, but only the excellence of the first; which agrees with Locke, Essay l. ii. c. 11. s. 5, 7, 10.
↩ Plato gives two parts or powers, rational and irrational
(Timæus, and note 4): the last Aristotle further divides into
sensitive and passionate (Eth. i. c. 13. vi. c. 3), which nearly
agrees with the text. Memory and imagination are held not
faculties, but states (see Sect. 2), as in the Greek system,
Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iv. 5. “Veterem illam equidem, Pythagoræ
primum, dein Platonis descriptionem sequar, qui animum,” &c.
“I wish to follow the old distribution; that of Pythagoras first,
and of Plato afterwards, who both divide the mind into two parts,
one of which they hold to partake of reason, and the other to be
devoid of it. In that which partakes of reason, they place tranquillity,
that is, placid self-possession, and in the other those
turbulent commotions, whether of anger or desire, which are
opposite and hostile to reason.” These are involuntary motions.
How far they intended to limit voluntary motion likewise to the
second power (thus rendering the two identical with the passive
and active principles) is not clear in either school. Túsy says,
“Perception in its (the soul’s) nature and impulse by its organs.”
Akh.-nās. ii. 5. On the other hand, active intellect (and more,
active power) is often loosely used as a moving principle. In
the higher science we know perception itself was only a form of
motion,
The Ptolemaic orbs, with the motion of which they supposed the procession of ideas to be connected — a compromise between Platonic recollection and Aristotelian attainment. See Introduction at note 35, and Sect. 5. Book iii.
↩The immediate source then is in the power of impulse.
↩ Said only for illustration; not that they divided the faculties.
So Aristotle, “It makes no difference whether the soul is divisible
or indivisible; it has at any rate distinct powers.”
I am obliged to use equity instead of justice throughout; in order to maintain the connexion, all along insisted on, between the quality intended and equipoise, both physical and metaphorical.
↩
| 1. Reason. | 2. Excitement. | ||
| 1. Contemplative. | 2. Active. | 3. Appetent. | 4. Vindictive. |
There are many logical anomalies in this derivation of the virtues, the terms in the several processes not bearing the same respective relation. The actions in which such qualities are observed proceed indeed from the powers assigned, which may so far justly be termed their first material. On the relation of coolness to courage hear Aristotle. — “The office of courage consists in moderating the impulse of rash boldness, as well as the excess of cautious timidity.” — Eth. iii. 9.
↩In ii. 5.
↩In i. 3.
↩From this time forward he uses power and intellect indifferently when speaking of the contemplative and active divisions; thus endangering the distinction between active intellect and impelling faculty (see note 4), as in the sentence next noted.
↩That is, equity (of which the first member of the sentence is a description) exists in and by the active power (or power of making one power influence another) to which (and therefore to equity) the other three virtues were shown (in the preceding sentence) to be substrata.
↩Hujet ul Islām; so Ghazāly was called. See Introduction, note 61. Ihyā Ikhtiyār signifies resuscitation of the will — importing the work to have been partly directed against the heresy of the fatalists.
↩This question, which bewilders the writer and reader throughout the treatise, is raised on the old error of looking for specific essence in qualities themselves, instead of in the minds of those contemplating them. (Locke, Ess. iii. chap. 5.) No doubt the ruling disposition of the mind, be it to good or evil, or any degree or intermixture of the two, call it by what name or classes of names we will, is as single and indivisible as the mind in which it exists; but the actions in which it is exerted have various aspects and relations: it is these actions, and not the disposition originating them, which are properly the subject of classification and nomenclature. In different classes of these, according to situation and habit, the ruling disposition will manifest itself in different intensity, and then we suppose different dispositions to each, instead of different degrees of the same. But by reason of the sameness of the ruling principle, most of these subordinate divisions are liable to be expanded into the whole; and hence the indistinctness and versatility of the terms employed. In the case of justice the question had already been settled by Aristotle. “In one sense justice comprehends every thing that has a tendency to produce or maintain happiness in society.” — Eth. v. 1. “But our present inquiry is concerning justice in a more limited sense, denoting one virtue in particular.” — Ibid. 2. (Gillie.) This is equally true of wisdom (see Introduction, note 42), of temperance, of courage, even of modesty, patience, and others (see Sect. 2.), all which, by merely generalizing the terms of their definitions, may be identified with universal virtue; though there will always be a particular class of actions coming under it, to which each is respectively and peculiarly appropriate.
↩Akh.-nās. ii. 5. ad fin.
↩After Aristotle in his Metaphysics, where he applies this term to the science of first principles in all things, called also Wisdom and Theology. (Gill. Anal. c. ii.)
↩Take Túsy’s illustrations, Akh.-nās. i. 1. “First principles are those which, when not self-evident, are established in some other science higher than the one in question, in which latter they are to be at once admitted. For instance, it is one of the principles of medicine that there are four elements, and no more: a proposition which is made out in natural philosophy, from the adept in which the physician must receive it, and consider it as granted in his own science. It is a first principle of mathematics that quantities are points of being in continuation, and that their species are three and no more — line, superficies, and body; an axiom established in theology, or what is termed metaphysics, from the adept in which the mathematician is to receive it for application in his own science. This science of metaphysics is that on which all other sciences bottom, and in this only can there be no first principles which are not self-evident.” — See Introduction, note 62.
↩Avicenna; for the Shafā, see Introduction, page 42.
↩