IT is held that wisdom is a term for knowledge of the states of things in the aspect really belonging to them; as far, that is, as man’s capacity admits: for neither their conditions nor natures depend on human power or will, and the active wisdom is only the knowledge relating to them.2
Courage is the quality of submissiveness in the vindictive spirit to the reasonable spirit; so that it retain its firmness in situations of alarm and danger; not giving way to agitation; but acting by the dictates of right reason.
Temperance is this, that the appetite be obedient to the reasonable spirit; so that it be employed according to the dictate of intellectual prudence, to the manifestation of freedom and deliverance from the bondage of physical desires, and from subservience to their manifold impulses.
Equity is this, that all the powers agree with each other and shape themselves after the discerning faculty; that contrariety of inclination and conflict of powers cast not their possessor into the gulph of dismay; but rather, that giving what is due, and taking what is due, be the symbol of his actions: on which definition of equity we have discoursed at large.
Further it is to be observed of each of these virtues, that till it operates not on other, the possessor of it is entitled to no praise. And therefore it is that one endued with the quality of expensiveness, and that on proper occasions, as long as his influence passes not on to other, is called expensive instead of liberal: he that possesses the quality dependent on the vindictive power, in the same situation, is called irritable instead of courageous: and he that possesses intellectual cultivation is called clever instead of wise. But as soon as he produces an effect on other, he excites the hope and fear of other, reverence and respect take root in the hearts of men, and it then becomes obligatory on their feelings to give him praise. And so throughout this passage; when we say one is entitled to commendation, we mean that the intellect decides for the propriety of commending him. Now it is clear, that without feeling hope or fear, the intellect never can decide for the debenture of commendation on the part of others. For be one never so graced with the most varied perfections, as long as advantage is not expected of him nor injury held in store, the understanding will not hold it incumbent on any one to enter on his praise; but as soon as ever there is either of the two, it holds it meritorious, nay, obligatory, as the occasions of hope or fear alternately arise, to approach him with fair report for acquisition of the advantage or rebuttal of the apprehension: and happy is he who can thus command the hopes and fears of his fellow men.3
Under each of the four genera are many species; the most noted of which the treatise shall comprise, and the pen illustrate.4
Of wisdom, according to ordinary repute, the species are seven: penetration, quickness of intellect, clearness of understanding, facility of acquirement, propriety of discrimination, retention, recollection.
For penetration, it is the quality of expedition in educing intents, and facility in evolving conclusions from premises; and the acquisition of it is a consequence dependent on the frequency of following premises out.
Quickness of intellect is the quality of passing from the related to the relations, without dwelling on the transition. And here, between these two,5 the difference is this, that the first celerity is in the process of thought, whereas the second is without thought; as in passing from things speculatively related to their relations, or from things given to their reverse or converse.
Clearness of understanding is the quality of capacity to evolve an end without looseness or confusion.
Facility of acquirement is the quality of perfect attention to objects, so as to master them readily without hinderance from discrepant ideas.
Propriety of discrimination is this, that in reasoning and investigating we should observe the proper limit of every object, so as neither to admit of neglecting a consideration nor pushing a thing too far.
Retention is when an idea conceived or received makes a firm impression.
Recollection is the quality6 of calling up things retained whenever one desires, without inconvenience.
Under courage we have eleven: magnanimity, collectedness, elevation of purpose, firmness, coolness, stateliness, boldness, endurance, condescension, zeal, mercy.
Magnanimity is, that the soul take no note of honor or disrepute, pay no regard to affluence or adversity; but remain entirely unaffected by praise or censure, by wealth or want; from the mutations of human affairs admitting neither alteration, nor transition, nor impression, nor influence:7 a spiritual eminence whose heights are only attainable to the most advanced on the paths of research; whose summits are not to be contemplated, but by the choicest of the accomplished.
On this subject there is a saying of the principal Sufy Shaikhs: “the last foible to evacuate the heads of the faithful is the love of place; and the luxury of destitution cannot be known till praise and blame have become indifferent.”
Collectedness is the soul’s constancy in its own stability at the moment of entering upon difficulties and dangers; that it give no room to trepidation, and no rise to unsteady impulses.
Elevation of purpose is, that in the soul’s pursuit of real good and spiritual perfection, it pay no regard to worldly interest and prejudice; neither rejoicing at such attainment, nor grieving at such loss; even to being unsusceptible of the fear of death. Many enthusiasts after the commendable in morals, have gone so far as to say —
Firmness is the power of withstanding afflictions and trials, that they affect not our minds to extremity, nor any prostration be allowed beyond what admits of recovery.
Coolness is a quiescence, in virtue of which one cannot be hastily, or rather cannot be at all, overcome by anger.
Stateliness is this, that into enmities or hostilities which may be necessary to protect the honor of faith or worship, or the dignity of life or feeling, no levity be allowed to enter.
Boldness is an appetite of the soul for undertaking great concerns, for the sake of storing up a good report and holy recompense.
Endurance is the quality of taking pains to exercise the bodily organs8 for the attainment of such faculties and endowments as are the subjects of repute and approbation.
Condescension is this, that one should arrogate no superiority over persons of lowlier station. And the ruling consideration in the acquirement of this quality is the recollection of the fellowship subsisting between individual men in matters of organization; the signs of weakness and want, the attributes of helplessness and dependence; in regard to that original unity and kindred connexion which, in the Scripture texts, — Fear the Lord, O ye men, that Lord who created ye of one and the same spirit;9 — and again, As one spirit he created you, and as one spirit he invites ye to return to him, — is so plainly apparent, as to draw the veil of concealment from the face of truth.
Zeal is to allow of no indifference in preserving the integrity of religion and honor; but to hold it right on such accounts to push exertion to its furthest limits. The Prophet has said, God is a jealous God, and for his jealousy it is that he has interdicted sin; and again, If Saäd be jealous, I am more jealous than Saäd, and God is more jealous than I.10
Under the genus temperance are twelve species.
1. Shame is the soul’s restraint upon itself when aware of intending to commit any thing odious, that it may guard against deserving censure. One of the Prophet’s sayings is this, Shame is a compendium of every virtue.
2. Good humour is the soul’s submission, by voluntary process, to any thing that may arise.
3. Righteousness is the soul’s exceeding earnestness in pursuit of its own perfection.
4. Easiness is to appear unconscious in the conflict of opposite opinions and differing tastes.
5. Continence is the steadiness of the soul under the emotions of lust.
6. Patience is the soul’s opposition to its own desires, whereby it prevents its engaging in illicit gratifications. God has said, As for him that reverences the dwelling11 of his Lord, and interdicts his soul from desire, verily to Paradise shall be his return. Of this virtue some have made two subdivisions; forbearance from an object, and forbearance under inconvenience; of which the second has to do with the vindictive power. Patience is the distinguishing embellishment of prophet-hood and priesthood; for it was said by him whose words are glorious, — Be patient, even as the greatest of the prophets were patient.12 Among the most reputed of his dicta is this, “Patience is the key of joy,” and again, “Victory sides with patience.” That brazen tablet which the sages of Fārs13 used to suspend in their temples, is said to have borne this inscription: Even as iron turns naturally to the magnet, does victory submissively attend on patience.
7. Content is the inattention of the soul to food, drink, and clothing, &c., and its acquiescence at the limit of strict necessity; and this from a contempt of such gratification; not from the desire of saving money, which is avarice, and under law and reason to be condemned; contrary to the first, which has been noted with the height of condemnation. Thus it is handed down to us among the sayings of the true and tried, Content is a treasure that never spends.
8. Steadiness is a spiritual calmness and avoidance of hurry. There is a saying of the Prophet, — Haste is of the devil, and delay is of the all-giving. And in the precepts of the institutes such stress is laid on the interdiction of haste, that Imām Bāverdy, one of the head doctors of the faith, makes it a corollary, that even if in danger of losing Friday’s prayers,14 nevertheless one is not to hurry as he walks, nor seek to deviate from the path of deliberateness and decorum.
9. Piety is the servitude of the soul to good deeds and proper actions. God hath said, Be there any great but those who are pious?
10. Regularity is a habit of the soul to arrange matters in their appropriate order, with reference to expedience.
11. Integrity is the acquisition of property by fit and proper emolument, and the application of it to justifiable purposes; with entire abstinence from engaging in blameable occupations, or spending in objectionable ways.
12. Liberality15 is inattention to the disbursement of money, so as to pay in the proper manner, to whoever may be entitled, whatever may be due. We are told, among other dicta of the Sanctified, “God hath declared he chose the religion of Islām for himself; and whereas nothing but liberality and good conduct could bring a religion to perfection, he embellished his own with both.” In another place it is said, “The first thing which at the day of judgment they will put into the scale of virtues, will be good conduct and liberality.” And again, “When God created the true faith, it said, O God, give me strength; whereupon God made its strength to consist in good conduct and liberality: and when he created infidelity, it said, O God, give me strength; whereupon God made its strength to consist in parsimony and ill-humour.” Imām Ghazāly has related that once, when a set of infidels of the tribe of Unter were made prisoners and brought before the refuge of revelation, he ordered all but one to be put to death. On this Aly, the commander of the faithful, remarked, “God is one, and his faith is one, and their offence is likewise one and the same; on what principle then has a single one been spared?” He answered, “Gabriel16 came down and told me to kill all, but save this one, because he was liberal.” It has likewise been handed down to us, how the Almighty signified to Moses, “Thou shalt not put Sāmiry17 to death, for that he is liberal, and liberality has its return at our hands.”
Under the head of liberality are many divisions, the particulars of which would be regarded as tedious; but it is important to observe, that courage usually necessitates liberality;18 for when endurance of dangers and perseverance under perils where death may be expected, becomes a quality of the mind, so that it appears not of moment to give away life itself, surely the diminution or destruction of property cannot enter into one’s serious regard: it would be very strange if it did. But for liberality it cannot be said generally to necessitate courage in its turn; though after equity, there is more approach to it here than with the other virtues.
Under genus equity the species are twelve: fidelity, union, exactitude, tenderness, brotherhood, gratitude, good fellowship, good faith, cordiality, submission, resignation, devotion.
Fidelity is a term for faithful friendship, and the sign of truth in affection is, that it remove (as far as in law and reason they admit removal) the laws of duality, and draw close the bond of unity; in such sort, that what one dislikes for oneself he dislike also for his friend, and what one wishes on his own account he wish on the other’s likewise. The refuge of revelation has alluded to this fact when he says, “None of you can be called a true believer, till he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”
Union is when the opinions and concerns of many become blended and conformed together into one course of mutual co-operation.
Exactitude is, that one should allow of no deviation from the course of mutual dependence; though many explain it by the performance of promises and the discharge of obligations.
Tenderness is to be impressed and affected by any thing untoward that befalls another, and to exhaust one’s endeavour in removing it. For to the possessors of reason and masters of discrimination, it is clear and established, that the whole of the several existing corpuscules of life derive the effluence of existence from the source of real unity,19 and that the collective currents of all created beings, in virtue of their all draining the milk of preparation from the elactative guidance of the Supreme, keep pace with each other in their progress, and continue in juxtaposition through the limits of motion or at the point of rest; more particularly individuals of the human race, with whom, by reason of the establishment of a scriptural rule and pattern, the bond of spiritual unity is secured and strengthened, and the tie of vital affinity corroborated and confirmed.
This is a subject susceptible of treatment in various degrees, and to different lengths. It is told us of the prophet Shaily,21 that the marks of a stick with which they were beating an animal became visible on his limbs.22 The secret intent of which statement, although to the eyes of those imprisoned in the corner-confinements of custom, who never reached the essence of things, nor looked on the beauty of reality, it may remove the explanation beyond the assignable limits of possible distance, is no abortion of the fancy. And herein, certain conditions might be propounded, after which no difficulty would remain to the understanding in receiving the like of what is now declared. Thus much has been graven on the tablet of compilation as a sounder to the depths of intellect in those who are engrossed by the science of ordinary routine, or else —
Brotherhood is to make one’s relatives sharers in one’s opulence and comforts. And in like manner as there is an obligation in material propinquity, moral propinquity, which is the affinity of souls, and is termed the divine proximity or propinquity, has also its claims, and these the more legitimate and obligatory of the two.24 It was a saying of Omar’s, “Propinquity is flesh and blood; proximity is life and soul.” How great is the difference between them!
Good fellowship is to manage one’s transactions in such a way as not to disincline the regard of one’s fellows; always within practicable limits, and conditionally on the preservation of the canons of equity.
Good faith is to discharge the claims of others and keep one’s self far from censure and reproach.
Cordiality is to seek for the friendship of one’s equals and betters, by good words, deeds, and respects, and whatever else may be the means of attracting regard.
Submission is to acquiesce in and receive with satisfaction (although perhaps repugnant to the inclination) the commands of God, the laws of the institutes, rules of the faith, and so forth, according to the canons laid down by the fathers of the religion and elders of the calling. The sacred Lord of Lords, in his book of standing miracles, has set forth submission (for the extremest degree of exhortation) as the foundation of true faith. As when the Almighty says, No! by him who is your Lord, they are not true believers, till they make thee judge in the differences that arise between them; not feeling displeasure in their souls at what thou decreest, but submitting with a perfect submission.25
Resignation is, that in matters not entrusted to the power or care of man, and where reflection finds no opportunity for action, one should forbear to wish for increase or diminution, for acceleration or delay; but, entrusting them to him who is the best of all trustees, should lay superfluous imaginings aside.
The sacred Prince of Men used to say, there was a prayer which every one who repeated as he left his house would receive a good portion for his subsistence from the uncoined treasures26 of the munificent Almighty. “Oh God, make me content with thy decree, and bless me in that which thou hast destined; until I wish not the acceleration of what thou hast delayed, nor the delay of what thou hast accelerated; for all things are in thy power.” The intelligent reader will here perceive, that the intent of this prayer is to request the gift of resignation and acquiescence in the issues of destiny. For our own will we should conform to the will of God, and wholly cleanse the chambers of our hearts from the perturbing calls of passion and inclination. Then will the tranquillity of the supreme and the security of the infinite descend upon our hearts; then it is that events will befall according to our wills, and things make their appearance in the order of our wishes.
Devotion is, that we make it the symbol of our conduct and the uniform of our party to magnify and praise the great Originator, who, without any foregone merit on our part, brought us forth by his fostering grace and bounty from the blank of inexistence to the theatre of being, and poured on us unbounded blessings from the treasury of divine favour: a quality which the whole host of those who are nearest to his presence, angels, prophets, believers, converts, patriarchs, and inspired sages, have held to be attained only by obedience to the dictates of his law, and deference to the restrictions imposed by the canons of his church; combined with self-restraint and abstinence from sin. The subdivisions of devotion are no other than the practices of the institute; and as science treats of things in order that the intellect may fully master them, and the particulars of ritual laws do not come within the department of the intellect, (whose utmost hold on such matters is by the quarter of compendium seeing that it is only by the light of revelation that we can penetrate the retreats of religious mystery,) the precepts of divinity come within the active wisdom only as touching the abstract; as touching the detail, they fall beyond it.27
As to the species of virtues engendered by commixture of some with others, they are innumerable. Indeed, philosophers assert that even as temperaments are various in individuals, and no two persons can have the same, morals have likewise their necessary varieties, neither can two persons have the same habitude.28 Aristotle says, the reason of particular men differing from each other in appearance beyond the difference observable in other animals, is this, that different mental states (though all still governed by the general temperament) are induced in different men by the varieties of their perceptions, and every mental state engenders a particular expression.29 The expression of the cheerful is distinct from that of the angry, and the expression of the afflicted from that of the gratified. With the individuals of other animal species it is different.30 Having only the perception of their generic nature, the difference of state will not be considerable, and consequently in appearance they are all alike.
In concluding this part of the treatise, instances of assumption31 may be remarked under a strict application of the premises laid down, and among them this, that penetration, quickness of intellect, and other such qualities, are enumerated under genus Wisdom as its species, when the truth is they are its causes; if, that is, we are to abide by that explanation of wisdom which they have given in the preceding pages;32 yet if they explain wisdom for the attribute into which the observative power settles by acquaintance with the conditions of things, the said species may certainly be included under it. And so in what they say of the reasoning power, that when its action is in equilibrio, knowledge results from it; the consequence may be managed as above. But for all such assumptions throughout the science a general excuse has already been offered.33
Now that the virtues have been ascertained, it should be stated that there are certain qualities corresponding to each, which are not however of the same genus, but only imitations of it:1 whereby many not versed in the science of morals are liable to be deceived; on which account it is proper to show the distinction between virtues and the vices resembling them; between the jewels and the tinsel of the soul; that they who seek after the gems of human perfection be not imposed upon in the most precious attributes of the mind, nor be induced by the fraudulent array of the pretending and false glitter of the fabricating, to purchase gewgaws at the rate of pearls and rubies.
As to the virtue of wisdom,2 there is a class who retain some positions of some sciences, and advance conceits and arguments which they have caught up in a hurry, in such sort that the multitude, who are devoid of true penetration or enlightened sagacity, admire them for their surpassing excellence, and bear testimony to the plenitude of their acquirements; when the fact is, that they have no certainty or security in any one position, nor a single diagram properly fixed in their minds. And their condition in resemblance to persons of real wisdom, is like that of certain animals, such as apes and parrots, in mimicking the behaviour and language of mankind, or of infants in their likeness to adults.
Some of them there are that submit not in any matter to actual truth, but pretend in every question, clear though it be, to display an application and a capacity which they do not possess, by specious blunders casting young beginners into doubt: and albeit in ascertained propositions into which supposition enters not, they have no footing, on the highest matters of all they make lofty pretensions; clothing error in the garb of truth, and painting opinion and conjecture in the shape of knowledge and certainty: and this forsooth they call examination and insight. Now wisdom being the highest degree of perfection, and the recognition of it unattainable but to the wise, the distinction between ordinary men and wise men is lost with the generality.
As to the opposites of temperance, there is a class who in the same way manifest a repugnance to secular pleasures, only for the sake of something of the same sort which they prefer to these: like most recluses3 of the present age, who make their apparent austerity a snare for deceiving and preying upon the public; by these means seeking to arrive at corrupt ends in religion and stale devices in the world; or else, that they have no acquaintance with such pleasures, like mountaineers and villagers who live at a distance from any city; or perhaps, that from superabundance of admission and enjoyment, weariness and satiety of such gratifications has crept upon them; or else, that from original organization, or by reason of some complaint, they are wanting in inclination towards it; or perhaps on account of hypocrisy, or from coveting ampler wealth and station, or for a protection against external violence.
Many again spend their substance on improper occasions, and make wasteful outlays merely because they know not the value of property, and are careless of the restrictions imposed by the want of it; as is mostly the case with that class of persons who come by their money without exertion, from inheritance or other such source; being thus unacquainted with the trouble of acquiring it. Now in property the gathering is difficult and the expenditure easy: for philosophers say, that making money is like carrying a mass of stone to the mountain’s head; and spending it, is like rolling the same stone down again.4 Now it is clear that the conduct of life depends on money, which has likewise a great deal to do with the putting forth of virtue, as is written in the book of Solomon, (peace be on our Prophet and on us!) “Wisdom with wealth is waking, and with poverty is asleep.”5 For the wisest, if destitute of money, can be no benefactor of the people; and even in himself, by reason of his attention to requisite expedients, is withheld from acquiring perfection.
But the acquisition of it by praiseworthy means is rare; for estimable professions are few, and to walk in their ways is hard, except to the well-con-nected. Such persons then are not entitled to be called liberal. The really liberal man is he who gives away his money, not from any design, but because liberality is a noble quality, the delight of which he seeks after; and if he has any other intent besides this, it is secondarily and by contingence, of which we have an example in the works of God.6
Next as to courage, actions resembling it may proceed from one who is yet not courageous; like that class of persons who enter upon dangerous encounters and perilous undertakings in pursuit of wealth or rank, and such like, the love of which pursuit, and not of the quality of courage, is what actuates them; or like the impostors who endure violent suffering and protracted confinement, nay, even maim or execution, that their name may be lasting among others of their class resembling them in depravity; or if any should enter on such actions to avoid the reproach of his neighbours or kindred, or for fear of his prince and such like; or if in the course of accident, having been repeatedly victorious, he has become overweening in consequence; — of these classes none are courageous. The courageous man is properly one who aims only at mastering so eminent a quality, and so on in analogy with what has been explained of the other qualities. The conduct of wild beasts, as the tiger and others,7 though it resemble courage, is in many respects distinct from it. First, in that they possess a perfect reliance on their strength and superiority, which they have a physical inclination to exert, so that their behaviour is in obedience to this strength and power, and not in obedience to courage. Next their disposition towards contention is mostly as if a powerful champion, fully armed, should attack a weak and helpless man; the like of which enters not into the doings of a courageous one. And again, (what is fatal to the virtue,) that understanding to which the collective powers ought to be submissively subservient in them is altogether wanting. The truly courageous is he from whom the acts of courage emanate under the dictates of the understanding, whose original intent is upon the essence of the virtue, who invariably dreads the commission of any thing disgraceful more than he dreads the extinction of life, and who prefers honorable death to shameful existence; or, as the proverb has it, “Flame, rather than shame, in the language of our souls is the trifling consideration: and he that courts a beauty bargains not about her dower.”
Albeit the delight of courage doth not appear in the beginning, since the outset of it leads to the fear of extermination, yet in the end, the pleasure and advantage of it is sure to display itself either in this world or in the next; particularly when life is sacrificed for the defence of religion or the establishment of our glorious institute. On this point the sense of the words which are symbols of truth is explicit. Not dead,8 but living, are ye to account those who are slain in the way of God — with the Lord is their provision. A sensible man well knows that backwardness in battle does not occasion continuance of life. The faint heart seeks in flight to perpetuate that which admits not of perpetuity; to justify such a seeker is impossible. Moreover, if for the sake of argument we admit that he gains a few days’ respite, he sullies all the springs of life with shame and infamy during the supposed period; with the disrespect, contumely, and reproach of friends and acquaintance. It must be acknowledged then that death with the virtue of courage, with honorable memory, and blessed recompense, outweighs a life of infamy and vice.9
And hence it was that the head of the faithful thus exhorted his adherents: Men,10 though ye fight not, ye must die. By that God who holds in his hand the life of Abú Tálib’s son,11 I swear that a thousand beheadings were easier than one death-bed. For
Oral dicta on the eminence of courage and the courageous are many; and among them that the Prophet said, “Verily God loveth courage, even to the extinction of life.” Incumbent as it is on all men to extol and reverence the courageous, it is especially so on those who guide the reins of government, those who hold the trammels of dominion, and walk in the ways of sovereignty. For this glorious class it is who traffic in the emporia of battle with the dearest of valuables, (for life is no other,) and who, as often as they encounter the enemies of the state, make existence a shield to intercept the shafts of calamity. It were unbecoming therefore in a king to be sparing towards them of his property and effects, or to pass censure on them for every trifling indiscretion.
As to the conduct of those who kill themselves from fear of poverty, or the unforeseen decay of rank or fortune, or from wearisome sufferings, it should be referred to faint-heartedness rather than to courage.12 For the courageous man is patient in every situation — strong to support adversity, and equal to self-preservation under every form of trouble. Rather may this act be said to imply pusillanimity and want of self-possession: and according to the institutes it deserves execration, even as it is delivered to us in the most genuine dicta.
Now we find from all these disquisitions, that temperance, liberality, and courage are only to be realized by one already possessed of wisdom.13
In respect to equity likewise, actions similar to the actions of the equitable may proceed from those who are not graced with this pearl of great price. And this from hypocrisy, or for renown, or when by such means men seek to attract the hearts of the vulgar, or when they act for the augmentation of property or rank. The truly equitable is he who equalizes his powers, so that all his actions may take place under the direction of his judgment, in the course of equilibrium; no one power seeking more than that share which the judgment assigns to it, nor any usurping on the province of another: and further, that in his competition with his fellow-creatures, he observe the same adjustment; at all times limiting his regard to the realization of the virtues, and having no object beyond it, unless consequently upon this.14 All which is then only attainable when the soul has acquired a spiritual character productive of general discipline; all its impressions and actions being graced with the jewel of equipoise, and purged from the corruptions of disorder.
In the other virtues, no less, we must maintain the like estimate, if we would distinguish between base and current coin;15 between the spurious and the full standard; an explanation which indisputably points out equity as a simple quality.16
IT is to be observed that each virtue has a corresponding vice which is its opposite; and the genera of the virtues (as we have seen) being four, the genera of the vices might appear at first sight to be the same in number, — ignorance answering to wisdom, cowardice to courage, lasciviousness to temperance, and iniquity to equity. Now what we ascertain from a closer examination is this: that every virtue has a limit which it no sooner overpasses, whether by excess or deficiency, than it verges towards vice.2 The virtues then are in the situation of means, and the vices in the situation of extremes; or like a centre and circle, where the centre is the farthest of all points from its circumference, and other points are infinite, but all nearer on some side to the circumference: according to which the vices corresponding to every virtue will be infinite. Again: exactitude in the path of virtue is like motion in a straight line, and deviation from virtue is like deviation from that: now the straight line being the shortest that can be drawn between any two points, it is clear that between two points there can be but one straight line, while the lines not straight may be infinite. There is then but one road to which we can adhere in advancing to perfection, but infinite are those whereby we can deviate from it.3
Now since it is extremely difficult to find a true mean, and, when found, more difficult to keep to it, hence it is that among the band of Prophets4 they describe the way of rectitude as finer than a hair and sharper than a sword. And so perhaps the right way, direction to which it is the purport of the glorious opening of the Kurān to pray for,5 may be no other than this. For in the opinion of the chiefest Doctors and most orthodox Fathers,6 it is certain, that those particulars of another life by reference to which the veritable instructor has addressed himself to our hopes and fears, are entirely figures of habits and practices according to men’s predicament wherein they will be dealt with in their final home (as we may understand from the declaration, Sleeping are men, and when they die they wake, and from sundry other such enunciations which abound both in Scripture and Sunnah): the material of such figures being either in the culpable or commendable of the habits and practices acquired by men in the course of their earthly existence. If the sincere seeker would but put aside the fancy and suspicion which clings about his discernment like dust about his eyes; if he would but free his penetration from the servitude in which it is riveted by the followers of custom, as the serf’s neck in his iron collar, this fact would dawn upon him in the glorious expressions, Truly hell is a circle about the unbelieving, and the prophetical assertions, — “He that drinks in a vessel of gold or silver, verily in his maw the fire of hell shall gurgle” — and “Verily the ground of Paradise is extension, and the plants of it are hallelujahs to God’s praise.” That world-bruited dictum, “Futurity is our estate,” if he listened with his judgment as well as his ear, would only be a repetition of the Poet’s sentiment, —
According to these premises, then, the straight way of the day of judgment, which is to be drawn, as the Prophets tell us, in the regions of the final meeting, over the summit of hell,8 is a type of intermediacy in the practices of morals; and hell itself a type of the extremities, which are the vices: and he that is now firm-footed on the present straight way, never deviating from his course along the path of equilibrium, will be able on the last day to pass over the other straight way, and arrive at that eternal Paradise which is the abode of the pure: and whosoever seeks to deviate from the straight way in his present state, will be unable to traverse that way in his future one, and must remain in the hell which is prepared for the rebellious.9 There is a saying ascribed to Pythagoras, that every quality which a man acquires originates an angel or a demon, which abides by him, after the intercourse of life is at an end, as a companion and attendant; if good, then to good; if bad, then to bad. How careful then men ought to be what companion they engender for themselves.10
To return, however, to our immediate subject. Mean is used in two significations — the true mean, or that which bears the same relation to both extremities, like as four is the mean between two and six, — and this is analogous to the true equator, on the unattainableness of which so many proofs are advanced; and the other the involved mean, in analogy with the equilibria which physicists affirm of species and individual.11 Now the mean which in this science is the subject of discussion may be of the second class; and in determining the conditions of the virtues a different estimate must be applied to every individual, nay, to every time and state of the same individual; so that to every one of the virtues of every individual there will be an infinite number of corresponding vices.12
Here, however, our reflection is shaded by a doubt. For when we assign the mean of this science to the class of equipoise manifested in species and person, undoubtedly it will possess a latitude, similar to the latitude of temperament;13 so that it is no longer necessary in defining it to insist on the exactitude of unity. To relieve ourselves of this obscurity, the way is this: even as of all the degrees of temperamental latitude there is some one degree which is superior to all the others, and nearest of all to perfect equipoise, so of all these degrees there is one superior to the rest; and that is the one of which we are actually in search: all other degrees, according to their distance from this one, being more or less tainted with excess or deficiency. And like as individual and species do not exist in those other degrees in their completest form, yet by reason of their assignable proximity to that degree, the essence of species and individual is maintained; so also in regard to the virtues, absolute virtue is that degree, and other degrees are to be numbered among the virtues, according to their proximity thereto: just as in the bodily equipoise, the other degrees, though they come not within the true equipoise, nor are devoid of the taint of deviation, yet as no observable disturbance results therefrom to the actions, they are included in the series of degrees in equipoise. According to this exposition, therefore, the difference in the steps of perfection will be measured by the difference in their proximity to the true equipoise:14 so that the principles of mental therapeutics will follow the analogy and standard of therapeutics for the body. No doubt equipoise, in its stricter meaning, is not without its application, though never devoid of difficulties. Indeed, if in the height of our correctness, we were to limit its description to the exactitude of unity, our lucubrations would be inapplicable to fact. God it is who directs in the straight way whom he will.
Deviation from the mean being either on the side of excess or on the side of deficiency, there will be two vices corresponding to every virtue,15 which must itself be a mean between the two. Since then it has been established that the genera of the virtues are four, the genera of the vices must be eight: two of them extremes in relation to wisdom, and these are flightiness and stupidity; flightiness on the side of excess, and that is the exercise of the power of thought in what is not proper or beyond the proper degree (which may likewise be termed cunning); and stupidity on the side of deficiency, and that is intentional suspension of the power of thought, or discontinuing the exercise of it on proper occasions, or stopping short in such exercise at less than the proper limit. Two others are in the extremities of courage, rashness and cowardice; the first on the side of excess, and that is entering on situations of danger which the judgment does not approve of; the second on the side of deficiency, which is shunning what ought not to be shunned. The two in extremes of temperance are lasciviousness and indifference; the first in excess, being the inclination to lechery beyond the desirable degree; the second in deficiency, being a quiescence in the spirit from exertion in pursuit of urgent gratifications, such as in law and reason may be desired or allowed, — and this from choice, not from organization. The two in extremes of equity are tyranny and servility; the first on the side of excess, being the usurpation of men’s rights and properties; the second in deficiency, being the support of a tyrant in his tyranny, and obsequiousness to him in what it is interdicted him to do.16 Some designate both extremes of equity by the single term oppression; which is tyrannizing either over self or over others:17 and like as equity comprehends the collective perfections, its opposite comprehends the entire vices. Hence it has been said by Abdulla Ansāry and other philosophers, that there is no fault without injury;18 every injury being oppression, either of one’s self, or of others. It has been observed by many great men,19 that on most questions there is variance even among the orthodox; but all are agreed in recommending the promotion of enjoyment, and in interdicting the doing of injury. The Hadiyah Saheeh (Spur of Truth) says that the good deeds of the oppressor are transferred to the account of the oppressed. As much may be understood from the glorious text, Us they injure not, but their own souls.
Now by the same analogy we are to apply the principle of intermediacy to all the species falling under the generic virtues.20
IT must first be premised,2 that according both to reason and revelation, the holy nature of the just and glorious God is elevated above the comprehension of our thoughts and fancies. High as perception soars, it finds no way to the elevated pinnacle of his glorious being. By the remote extremities of cause and reason, to grasp at the skirts of connexion with the mysteries of his holy essence, is the utmost limit in the progress of human understandings — the highest point to which the contemplative power can advance.
The first reflector in which the eternal aspect of his hidden nature is disclosed to the enraptured gaze of those who look beneath the veil, is the attribute of unity. Not that unity which is the contrary of many; for that is but one of the shadows he casts: nor yet the unity which pervades and constitutes number; for that is but a ray from the sunshine of his everlasting beauty: but a unity, whose perfection, if displayed, would absorb and annihilate pluralities, even as the blazing lamp attracts the insignificant moth to perish in its beams.3 If fully manifested, its glories would consume; and for our sakes it is that his eye is withdrawn from his creatures. The lights of life, with all their splendour, would not serve for motes in the radiance of his lustre; lost in that illimitable space, plurality could find no entrance to the arena of manifestation; nor any thing possess assignable properties in the unbounded expanse of so perfect a nature.4 With inimitable force this is expressed in the text: To whom belong the Princes of the age? To God, the one and only potentate.5
Thus it is laid down by the high priests of wisdom and noblest elders of the faith, that the essential unity of God is a distinct species of unity, different from that of numbers. As we find in Ibn Khafeef’s Sadr Mutakid (Fount of the Faithful), “God is single: not in number, and not as things singular.” To persons excluded from the sanctuary the conception of such unity passes beyond the limit of intellectual comprehension, and it is only by the light of ocular admission7 that any can arrive thereto. On account of this difficulty of conceiving the unity it is that he says, “As often as God refers to his unity, the hearts of those who believe not in the world to come are ready to break asunder.”8 It has likewise been declared by Imām Rāghib and other philosophers, “One of his rays which admits of being contemplated by intellectual vision is numerical unity; without whose lustre no atom of all the myriads that exist could be brought within the jurisdiction of evidence or the realms of certainty, and on the dissolution of which tie it would be impossible to effect the continuance of any among all individual entities.”9 But again, it is a maxim with the inspired sages, who are the high priests of ocular admission, that the perfection of every attribute lies in its meeting and embracing its opposite,10 as we find in the connexion of the following qualities: He is the first, and the last; the manifest, and the hidden; and there is nothing to which he is not privy. Hence it is11 that whatever thing, at the same time that it comprises plurality, embodies with more than ordinary precision the powerful law of unity, is more excellent in consequence. The effect of cadences, concordant tones, metrical verses, and fine forms, is on account of the eminence of their unity in relation; and those (magical) influences which are prepared by correspondence of numbers12 are also of the same class. It is likewise a position in science, that inasmuch as a temperament may be better poised, more close and more inclined to real unity, so much the more excellent and complete is the figure or the life it constitutes. Wherefore, as in the chain of being the temperament of minerals is farthest from unity of equipoise in their specific form, it here produces the retention of combination merely.13 Passing upwards from this rank, it comes to that of equipoise in vegetables; and then, together with retention of combination, it produces nourishment by solids and fluids, and the propagation of kind. Advancing from this class to the equipoise of animal life, in addition to the previous effects, it produces beauty and the procession of ideas. Lastly, on its exaltation from this rank to the human equipoise, in addition to all the previous effects, it produces reason; that is, the perception of universals with their consequences: and in whatever degree the temperaments of individuals are nearer to the true equipoise, the fuller its perfections are; until it reaches the order of prophecy. Among these too it has its varieties, till it arrives at that cumulative point which embodies every perfection, and constitutes the uttermost limit of creature developement. There is nothing above the servants whom we have brought near unto ourselves.14
In the science of music it is ascertained that there is no more exquisite ratio than that of equal intervals, and every ratio not some way resolvable into one of this nature, passes beyond the limit of concord, and falls into the class of discord.15 The element of harmony then is similarity; which is an image of unity. Some of the deepest studies of the ancients were directed to exalting the importance of proportion; to investigating its properties, and by their means deducing the principles of the pure sciences. Among the most noted of proportions are the arithmetical, the geometrical, and the harmonical. The arithmetical is when the mean is equidistant from both extremes, as four between two and six: the geometrical is when the ratio of the first to the second, is as the second to a third; and this we call close proportion: the harmonical is when the ratio of the difference between the middle and the least, is to the difference between the middle and the greatest, as is the ratio of the least to the greatest. The method of evolving all of which is to be found in books of arithmetic.
Many are the minutiæ of science and the secrets of wisdom which rest on the laws of proportion; and that which is told us of Pythagoras deducing the principles of music from the tones of the spheres, and asserting that no music was more delightful than the voice of the heavens,16 (although many of the first philosophers have taken the declaration literally, and held that the cause of that voice was involved in the fluctuations their movements produce in the air, and that it is only by reason of their vacuity and instability that it is not overpowering,) may perhaps be only an enigmatical intimation of that pure proportion which prevails between the spherical movements, in regard to speed or tardiness, and the periodical measures they obey: for an exceedingly pure proportion it must undoubtedly be, seeing that it is the bond of regularity to all this world of existence and decay. It would not be surprising, therefore, were we to transfer that proportion, or any near it, to the form of tones and notes, if it were to prove the acmè of harmony. Here, too, the intelligent reader may be aware, that the connexion of soul with body is by means of a pure proportion (that is, equipoise) maintained between the elementary particles:17 hence on the subversion of this proportion the connexion is dissolved. Thus it is that the soul feels an essential affection for any similar proportion; and, in short, that a pure proportion, wherever observed, is the means of attracting and agitating the spirit: such as beauty, which is a term for correspondence in parts; or rhetoric and eloquence, which are terms for that peculiar correspondence that ought to be maintained between the portions of our language, and between our language and the decorum of our situation. The effect of tones too, depends, as we have seen, on their mutual proportion. In short, there is one and the same principle, which, if prevailing in the attempered particles of the elements, is equipoise of temperament: if produced in tones, is pure and delightful interval; if apparent in the gestures, is grace; if observable in the language, is rhetoric and eloquence; if created in the limbs, beauty; if in the mental faculties, equity.18 Of this principle the soul, wherever it harbours, is enamoured and in search — whatever form it may take, and whatever dress it may assume.19
From the tenour of these disquisitions, it appears that the course of equity lies in the preservation of relativeness, which is resolvable into unity. Now when we apply equity to the concerns which regulate the conduct of life, we discover three directions in which the application proceeds;20 inasmuch as the concerns in question are of three sorts: 1. That which has to do with the distribution of property and distinction; 2. That which has to do with transactions and dealings; 3. That which has to do with discipline and correction: in all of which three species the principle of proportion is employed. In the first division we say, since the ratio of a given person to a given possession or distinction, is as the ratio of a person so circumstanced to the like distinction or possession, such distinction or possession is his right.21 If any excess or deficiency exists, recourse must be had to appropriation and adjustment. Now this is like open proportion. In the second division we sometimes apply the open and sometimes the close proportion: we say for instance, since the ratio of this clothier to this cloth, is as the ratio of this carpenter to this bench, there is nothing unfair in their exchange; or secondly, we may say, the ratio of this cloth to this gold, is as the ratio of this gold to this bench; therefore there is nothing unfair in their exchange: which examples are so adduced in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry;22 though this last of the two is clearly erroneous. No doubt if the ratio of the cloth to the gold, be as the ratio of the bench to the gold, there is nothing unfair in their exchange; but this is not a close proportion, as may be known from the definition of one. As to the third division, a proportion is observable resembling the geometrical, when we say the ratio of this person to his own situation, is as the ratio of the other person to his: if therefore the latter do harm or injustice to the first, retribution is to be enforced in the same ratio, if we would abide by rigid equity.23
In every instance, then, the maintenance of equity and reference to it, can only be effected by the ascertainment of a mean: and since to determine the mean (as before24 intimated) is an exceedingly difficult and intricate proceeding, recourse must be had to the standard of the divine law: for the source of all unity is no other than the Supreme and Holy Divinity. Farther, since men are citizens by nature, and their subsistence unattainable except through co-operation and fellowship, of which interchange is an indispensable ingredient, (as that the baker should bake bread for the seedsman, while the seedsman sows for the baker; or that the clothier should sell cloth for the weaver, while the weaver weaves for the clothier, and so forth;) and since the relation of things differing in their properties, is not to be ascertained without the intermediacy of some such indicative substance as may serve to test the genuineness of worth on both sides, therefore, with regard to this desideratum, the end is answered by the intervention of money;25 which is termed the equator by intermediacy. This however is a surd; whereas the desideratum extends to a reasonable equator; which is no other than an equitable Prince. A Prince, therefore, the holy God selected and invested with the sword, in order that whosoever should be incompliant with the equation of money, seeking more than his right, and overstepping the path of rectitude, with this trenchant sword he may be enabled to bring him to order.
The maintenance of equity, then, is realized by
three things: 1. The holy institute of God; 2. The
equitable Prince; 3. Money — or, as the old philosophers
laid it down, the foremost
According to these considerations, transgressors will be three. First and greatest, he who obeys not the law of God; and him we call infidel and sinner: second and intermediate, he who pays not obedience and submission to the reigning Prince; and him we call rebel and criminal: third and least, he who, seeking more than his right, walks not the course of equity according to the restraints of money; and him we call cheat and thief. Whereof the evil of the two first is greater than of the last. For whoso swerves from his obedience to the institutes of God, whether injunctive or prohibitory, undoubtedly we cannot expect him to submit to either of the other laws; but of him will every evil be engendered. And whoso departs from the authority of the reigning Prince, and breaks that bond of legitimate obedience which is sanctioned by Scripture, (obey our emissaries, and those among ye who are possessed of authority,)29 from him likewise we may look for all iniquity; and all persons, as far as in them lies, are bound to exterminate such an one.
The reporters of the characteristics of celebrated Princes have related in their books of history and anecdote, that the deceased Sultan, Malik Shāh,30 who passed in his day for the first of living potentates, at the time when the fortunes of kingdoms were guided by his touch — when the world submitted its course to his direction, like a steed to the rider’s rein, and time crouched to his constraint, like a courser to his keeper’s scourge — had chanced, at the twenty-ninth day of the feast31 of Ramzān, to fix on Neeshāpor for the spot where his victorious standards were to be planted, and where, of course, the dawn of religious enjoyment was to dissipate from his mind the mists of anxiety consequent on the interruption of his expeditions. Evening came, and king-like the sun departed to visit his dominions in the West. His snowy canopy was mirrored in the sources of living waters; while he himself, fatigued, it seemed, with the uproars of the past day, retired to the privacy of his subterranean palace. Wearily, as the eyes of Jacob for his son, were the glances of the fasters fixed in expectation of that light — to them more radiant than the day — the first faint streak of the new moon,32 that was to rise, like Joseph, from the depths of darkness,33 and usher in the festival of Eed.34 The aspirations of their anxiety rose into the air, like incense from a burning censer: the cravings of hunger glowed within their bosoms, like heated iron in a blacksmith’s forge. Not a soul, but suspense had brought him to the housetop to watch for the moon’s appearance: not an eye, whose eagerness did not ever and anon take the fringe-top of its own brow for the luminous streak it yearned to spy.
It chanced, that without any regard to the preliminaries required by the institute, or the essential requisites of the religion, the courtiers announced to his majesty, by reason of their longing for the festival, that the Moon of Eed was visible, and got him to give orders for issuing a proclamation, purporting that the morrow was the festival; and this was proclaimed accordingly. Now the throne of judicature and hierocracy35 was honored, in those days, by the occupation of the Imām of both sanctuaries,36 Abul Muāly Jobìny, one of the firmest votaries of the sect of Shāfei,37 and preceptor to Abú Hāmid Ghazāly.38 As soon as he was apprised of the occurrence, he forthwith ordered a proclamation to the effect that the morrow was still Ramzān, and whoever abided by his ordonnance was to continue the fast. On learning this, the king’s attendants represented the fact in an ill aspect; stating that Abul Muāly had placed himself at issue with his sovereign; and, seeing that the people of that province were his adherents, they would unquestionably act upon his ordonnance, and not upon the king’s directions; which would unbeseem the dignity of so great a potentate. The king was greatly disturbed by this intelligence; but feeling, with his noble disposition and correct tenets, that it was part of his duty to consult the respectability of men of learning;39 and estimating at its proper value the high worth and exalted station of an Imām of both sanctuaries; he merely despatched a party of his guards, with orders to use all courtesy and civility in bringing the Imām to the presence. To all their representations on the inconsistency of treating with respect a person who treated his orders with disrespect, his answer invariably was, that without hearing his defence, it was impossible, on a mere report, to disgrace so eminent a man. The instant the summons reached the Imām he arose, and with nothing on him but the cincture of papyrus which he wore indoors, put on his shoes40 and proceeded to the audience-room. The chamberlains, on seeing his condition, represented to the king, that the Imām, not content with open opposition, was about to outrage the decorum of the court by appearing before his majesty in his household costume. Aggravated as the Sultan’s displeasure was now become, he still ordered that every civility should be shown to him, merely sending the head chamberlain to enquire, why he came in that guise, as it was notoriously a breach of decorum to appear in that manner in the presence of kings. The Imām answered in his loudest tone, that the Sultan must himself hear the reply, which was such as no one else could be trusted to report; and then, when ushered before his majesty, his words were these. “It is in this homely dress, O king, that I offer up my prayers; and there were nothing inappropriate in waiting on my Sultan as I wait upon my God. Still, as custom has prescribed that we should appear in other guise in the presence of kings, I was willing to comply with all propriety, and array myself in proper apparel; but, seated as I was in this dress when the mandate reached me, I was apprehensive that the delay occasioned by my changing it, might give thy messengers cause to set me down among the enemies and opponents of a king of the faith. Had I been sitting with a mere turband on my head, in the same guise should I have come before you, to prove, by the excess of my haste, how far I was from departing from obedience to my king.” “And if obedience to my commands,” asked the king, “is in your opinion so strict a duty, how is it that you proclaim an opposition to them?” “In all that is subject to the Sultan’s orders,” said Abul Muāly, “it is a duty to obey the Sultan; but in all that is subject to the ordonnance, it is the Sultan’s duty to consult us. For it is as much a maxim of our glorious institute and illustrious church, that the ordonnance is the right of the priesthood, as that the order is the right of the king. Now the maintenance of the fast and the appointment of the festival is matter of ordonnance, and not of royal command.” Not more certainly is fire extinguished by water than the king’s anger was merged in approbation, and he sent the Imām home with marks of unusual favour and good-will.41
* * * * * * *
It is a remark of Aristotle’s,42 that equity is not a division of virtue, but all the virtues; and iniquity, which is its opposite, is not a division of vice, but all vices. In which aspect it has to do, 1. with the nature and powers of the individual, as has already been explained; and, 2. with his intercourse with his fellows, and those of his house and city; and hence that dictum of the Prince of Prophets, “Each of you governs, and each of you will be questioned as to his charge:” which means, that every person is sovereign over the concerns of his members and powers of soul and body, so as to be governor over those parts and powers; and every one will be questioned on the day of account concerning the condition of these his subjects. And again, when he declared that the exact dividers (that is, the just,) would hereafter be exalted upon thrones of light, the Companions enquired of whom it was he spoke. “Of those,” he replied, “who, in all of which they have possession and use, observe exact equity as regards their own right and that of their children.”43 Certain writers have said parabolically, How should you be a lamp, when you yield no light to what is close beside you? Which means to say, whoever is unable to regulate his own condition, and unequal to maintaining the equity of his body and faculties, from him we cannot expect the equity of denizen and citizen.44 But when he shall first preserve equity in his body and faculties, standing aloof both from excess and deficiency, and afterwards pursue the same course towards his partners in residence and polity, he becomes the vice-regent of the Supreme Divinity.45
* * * * * * * *
As to the division of equity, Aristotle has distributed it into three parts: 1. That which is practised in discharge of the Almighty’s right to our obedience — of him whose own bounty, without any previous claim of ours, has raised all that is to the rank of existence, and supported all the corpuscules of being from the stores of divine favour and unbounded munificence; in return for which, equity demands that in all that lies between the servant and his Maker, the former should pursue the most unexceptionable course, and leave no particle unobserved of all which the canons of obedience require him to perform. 2. That which has to do with associating with his fellow men, as allegiance to princes, reverence to doctors and dignitaries of the faith, discharge of trusts and integrity in dealings. 3. That which is due to the rights of our predecessors; as the payment of their debts, the performance of their injunctions, and the like. Now it is well known to those versed in the ordinances of the institute, that our living compendium of the Commendable in Morals has in sundry passages embodied these universal divisions of equity, in the most sublime language and in the most graceful form: as for instance, Reverence to the commands of God and kindness to the creatures of God; which comprehends all these parts of equity. For its observance is either in what lies between the worshipper and God, which is conveyed in the first limb of the above sentence; or in what lies between him and his fellow creatures, which is the meaning of the last limb. The intelligent believer well knows, that to comprise so many and so extensive injunctions in so compendious an expression, and this with such significant sweetness — such pregnant elegance — such apt precision — is a task only to be executed by one who has studied in the school, Be thou, O Lord, my instructor: So he made my instruction full. And hence it is, that the modern school of philosophers,46 being versed in the minutiæ of the Muhammedan institute, and being witness to its comprising all the particulars of the active science, withdrew entirely from all regard to the dogmas of (pagan) philosophers and their books.
And here we must say a few words explanatory of obedience to God. Each one of the powers and members48 was created by the Almighty for a special end; so that by their collective means, we might attain to the true perfection, or end of all ends: in other words, might arrive at the height of vice-regence to God upon earth. In the application therefore of these powers and members to these ends, consists all devotion, all equity, and all gratitude; as in their application otherwise, all presumption, all oppression, and all faithlessness. Now the attainment of this purpose being an extreme of difficulty, the class so conducted are noted for their paucity, in the words symbolic of truth: The grateful among my servants are few. The particular charges whereby to employ every one of these powers are set forth in the institutes in their completest form; and the right of men in their transactions, their intermarriages and their usufructs, are no less distinguished and explained at large: from that institute, then, they are to be collected.
The most comprehensive form of equity is that of kings; for without the royal equity, no one would have power to observe his own; or at least would meet with interminable obstacles to so doing.49 For the culture of morals and the management of homes may be said to depend on the regulation of states; while that mental leisure, which is the menstruum of all perfection, is hardly to be realized in defiance of fluctuating pretensions and conflicting aims. Hence that tradition which tells us, “If a Sultan conform to equity, he shares in every act of obedience that emanates from his subjects; and if he practise oppression, he partakes with them in the onus of every crime.” It was also declared by the refuge of revelation, that at the day of resurrection, a just king will be of all men the nearest in degree to the Almighty; and a tyrannous one the farthest. Another saying of the Sanctified is this: “An hour’s equity is better than seventy years of devotion.” And this because the influence of an hour’s equity extends to every subject throughout every department, and abides to a prolonged duration. Abdulla bin al Mubārak50 observes, “Were I certain that one prayer and only one was to be granted to me, I would breathe it for the righteousness of the king, as the best means of reaching the interests of the world at large.” To these observations we shall at present confine ourselves; the particulars of this species of equity coming more appropriately under the head of political control.
Now on this subject a difficulty has been raised to the effect that charity, though unquestionably commendable, is not comprised under equity. For equity deals in equalities; whereas charity is an increment: yet it has been laid down that to outstep the limit of equipoise, whether by excess or deficiency, is the constituent of fault; according to which charity would be faulty. To this it is replied, that charity is a watchfulness over equity, to secure it from the occurrence of deficiency. The intermediative so undoubtedly indispensable to all the virtues, is not, however, always of the same measure. For the observance of exactitude in liberality (which is a mean between prodigality and avarice) may incline to the greater side; and temperance (the mean between lasciviousness and indifference) may incline to the lesser. Neither can charity ever be realized till the conditions of equity have been previously observed: and withal our first step is to the limit of obligation; after that, for further safeguard and support, an increment is included in it. Were we to spend all our property without an obligation for spending it, we should be not charitable, but wasteful. Charity then is an equity secured against disturbance; and the charitable person, an equitable one, watchful over his equity: its very excellence, indeed, lying in its extraneousness.
This is the answer that is generally given. The intelligent reader, however, on recalling to the present question that which was said on the subject of virtual intermediacy,51 will perceive another and a clearer one. It is to be observed, too, that charity is then only a watchfulness over equity, when it goes to prejudice the right of self. In deciding between any other parties no charity can have place; here the equipoise and parity must be observed in its purest form.
There are philosophers who assert, that there would be no occasion for the strong links of equity, if the bond of love and ties of affection between manking were sufficiently stringent.52 For all engaged in transaction being in a state of preference towards each other in virtue of affection, what grounds could there be for coveting the right of others? The reason of which lies in this, that affection is a more perfect tie than equity; affection being unity in physical constitution, and equity a unity in the acquisitive power; and that a unity not attainable without some exertion. Affection then is the paramount sovereign, and equity is his vice-regent. Now the secret of this matter lies in affection being the source of creation; as we learn from the text, I was as a treasure that is hid; so I loved that I might be known.53 Hence permanence and order are likewise founded on the same.
The whole discussion of affection, however, (if it so please the Almighty,54) will come under the head of the domestic science.
IT is a conclusion of science, that the origin of those motions2 which conduce to perfection are either from nature or from art; the first, as in the motion of the seminal juices in the parts of the several species, whereby they seek to arrive at the perfection of animal life; the second, as in the motion of timber guided by artificial implements, whereby it arrives at the perfection of the hewn plank.
Now nature is superior to art, for it is derived from the highest of sources, without the intervention of human judgment; whereas art proceeds solely from such intervention. Nature then is pedagogue and preceptor to art; and as the perfection of things secondary lies in their resemblance to originals, the perfection of art must lie in its resemblance to nature;3 which resemblance it may attain by anticipating or postponing means, and arranging them generally in their appropriate course: so that that perfection which, under Providence, is effected by the agency of nature, may be accomplished by art under the guidance of human will; and this with a peculiar virtue belonging only to art. For example, if we subject birds’ eggs to a warmth corresponding to that of a bird’s bosom, we obtain at once a brood so numerous as could rarely be at once obtained by way of incubation from the bird. From this it follows, that as the culture of morals, which by hypothesis is the object of this science, is a proceeding of art, we should invariably imitate nature in the conduct of it, so as to give precedence in culture to that which takes precedence in production.4
Now when we consider the succession of the powers, it is clear that the first engendered in the infant is the power of seeking for sustenance: for in a single hour from its birth it manifests an inclination to suck;5 which it can only derive by instinct from the Almighty: according to the text, He gave every thing its nature, and instruction moreover to the minutest of beings. In course of this appetite, as his strength increases, crying6 and the like becomes associated with its relief. Whereto, in the first instance, being engrossed by the generic feeling, he is unable to distinguish between things so similar as the person of his mother and of other people: afterwards, as the senses external and internal gather strength, and the mind becomes equal to retaining the image of the thing perceived, the shapes of objects reaching him by the channel of sense (and with them the severalty of his mother and other people) are sufficiently apprehended.
Next after the perfection of this power (in one stage of its perfection) the vindictive power makes its appearance, by which he is to repel whatever is injurious to him, and resist whatever molests or opposes him in his appetency after the objects of want and desire; or, if himself unequal to repelling them, he is to seek support and assistance by appealing and referring to others.
After the perfection of this power (in one stage of perfection) the reasonable mind, which is the power of discerning, developes itself; and the first mark of its development is the power of shame,7 which is inferring a difference between good and bad — between decorous and disgraceful. This however is a faculty that advances but gradually on the confines of perfection; for it is not till the appetent and vindictive powers have by these means brought the individual to his due perfection, that they exercise their functions for the preservation of the species. For example, when the original power productive of nourishment and growth has brought the individual near to the requisite perfection, he becomes possessed of another, by means of which he is to perpetuate his species; then it is that the seminal matter is engendered, with the lust for connexion and longing for children consequent upon it. The second power, again, when it has been set at rest, and raised above the safeguard of the individual, proceeds to avert from his family the authority of laws, judicatures, and fraternities; whereby the greatest of benefits result to the species. As to the third power, it is not till he is used to the contemplation of particulars that he begins to comprehend universals,8 or to figure things in their genera and species. Now it is not till it so generalizes, that the name of intellect can be properly applied to it, or that there is any approach to developement in the distinguishing perfections of the human race: then it is, in fact, that humanization may be said to commence; and to apply the name human to him in his previous state, were like calling datelings and grapelings, dates and grapes.9 Perfection in this sense, depending on the regulation of the passionate nature, will properly commence with such artificial regulation; increasing as it approaches the true perfection, which is the highest of all degrees accessible to man, and has already (in the Introduction) been shown to be a designation for the vice-regence of God upon earth.
By this rule then is the aspirant after perfection to regulate his rise. First, from culture of the appetent power, let him acquire the attribute of temperance; next, from culture of the vindictive power, courage; and lastly, after perfecting himself in these, from culture of the judgment, let him crown the whole with wisdom.10 If then in the outset of his progress he chances to be trained to the course of wisdom, great is the advantage and momentous the gift; in gratitude for which his best exertions to preserve these qualities would be but a due return. But if he has been brought up contrariwise, he is not to despond, but persevere in his endeavour to apprehend and overtake it. Let him reflect, that except such as are aided by God, and whom the Almighty, by perfecting in conformation and elevating in intellect, according to the text, He found thee going astray, and gave thee guidance,11 has exempted from the labours of attainment and the pursuits of ordinary life, no one is formed to excellence, or independent of labour in its acquirement;12 although, doubtless, as they differ in capacity, men proportionally differ in the ease or difficulty with which it may be obtained.
In the same way then as persons desirous to attain the art of composition or carpentering must apply themselves to practice, in order to become composers or carpenters, must he who aspires after virtue betake himself, if he would obtain it, to such practices as are means of originating that attribute.13 Now the art in question bears an exact resemblance to medicine: inasmuch as it is the object of the physician to maintain the equipoise of temperament, as long as it will last, and to restore it when subverted; and the object of the metaphysician is to maintain the equipoise of disposition, as long as it will endure, and to regain it afterwards. Indeed, the science is strictly that of mental therapeutics, as has already been declared.14 Hence Galen entitles his letter to Eesa (blessed be he!) “From the physician of bodies to the physician of souls.”15 Like then as medicine has two departments, the maintenance of health and the expulsion of disease, this art has also its two divisions, one applying to the maintenance of virtue, and the other purporting to extinguish vice and recover virtue. In the outset then the student’s view is to be directed summarily to the fundamental condition of the powers in their pre-explained succession;16 and if the condition of each of them agrees with the rule of equipoise, his only endeavour will be to maintain it. But if perversion has taken place, his business is to bring it back to the equipoise, and that pursuantly to their order in production. Then when the culture of the powers has been duly effected, he is to bestow his utmost attention to maintaining the principles of equity; making it in fact the menstruum of all his practices and fortunes, till he arrives at the limit of true perfection.
ANY virtue the mind may possess we ought undoubtedly to maintain; exerting the excelling quality, whatever it may be, associating and intermingling with the good, and avoiding the company of the bad. For the morals of a companion have a powerful influence on the mind:2 insomuch that the wise have a saying, Character from company. And like as the society of the bad is to be avoided, in listening to their histories also the same caution is to be observed; especially to such as evidence their tendencies by fanciful introductions and vain fiction.3 For, from attending a single party, or listening to a single couplet of this description, the mind may contract vice, from which it can only be freed by long perseverance in irksome expedients and diversified remedy. Nay, not unfrequently do men of attainment and intelligence weary and fall away from the same cause. In the science of divinity, no less, the repeating of passages, whether verse or prose, conveying representations of sin, or encouragement to it, is of established illegality; and that on the same principle. The interdiction too of such musical instruments as are appropriated by the drinkers of wine, proceeds on the same grounds.4 For the mere imagining of such subjects, or contemplating them with approbation, must inevitably stimulate desire and dispose the character to give way. The secret of the matter lying only in this, that the calls of desire and anger are ineradically implanted in the nature of man, by reason of the connexion between mind and body, and the consequent sympathy of the former with the corporeal powers: so that yielding to the passions of the mind is like descending a declivity, no trouble or exertion being requisite thereto; and rising to the ascents of virtue is like climbing an acclivity; only attainable by the endurance of labours and difficulty, and the sacrifice of desires and gratifications.5
Hence that saying of the Sanctified, “Paradise is begirt with disgusts, and hell with pleasures.”
It must be observed, however, that cordiality towards friends and the reciprocal indulgence of each other’s humour is commendable, and conducive to a more perfect state of social intercourse and the permanent confirmation of benevolence. With this, in fact, as with other dispositions, there are two extremes: on the side of deficiency, melancholy, ill-nature, repugnance; on the side of excess, foolery, infatuation, and sottishness; both which extremes, like all others, are culpable: the middle or laudable point being styled alacrity, cheerfulness, easiness, or good-fellowship, and the possessor of it described by the terms urbane and jovial. The sacred refuge of revelation, with all the glory of his position, could condescend to jest — “It was the art of the Prophet to jest without untruth.”7 The Caliph Aly, by reason of his entire benignity and the ascendant acquired by his pretensions to sovereign power, (which may be said to bring out the individual and dissipate the generic traits of character,) possessed a vein of poignant humour, which led Solimān Fārsy to say of a jest he one day indulged in, “This it is which has kept you back to the fourth;”8 — which remark is very just; for a reliance on his rights of sovereignty was the ruling feeling of that sacred person; and it is one which gives ascendance to the inner and individual nature, in opposition to the suggestions of appearance and the observance of our relations with the many. The difference between the two is most decided:
Another method of preserving mental health is to employ the powers in some laudable pursuit, be it of the observative or the practical class. For every faculty takes deeper root by being exercised in practice, and loses tenacity by suspension; nay, in time, disappears altogether. This principle takes the place of diet to the body — an essential means of maintaining health according to bodily medicine: nay, more is contributed by this diet to the mental, than by the other to the bodily health: because, in that many changes are to be entertained; whereas the mental diet admits of none. For no sooner is the mind released from the exercise of contemplation, and ceases to send its soaring thoughts abroad in pursuit of their philosophic food, than it inevitably verges towards folly and stupidity, turns from those fountains of the intellectual world which supply the spirit with sustenance and heavenly support, and stripped, in the eye of reason, of the honors of human perfection, becomes virtually degraded to the shape of ravenous beasts.9 Finally, when made conscious of its inverted position, as it only can be at the final resurrection, lamentation and perdition are the only result. Oh, if ye could see when the guilty hang their heads before their Lord, (saying) O Lord, we have seen and heard; then send us back to life unharmed, and we shall rest persuaded. Let no one then, however eminent in his age, and distinguished above his contemporaries in knowledge and attainment, allow conceit and self-sufficiency to drop their veil before his eyes, or hinder him from the felicity of further progress in the heights of perfection; for, Every scholar has his superior.10 Neither may he plead in excuse for abandoning his pursuit of perfection any weight of years, any disappointment in result, or weariness of exertion. When Plato was asked how long study was to be recommended, he replied, “as long as ignorance is to be condemned.” Let him never allow of negligence in returning to review what he has acquired, but hold himself bound to repeat and recall; for the bane of knowledge is forgetfulness. Let him who desires to maintain the health of his mind reflect, that if the followers of evanescent good and mistaken felicity, which is liable to decay, and ever verging upon change, are contented, for the gain of its every portion, to endure the dangers and toils of travel, and to encounter whatever may arise to disgust or appal them,11 à fortiori is continual labour and pertinacious exertion to be employed by him, in mastering real good and essential virtue, the ornament of his whole being, and which no accident can take away.
But what fraud or detriment can equal his, who, for vile and perishable pottery, gives a precious and everlasting jewel, which it requires immense labour to regain? And then, if the equivalent leaves not him, he leaves it; and it then falls to his inheritors, who are generally his ill-wishers.12 Thus in the discourses of the Prince of Men, we are repeatedly exhorted to stand aloof from worldly superfluity, and from application to worldly interests, with all their delusive advantages; particularly where he says, “Be intent upon religion, and you will be loved by God: be intent upon what pertains to men, and you will be loved by them.” And again, “Live in the world as though you were a stranger, or a passer by its road, and count yourself for one among a people of the tomb.” “He who can command a competence to his situation in life (says Aristotle) ought not to seek for more; for to that there is no limit, nor to the disgusts which the seeker of it must encounter.” And again, “Not enjoyment is the object of wealth, but defence against infirmities, such as hunger and thirst, and security against falling into bodily afflictions. The true enjoyment is health, and that we are bound to seek for; so that in shunning superfluity enjoyment is placed, as well as health; and in seeking it, neither health nor enjoyment.”13 In the book of Solimān, son of David, (blessings be on them!) it is written, “Seek not after more in this life; for whether one is master of a house, or guest in it, the stomach holds the same. So that he that has but in the measure of his wants, or he that has more, are both equal in the benefit resulting; only the possessor of more undergoes greater trouble and labour, without any other privilege than that of saying it is his.”14
For him who possesses not to the degree of competence, let him never indulge in exaggerating the measure of his wants; let him beware of disgraceful emolument, and on no account encourage the faculties of desire and resentment. The employment of these let him hold under the absolute guidance of nature: not like that class of persons, who, on the mere recollection of gratification received from relieving an appetite or giving loose to a resentment, conceive a desire for the like indulgence; which is plainly invoking lust and anger to appear. This resembles the conduct of him who should first provoke a wild beast, and afterwards apply himself to effecting his escape; conduct, clearly, which no reasonable person would pursue. But when he leaves it to the disposition in its own time to stimulate them, and then employs them by the measure of judgment, balanced to that degree which is the point of equipoise, keeping aloof from both extremes of excess and deficiency, they bring him to the virtues of temperance and courage.
Another requisite is, to let all our words and actions be preceded by the exercise of thought, lest any thing escape us by course of habit, in opposition to our reasoning volition. And if habit should at times surprise us into an act repugnant to our better purpose, we should have recourse to some such punishment as may be the means of restraining us. For instance, if it hurry us into indulging in a dish which the dictates of reason go to prohibit, let us retort by limiting food, adopting fast, and other such reproofs and inflictions15 agreeable to prudence, and suggested by reflection; or if groundless anger escape us, let us administer discipline by engaging in some discreditable frolic, or embracing some arrangement of property or person which is troublesome to us. We are told in the annals of sages, that when Socrates was urged by the archon of the age to take a wife, (for it was the custom in those days to request sages so to do, in order to perpetuate16 the sanctity of their influence,) he selected a scold, noted in those parts for her shrewishness, that by this means he might keep the angry feeling in subjection.17 Euclid used secretly to keep in pay light persons of his own city, who were to mob him with abuse and insult; and if he perceived any impatience in his mind, he disciplined it by toiling unwontedly in some useful employment.
In order to habituate the inclination, let us engage in such affairs as leave no room for negligence or want of care. No act which is culpable, however petty it may be, ought we to consider unimportant; for that leads to mental extenuation. And hence it has been affirmed by sundry heads of the institute, that any fault which we consider trivial, is, for that very reason, great in regard to us, (a principle expressed indeed in the sayings of the Sanctified,) and must on no account be indulged in.18 For trivial faults lead by degrees to great ones; nay, by persistance they acquire the properties of a great one, or, in other words, become great; though which of the two is to be affirmed, is a subject of dispute among the learned.19
The utmost care is likewise to be taken in seeking out our mental defects: and seeing, as Galen proposes, that every one is friendly to himself, and, according to the proverb, Love is a thing which maketh blind and deaf, affection is a cause of concealing defects, our proper course is — First, to select an intelligent friend, and after a length of intercourse and companionship, to question him of our faults; and this in an impressive and importunate manner, not being satisfied with his professions of seeing none, but persisting in our demand. When he has thus been won to bring them forward, we are not to appear mortified but rejoiced; for according to the Prophet’s declaration, Blessed be he who points out my defects, he has done us a favour, conveying no ordinary claim on our gratitude. In this way then we may set ourselves to remedy what is amiss.20 But if the truth is not made known by a friend, the object may certainly be obtained from an enemy. For these, in the most part, show no tenderness in declaring any one’s bad qualities, but rather strive to publish them abroad. By such means, then, being made aware of our defects, we are to employ the utmost solicitude in filling up any fissure which has taken place; and this is the meaning of what Galen says in another place: “The good are profited of their enemies.”21 It is told us for a saying of Eesa22 (blessed be he!), “I have learnt manners from the unmannerly;” and others23 of the wise have said, the seeker of virtue ought to make his friends’ exteriors a glass24 wherein to contemplate his own qualities and disposition; that he may thus become aware how odious his vices are. For the mind is unconscious that any of its own proceedings are odious, but easily perceives it in those of others.
IT is a maxim of bodily medicine, that the maintenance of health may be effected by persevering in its auxiliary, and the removal of disease by resorting to its contrary; and the same principle is equally fundamental to therapeutics of the mind. Now the virtues, as we have seen, being four, and the vices eight, the latter are not to be termed contraries to the former in that phraseology whereby we say two things are opposite when they are in the extreme of separation from each other:2 though in popular phraseology the term contrary may be applied to them.
The first requisite in pathology is to be acquainted with the genera of diseases; secondarily, with their causes and symptoms; and lastly, with their mode of remedy. Now the human powers being of three sorts, the power of reason, the power of anger, and the power of desire, and the evils to which they are severally liable arising either from original construction, or from failure of function, and proceeding either upon redundance beyond the limit of equipoise or paucity within it, it follows that the diseases of every power will be of three sorts: excess, deficiency, and perversion of state.
Excess in the power of reason may be either in the observative or the active division. In the first, such as application beyond measure; bigotry in distinguishing; contentiousness, and groundless delay through hesitation; all which certain simpletons and self-styled philosophers, guiltless of the sweets of knowledge, term investigation; and by such means miss their hold of certainty. In the second, if applying to particulars, it is sleight; if to universals, artfulness. Deficiency in the observative power is dulness and stupidity; in the active, clumsiness;3 and, generally, all stopping short of the proper limit of attention, whether in science or practice. Perversion of the power — such as eagerness for knowledge not conducive to real perfection, as the art of wrangling, dialectics, and sophistry beyond what may be auxiliary to the attainment of certainty, or such as vaticination for money, juggling, &c. where the end is not the attainment of realities.4
Excess in the power of anger — as violence of resentment, glutting of revenge, and the outblaze of passion beyond the mark of equipoise: Deficiency in it — as wittoldom, faint-heartedness: Perversion of power — as getting angry with a wrong object, things inanimate, brutes, children, or any one under our control, or with any thing other than what occasioned the angry feeling.
Excess in the acquisitive power — as greediness in eating and drinking; intemperate lust for connexion beyond the degree sanctioned by the understanding: Deficiency in it — forbearing to eat and drink in the requisite measure; neglecting to continue the race; which is also termed dulness of desire:5 Perversion of state — as wanting to eat clay, or coal; pæderasty;6 and generally, the exertion of desire in any form which goes beyond the rule of intellectual sanction.
These are the genera of diseases simple: the species belonging to them are numerous, and the diseases arising from their intermixture innumerable. Of these some may be termed deadly; as they lead to many chronic complaints, (such as perplexity and ignorance; prevalence of anger and faint-heartedness; despondence, envy, unreasonable hope, love, levity, &c.) which diseases being most universal of any in operation, their cure is of all the most desirable; and each, if it please God, will be detailed in its proper place.
But since between mind and body the bond is close and the connexion stringent, so that every quality engendered in either is introduced into the other, we ought to examine whether these corrupt dispositions do not originate in corporeal disease, (such as wrong temperament or wrong constitution;7) and if so, we must resort to the bodily physician for their removal: but if they originate in a proneness8 to improper actions, it is the mental physician who must cure them. Like, then, as bodily cure consists either in diet or the use of medicine, and in extreme cases it is necessary to resort to poison9 and chirurgic operation, such as cautery and amputation, mental cure may also be said to proceed on a similar course. Culture of morals and removal of vice is to be prosecuted, in the first instance, by prayer and the practice of good deeds; which answers to diet in bodily treatment: secondly, by rebuke and reprehension of mind, in thought, word, and deed; which answers to medicine: thirdly, by encouraging provocatives to the opposite vice;10 which resembles cure by poison: fourthly, by penance, restraint, harsh usage, and dint of wearisome discipline, to weaken the offending power, and reduce it to obedience; which responds to amputation.11
This is the method of cure in its general aspect. In its particular aspect, a detail will be given of the cure of the principal diseases incident to each of the three powers; and for the others it may be inferred from these.
Diseases of the discerning power are many; but danger is only to be apprehended in three — perplexity, ignorance simple, and ignorance compound: the first belonging to the class of excess, the second to the class of deficiency, and the third to the class of perverted state.
For the cure of perplexity, as it arises from the conflict of evidence on obscure subjects, so that the judgment is unable to determine upon either side, we are in the first place to call to mind this self-evident proposition, that there is no reconciling or removing of contraries; so that we may take it for granted universally, be the proposition what it may, that one of the two sides is in its own nature necessarily true, and the other false. Next let us investigate the premises applicable to the question, with reference to the rules of logic and the precision of scrutiny, till the true becomes distinguishable from the false, and we determine upon one side or other.12
Cure of simple ignorance, which is want of knowledge without supposing ourselves possessed of it. In the outset this is not culpable; nay, is a condition of acquiring knowledge; for if we know, or if we suppose we know, it is impossible we should learn. But to remain in this situation is culpable, and condemned alike by the followers of faith and philosophy. Its cure is this: Let the patient reflect on the state of men and of other animals, till he is convinced that man’s superiority to them lies in his knowledge and discernment; and that the really ignorant man, who is graced by no such symbol, belongs to the class of irrational brutes; nay, is viler even than they. And so when he finds himself present in the assemblies of the learned and the eminent,13 where attainment is tested like the speed of coursers in the race-ground, while they are displaying their pretensions to rank among those who wear the order of precedence, he must remain altogether deprived and denuded of the properties of speech. For many are the brutes, who, attempting an imitation of language, are unable to accomplish it: and here it would seem that those words which he utters in interlocution with others like him, are more analogous to the cries of animals than the speech of men. For did they belong to the class of human language, they must possess a currency among those who are the chiefest connoisseurs in the gems of the spirit. To apply the name man to such a person, were like calling grass wheat, or grapelings grapes.14 If we reflect, that whereas animals, being urged by nature so to employ their powers and organs of body as to arrive at the limit of their specific perfection, do never deviate from the right way which that limit may be said to determine,15 while a fool, on the contrary, in his recklessness of the distinctions between virtue and vice, employing his powers otherwise than nature dictates, is constantly deviating and departing from the course requisite to his mastery of that perfection which is proper to his kind; — on these grounds, I say, we shall perceive, that a fool is viler than a brute.16 And if by the same rule we examine the character of inanimate substances, it will appear that he is even lower than this class; in that, by ill selection, he has degraded the human nature from that highest of the high, most excellent in conformation, to that lowest of the low, they are as brutes, nay, worse than brutes. Aristotle says, if a blind man and one with sight fall both into a pit, their sufferings are the same; but the blind man is excused and defended, because he lacks means of precaution, while he that sees is condemned and reproached with reason as guilty of a fault. There is a saying —
Revelation, as well as reason, declares that no virtue is entire without knowledge. Hence the Prophet’s prayer, Further me, O Lord, in knowledge. And when asked by one of his wives by what men were distinguished among each other, he replied, “by understanding.” Again, he said to Aly the accepted, “Various are the virtues, O Aly, by which men are brought near to their Creator; but thou by thy intellect art created near; and standest before them by many degrees of approach.” It is one of his dicta — “Men are either learned or learning; the rest are blockheads.”17 When asked by one of his companions, which was the best of practices, he answered, “knowledge.” The question was thrice repeated, and thrice the same answer returned. The inquirer observed, that his question concerned practice, and not knowledge. “Better a little practice with knowledge,” said the Prophet, “than ever so much practice without it.”
Cure of compound ignorance. Of this the essence is opinion not agreeable to fact; and it necessarily involves another opinion, namely, that we are already possessed of knowledge. So that besides not knowing, we know not that we know not; and hence its designation of compound ignorance. In like manner, as of many chronic complaints and established maladies, no cure can be effected by physicians of the body; of this, no cure can be effected by physicians of the mind: for with a presupposal of knowledge in our own regard, the pursuit and acquirement of further knowledge is not to be looked for. It was accordingly declared by the holy Eesa, (peace be with him!) “the blind and the leprous I can cure, but I cannot cure the foolish.”18 The approximate cure, and one from which in the main much benefit may be anticipated, is to engage the patient in the study of measures (geometry, computation, &c.); for in such pursuits the true and the false are separated by the clearest interval, and no room is left for the intrusions of fancy. From these the mind may discover the delight of certainty; and when, on returning to its own opinions, it finds in them no such sort of repose and gratification, it may discover their erroneous character, its ignorance may become simple, and a capacity for acquiring the virtues be obtained.19
Diseases of the resisting power are beyond the bounds of enumeration, but the worst are these three sorts — anger, faint-heartedness, fear: the first on the side of excess, the second on the side of deficiency, and the third analogous to perversion of state.
Cure of anger. This is a quality of the mind producing agitation of the spirit, and of its vehicle the blood,20 not extending beyond the causes of its excitement, and occasioned by the desire of revenge.21 As it gathers vehemence, the agitation becomes excessive; the brain and nerves, which are the channels of the mental feelings, are filled with a murky vapour; in this darkness and denseness the light of the understanding is obscured, and its operation enfeebled. Men in this predicament philosophers have likened to a stove full of fire and smoke, wherein nothing is to be perceived but the uproar and the combustion. In such circumstances the cure is difficult; for, at this pitch, the more we exert ourselves to reprove and restrain them, the higher the flames of anger blaze. Change of position, as from sitting to standing (or the converse), and the like, is of some use; or to drink water (in case no objection22 is discoverable), also to bathe, or to go to sleep.
Dispositions differ in their liability to anger. Some are of sulphureous nature, taking fire with the least spark; some resemble oil, and admit it not for the most part without urgent incentive; some are like dry wood, occupying an intermediate station of combustibility; and some are exceedingly slow to be affected; — which last characteristic, when not arising from weakness or cowardice, but from sobriety and a proper direction of the judgment upon consequences, is to be regarded with approbation. Now the difference between these classes is in the origin of the angry impulse. Let the incentives be sufficiently renewed, and all the classes may be carried equal lengths; or rather, the anger of the last class is most violent of all; because it can only have been educed by very urgent cause. And hence that maxim of the refuge of revelation, “Woe to ye, for the anger of a peaceful man.” In one of the prophetical traditions, we are told that men are of several orders: some quick to anger, and quick to recover from it; and some slow to anger, and slow to recover from it; but the best is he who is slow to anger, and quick to recover from it; and the worst is he who is quick to anger, and slow to recover from it.
Imām Ghazāly says, that since by anger men are carried beyond their own control, it is incumbent on the Prince to forbear ordering a believer to punishment while under the influence of anger. For in such a state he is likely to overpass what is due23 to the offender, and consult the gratification of his own feelings. Hence that story of the Muhtasib or Censor, who, seeing a man drunk, and meaning to give him the bastinado, released him when he began to be abusive; saying, as he turned away, that if he had scourged him after being hurried into anger, he should have been torturing him for the relief of his own resentment, and not for the love of God. Once, too, when a man of sin was brought before Ibn Abd-ul-Aziz, and uttered impertinent language to his face, the Caliph said, that he would assuredly have punished him, if he had not felt that he was in a passion.24
There are ten causes of anger:25 conceit, pride, disagreement, contentiousness, temper, arrogance, ridicule, perfidy, malice born, and eagerness in pursuit of valuables of a rare order. The concomitants of anger (being accidental to the disease) are seven: repentance, dread of retribution in this world and the next, enmity of friends, derision by the worthless, exultation of enemies, change of disposition, and suffering without change.26
Anger, as philosophers say, is essentially the madness of an hour. The temperament of an angry person inevitably tends from the healthy equipoise to superabundant heat. Such a temperament, were it to be permanent, would be raving madness, as is well known from the first principles of medicine.27 Hence that saying of Aly’s — “Passion is a species of madness.” And the absence of repentance in one who has experienced it, is a sign that the madness begins to be established. There are cases, too, when the violent direction of the spirit upon externals leaves the heart empty; and this being the reservoir of animal spirits, the supply of these, which is constantly being forwarded to the members, becomes interrupted; or else, the angry heat, in the blaze of its combustion, inflames the vital principle, and fills it with feverish vapour: in either of which cases sudden death must follow, or perhaps the humours are inflamed, and diseases of structure generated, which terminate fatally. Hence when the Prophet was asked for a precept, he thrice cautioned the applicant against anger, and said no more. Another person came before his holiness, and inquired what religion was; he answered, “good behaviour.” Again he came on his right, and put the same question; his holiness gave the same answer. Again on his left he repeated the query, and received the same reply. At last he made the inquiry behind his back; on which his holiness turned to him and said, “Dost thou not comprehend? Religion is this, that you give not way to passion.” The Scripture likewise speaks with encomium of repressors of their anger and pardoners of men. Now the cure of anger, as of all other diseases, may be effected by the removal of its causes.
Definition and cure of conceit. If then the cause be conceit, (and that is a false opinion, in our own regard, that we are entitled to a position which in fact is above our desert,) the way to remove it is this. Let us observe our defects and failings, and compare them with the excellences of others. For there is no one in whom, if we examine his position with impartial eyes, we may not discover some excellence peculiar to himself. The holy, just, and glorious Creator having rendered each of all existing atoms an index of some peculiar title, a mirror of some assigned attribute, in which no other can partake —
Cure of pride, which is usually pride in some personal or external good fortune, as wealth, beauty, or nobility of rank. If wealth, every sensible person must know that it is a matter quite external to ourselves, and eminently exposed to the chances of depredation: if beauty, surely a thing that is liable to decay on the slightest illness productive of a change of temperament, is not a fit reason for the exultation of a being capable of improvement and perfection.
If rank, which is a term for distinction in one of our forefathers, let us suppose that forefather to be present, and to say, “the distinction which you arrogate to yourself in reality belongs to me; what distinction have you in your own nature to be proud of?” What answer could he make? Or again, if one of the masters of the age were to compete with such our ancestor, possibly he would surpass him in his own distinction: how then can descent from him be matter for exulting over men who might be his superiors? Such is the practice with certain worthless persons, who, for some virtue which they suppose their fathers to have possessed, arrogate a superiority over men, the equals, perhaps, or even more than equals, of those fathers themselves. Or even supposing them to be not their equals, a little merit in a person’s own nature is nobler than ever so much merit reflected from another:28 yet on the strength of this vain fancy they consider themselves to hold patent for contemning the wise and insulting the eminent.
It was a saying of the Sanctified — “Come not to me with your pedigrees, but with your exploits” — of Aly, the commander of the faithful,
There is a story of one of the archons of Greece behaving proudly towards a philosophic attendant. “If the material of your exultation,” said he, “is the gorgeous apparel in which you are accoutred, the beauty is in the garment, and not in you; if it is the gallant beast on which you are mounted, the merit is the horse’s, and not yours; if it is the eminence of your fathers, that eminence belongs to them, and not to you. Wherefore, as no one medium of merit belongs to you, if we return each his right, (or indeed, never having been lodged with you, the return is superfluous,) what distinction will remain? ” It is said that a certain philosopher, when in company with a man of wealth, who prided himself on his finery, had occasion to spit: whereupon he looked in every direction for a place proper for the reception of his saliva; and finding none, he spat in the rich man’s face. All present were loud in their censure; when the philosopher remarked, that it was proper to spit in the vilest place, and however much he looked about him, he could find no place so vile as the face of a person, who had been transfigured, in the hands of ignorance, from all the graces of the human shape.30 The humble author of this compilation was told by certain his instructors, that once in the province of Fārs, a man of the world whose pride and joy was placed entirely in the vanities of transitory riches, went to visit one of those who look behind the veil, at a time when he was plunged in the abstraction of his own pursuits. As soon as his eyes fell upon that worldly one, he desired his servant, with some asperity, to remove the jackass, and insisted on it so vehemently, that at last the worldly man withdrew. Afterwards, on his descending from that state, the attendant apprised him of what had passed, when he declared that what he saw was neither more nor less than the figure of a donkey.31
As for disagreement and contentiousness, they loosen and destroy the bond of unity and tie of concord; for opposition is the contrary of coalition: and in proportion to the prominence and prevalence of plurality, order is dissolved and combination overthrown. Plurality and unity are negatives of each other. The above qualities therefore go to destroy the system of the world, which is the greatest of all offences.32 [Temper is omitted.]
Arrogance is akin to conceit: the difference lying in this, that conceit is the supposition, as regards ourselves, of a perfection which we do not really possess: while arrogance is the enforcing of such a claim, as regards others, even where no such supposition is entertained. Its cure is this. Let him reflect how far arrogance befits one who has twice33 passed through the urinary passage. It was a saying of Aly the accepted, “How should man be arrogant, whose beginning is filthy semen, whose end is putrid carrion, and who carries about a load of fœtid fæces in the interim.” In the holy writings we are told, Grandeur is my garment, and magnificence my mantle: whoso encroaches on them, I consign him to the flames.34 The truth is, that none can be entitled to be arrogant, but that one supreme Lord whose robe of glory can never be tarnished by corroding want; of whose lustre the existence of all things is only a twinkle; in whose bounty the universe is only a drop. Between such greatness and mere dependence, what can there be in common?35
Ridicule is a practice with certain low persons, by whom it is pursued in order to win the hearts and ensure the welcomes of wealthy men. A covetousness after rank and riches will also occasion it. When a person is reputed honorable, virtuous, or noted for any other good quality, these people take credit for the like, on the strength of discovering some fault in him; nay, they will even contrive by these means to hold rank for virtue and honor among those really possessed of them. There is a dictum of the Prophet’s, that on the day of resurrection those who have indulged in ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again, on their turning back, they will be called to another door, and again on reaching it will see it closed against them, and so on ad infinitum — punishment and retribution being exercised upon them in a form analogous to their offence.37
Perfidy may be either in property, or in rank, or in any other such object of pursuit; and all its divisions are sorts of treachery, which is the worst vice of the vicious, and such as no reasonable being would incline to think lightly of. The refuge of revelation has counted this among the species of hypocrisy, saying, that on the day of resurrection the perfidious will be gathered under one standard [with other hypocrites], and their perfidy be exposed to the assembled world.38 This disposition prevails chiefly among the Turks;39 and sincerity, which is its opposite, chiefly among the people of Rum40 and Æthiopia.41
To bear malice is to be at pains in supporting injury, in order more effectually to revenge it. The difference between this, and oppression or servility, is easily understood. Now a reasonable person should never attempt revenge till he is certain that it will not lead to further injury:42 that it will not, can only be ascertained by the careful exercise of thought and reflection, after the attributes of knowledge have been fully mastered. Nay, the expedient course is to forgive at once; for by this course the enemy becomes a friend, and is at the same time outdone and discredited in the public mark. Men of passion, however, feel it an injury to themselves to forgive an enemy whom they have power to punish: as the saying is, “It is worse to spare our enemies than to afflict our friends.”43
Eagerness in the pursuit of rarities is fraught with several dangers, of which it were well for princes and persons of consequence to beware — how much more those of the middle classes. No king can be secure against losing the jewels, however valuable, which his treasury contains. For it is well known that the revolutions of cycle involved in the celestial movements, nay, the very vicissitudes in the tides of authority, which is ever consuming its own depository, lead to unavoidable changes in circumstance, to fluctuation and transition without end.44 From the beams of the stars doth fortune weave the tangled web of systems, and then mangles it with the shears of corruption, and casts it into the fire of decay: preparation after preparation doth fate compound of the elementary simples, only to grind them in the mechanism of the heavens, and concoct some fresher invention out of their remains. Only the law of God it is which hath no antecedent; the law of God, in which no change is to be discovered.45
Now when a prince is visited with the loss of any valuable, the love of which is treasured in his inmost heart, symptoms of disturbance and dismay are sure to appear, and he is subjected to a suffering greater than the degree of satisfaction derivable from its possession. We are told of a crystal globe, that was famed for its clear material and delicate appearance, and on the mould and rotundity of which the keenest mathematicians had employed their minutest skill, being brought in presentment to a king.46 The more attentively he examined it, the more he felt its hidden beauties captivate his feelings, till he began to look upon it as the complement to a trinity with the sun and moon, — a sort of corrective for the variations in the lunar phase: and the better to enjoy the means of observing it, he ordered it to the safeguard of his private treasury. At last, according to the text, What good thing is there that time doth not sweep away? — the accidents of fortune and the vicissitudes of the cycles, on their own eternal principles, made it the prey of destruction. At this the king was so deeply affected as to become an altered being; giving up all interference in the affairs of his kingdom — all observance of his subjects’ interests — all conviviality with his most favoured associates of the banquet or the sport. In the agony of sorrow and chagrin at its loss, he bit his lips as though he took them for rubies that he wished to crush: in the fulness of his deplorings, he poured tears down his cheeks, as it were wine to carry the fragments away.47 His tears were a silver, and his cheeks a gold, which he lavished in the purchase of melancholy. The loss of his precious moments was a small outlay for the indulgence of his recollections. So deeply did sorrow for the artificial globe he had lost prey upon his system, that the real globe of the firmament, though studded with innumerable gems that illuminate the night, was darkness to his eyes. The stony heart of the ruby was melted into tears at his predicament, and the dull fabric of coral was observed to bleed at the calamity. Much as the nobles and princes exerted themselves to obtain some precious jewel that might comfort the king by replacing the lost, they returned in hopeless exclusion from his presence. In the end he lost all hold of the reins of his government or the guidance of his possessions, and irreparable ruin crept into the affairs of his dominions.48
Such is the case with kings. As to inferior persons, should they become proprietors of any surpassing valuable or attractive jewel, men of violence are sure to rise up in pursuit of it, and to fasten a quarrel on them, to excuse their taking it away. Do the proprietors give it up? They fall into sorrow and chagrin. Do they make open resistance? They fall into destruction, and lose their lives.49 Why then should a rational being seek after any thing which may lead to evils such as these?
Such is our essay on the causes and cure of anger. But to any one graced with equability, (that pearl of great price,) the cure will be easy; for anger is injustice — a departure from the straight path of equity, which, under any circumstances, is indefensible. As to that which a certain class suppose, that violence of anger proceeds from superabundance of manhood, in the height of their self-deception calling it courage, it is a most mischievous notion. With what justice can a habit productive of the worst consequences, ruinous to the peace of self, family, and friends, of dependents, household retinue, and followers, — with what justice can such a habit be considered with approbation? Hence that maxim of the refuge of revelation — “He who in a fit of anger can command his own soul, is bravest of the brave;”51 and upon his return from certain holy wars, he said they were returning from the little contest to the great one. They inquired what great contest he meant. “The contest,” he replied, “with our own souls; for your worst of enemies is the soul between your shoulders.”52 It generally happens that some perversion of state enters into excess of anger, the patient contracting a resemblance to brute beasts, and venting his rage upon animals and insensible objects, such as vessels, instruments, furniture, &c. Sometimes he relieves himself by destroying creatures, and slaying cat and mouse53 together. If the slit of a pen does not suit his fancy, or a lock does not open agreeably to his haste, he breaks it, and bursts, like a madman, into abuse without a meaning. This is a sad vice; as in that story of some ancient king of celebrated impetuosity, who, when his ship was detained at sea, grew angry with the ocean, and took to intimidating it by drawing off its waters, and filling it up with mounds.54 Hakeem Abú Aly Mashkovi speaks of some silly fellow, who, being unable to sleep one moonshiny night, took it in dudgeon; grew incensed at the moonshine, railed on it in good set terms, and composed the well-known lampoon on the occasion, beginning —
All such failings, in short, are ridiculous to the extreme of turpitude; and indicate impaired intellect and perverted feelings in their indulger. Such is usually the calamity of the weak;56 women, dotards, children, men in sickness, &c.
In like manner as some states of the body incidentally conduce to their opposite, cases also arise in mental humour, where the vice of anger is engendered by excess of the appetent power, which is covetousness, in some sort an opposite of the first. The covetous person whose cravings are disappointed, bursts out into resentment; and the avaricious person whose property is lost, gets angry with lovers and kinsfolk who have no way conduced thereto. From such execrable habits nothing is to be reaped but the loss of cordiality and the incidence of repentance. Let but a master of equity hold the feelings poised in the balance of reason, and in every occurrence that befalls, he ends on the equitable path, be it of censure or of reverence, of pardon or of punishment. We are told of a foolish oppugner of Alexander’s honor, who used to speak of him insultingly. One of the courtiers remarked, that probably if the king were to punish the man, he would desist from his offensive conduct, and others at the same time would be intimidated by the example. Alexander replied, that such a course would be opposed to correct judgment and refined sense; for as long as no harshness had been used towards him, every one acquainted with the circumstances would rise up in contradiction: but if he were punished, assuredly his abuse and invective would be augmented, and men of sense would think him excusable for using it.57 On another occasion, when one who had cast from his neck the yoke of obedience, was so unfortunate as to fall into captivity, Alexander cancelled the catalogue of his offences, and gave him his life. Some one in the height of his zeal exclaimed, “If I were you I would kill him.” “Not being you,” said Alexander, “I do not kill him.”58
Cure of faint-heartedness, which is want of tendency in the soul to chastise, on occasions where such tendency is desirable. This then is the opposite of anger, which is excess in this tendency. It is invariably accompanied by certain incidents of perversion, — such as light-mindedness, vileness, bad living, bad designs upon the patient on the part of other people, want of constancy in undertakings, — indolence and love of ease, which leads to the loss of all that is desirable,59 — successful injustice practised upon him, endurance of affronts offered to self or family, listening unmoved to all that is odious in insult and raillery, want of shame at what is clearly disreputable and disgraceful, with a general suspension of interest in any thing.
The cure of this disease, as of all others, may be found in the removal of its causes; which may be effected by awakening the mind to a sense of the shamefulness of this situation, and devising methods of exciting anger: for anger is implanted in all individuals of the human kind; and, however deficient it may appear, by continuous excitation it will put itself forth like fire from flint,60 and by proper treatment be kindled into a flame. To this purpose a quarrel with some one who is secure from retribution will conduce; or interference with persons who will treat the patient with aggravated indignity and contempt. Applicable to this principle is the story told of Mansoor bin Nuh,61 who, in his own day, was lord paramount of Khorāsan and its dependencies. This prince suffered from a pain in the joints, which the greatest physicians of the age not only concurred in acknowledging their inability to cure, but admitted themselves at a loss to decide on the treatment which he ought to pursue. On this the pillars of the state determined to consult Muhammad Zākiria of Rei, who was profoundly versed in the principles of cure and the conduct of health, and a person was accordingly despatched to summon him. When the physician was come to the shore of the Kulzum sea,62 he declared he would submit to any thing rather than go on board a ship; in so much that they were obliged to bind him hand and foot, and force him up the side. The water once passed, he soon reached the king, and put in practice a variety of appropriate remedies and rare expedients, but all without success.
He then told the king that no bodily remedies would be of any use, and it now remained to adopt a mental treatment. If it gave him relief, well — if not, he must despair altogether. With this he brought him unattended to the warm bath, and gave orders that no one else should enter. As soon as the heat of the bath had taken effect on his body, the physician came up to him, cutlass in hand, and broke out into all manner of abuse. “You it was,” he said, “who ordered me to be bound hand and foot, and dragged into the water — you it was who brought me all these miles with indignity. Lo! with this very knife I will visit it upon you.” The king’s anger kindled in an instant, and involuntarily he started to his feet. Zākiria ran out on the moment, and, bidding the attendants take the king out and treat him conformably with written directions which he gave them, mounted on a swift-paced steed, and made the best of his way out of Khorāsan. Ultimately, on the king being treated according to the prescription, he entirely recovered his health: the warmth of anger, aided by that of the bath, having loosened the phlegmatic matter63 that occasioned his complaint. Often as his majesty afterwards requested his attendance, the physician could never be prevailed on to present himself before him; saying, that although the outrage offered had been used entirely in furtherance of the cure, yet it might chance, that when the king called it to mind, it would prove offensive to his feelings: no one under any circumstances could be secure from kings.64
This anecdote is meant to show by what manner of means it is possible to stimulate anger to a flame, however feeble any coldness of temperament may chance to render it. Some philosophers have been known to throw themselves into battles and situations of peril, and to take shipping when the sea was in a storm, in order to acquire the faculty of encountering difficulties and dangers.
Cure of fear. This is a term for a disposition of the soul arising on the expectation of something undesirable which it is unable to avert.65 Now such expectation must be relative to a positive event, which may either be necessary or possible; and, if possible, may either be occasioned by the act of the person, or by something else: in no one of which divisions can fear be recommended by the reason. In no case then ought a rational being to admit of fear. If the event be necessary, as it is clearly beyond the bounds of mortal capacity to avert it, fear can do nothing but expedite the evil and antedate the distress; in consequence of which two predicaments we are precluded from arranging our religious and secular concerns. So the indulgence of this tendency brings misery upon us in this world and the next. If the event is possible, but not dependent on the person’s act, being in its own nature one that admits both of occurrence and non-occurrence, to determine on the side of its incidence, and invite gratuitous affliction, is irreconcileable with right reason: such an event is rather to be left to its own character of contingence. Indeed, this division, though partaking of a contradictory anticipation, has this characteristic in common with the first, that although the incidence were ascertained, it would still be better to abstain from fear.66 But if it be dependent on the act of the party, he should keep aloof from ill-selection, and avoid entering upon any act that can lead to irreparable results. For surely to commit offences in the expectation of concealing them, is not a reasonable course; because whatever his idea may be, the discovery of the offence involving his disgrace is surely possible, and that which possibly may occur is always near occurrence. In no case then is he to enter on such a course.67 The cause of fear then in the first instance is a persuasion of what may possibly be contradicted; and in both instances the consequences of it are suspension of intellect and failure in perception. Of all occasions of fear, death being peculiarly urgent upon the many, it seems right to throw open our treatise to this particular subject, and endeavour to disentangle the reader’s mind from so insidious an apprehension.
Cure for the fear of death. — First we are to know that death is not the cessation of human being; for the reasonable soul is the most tenacious of our endowments, being a ray from the glory of Omnipotence, over whose unbounded permanence extinction cannot pass, and whose essential substance has no connexion with the events of space.
This has been established as a fundamental principle of science by many convincing proofs, of which the following are all that suit the exigence of the present subject.
First, let a man suppose that one of his members, a finger for instance, is destroyed, his identity is thereby unaffected: next, let him in imagination withdraw some other member, and so on till he has successively supposed the negation of every limb he has; and he will find his essence to survive through every stage intact.68
After presuming this, we go on to state that fear of death proceeds either from ignorance of its true nature, and the notion of its implying a cessation of existence, or from some privation we suppose in it, or from circumstances posterior to death, (which last applies either to the individual as punishment at the final resurrection, or to our children and survivors,) or from uncertainty in these matters and want of decision upon them.69 Now most of these points, when examined with the eye of reason, and weighed by the standard of thought, are not really conducive to fear. As to the first, it appears from what was shown above, that death is properly the severance of connexion between soul and body, and the cessation of the former to exert the bodily organs. As to the second, since bodily pain operates through bodily vitality, and this vitality is an effulgence of the body’s junction with the soul, death, which severs the junction, must destroy pain; for the cause of our sensibility to what is painful exists no longer.70 For the third, we are to reflect that death is a complementary to the properties of human nature; or, as the philosophers of old expressed it in their definition, man is a creature who lives, speaks, and dies. Death then is completion, and the privation is properly in the reason of him who predicates it.71
A being endued with reason is bound to leave the groping dens of inclination, and come forth on the broad expanse of reality, till he recognises the preponderance of intellectual over animal life,72 devotes himself to the pursuit of true perfection, and, soaring on the wings of zeal over the seven73 heavens, seeks rest only on the summit of the virtues.
For the fourth, retribution being a consequence of crime, we are to refrain from wrong-doing. It is from acts of sin that this fear in reality proceeds.74
As to the fifth, if it be the fear of separating from family, children, relations, and friends, he ought to reflect how the goodness of eternal Providence, guided by unintermitting wisdom, directs every one of all existing atoms to the purposed end, according to what he judges best for the harmony of the world; and this course no one can alter or influence: even granting his life were to last, the fortunes of his children will be not according to his wishes, but agreeable to the will of God. We every day witness how often men of eminence exhaust their efforts in the discipline of their children, and it entirely fails of effect.75 But if our affliction is merely for the loss either of them or of our property and possessions, it belongs to the class of sorrow; which is a hurrying to meet affliction and suffering, and that in a matter which affliction no way relieves; but of this the cure will come presently, if it so please the Almighty.76
In the next place we have to state, as a received principle of philosophy, that all existing things decay; and the human body, being one of those things, must perish with the rest. For its elementary portions have been brought together by the action of the spheres,77 in their own nature being elective of dissolution and dispersion: so that a time must come when they will separate.
Thus whoever desires the being of his body, must likewise, by implication, desire the decay which attaches to it.79 Moreover, if death were not to occur, our turn for possessing the objects and enjoyments of life would never arrive.80 It is computed by Hakím Abú Aly Mashkovy, that if we suppose any of the departed whose lineage is marked by the care of their descendants, (as for instance his holiness Aly, the consignee of the Caliphat,) to be still alive, together with every one born of his posterity in the course of four hundred years, (the period intervening between his time and that of the Hakím,81) they would amount altogether to upwards of a thousand thousand;82 for in spite of all the trying adversities and hard fortunes that have befallen the race, and the efforts so constantly made by tyrants83 to extirpate them, there are still near two hundred thousand84 Alites dispersed about the world: then if we extend the supposition to the case of every other of the Prophet’s contemporaries, the above number must be substituted for each once in every four hundred years. It is clear then that in the first four hundred years, if no one were to die, while procreation and production were to proceed as usual, men’s number would become immense; and on the doubling of this period, the duplication of numbers, proceeding like that of squares85 in a chess-board, would be beyond the bounds of numeration. The expanse of the wilderness and utmost extent of the four quarters,86 which geometricians by demonstrative computation and the test of induction from survey have accurately measured,87 if divided among the several persons, would not give to each so much ground as he could put his foot on to stand upright; or if they should wish to stand altogether with their hands extended, the face of the earth would not hold them, much less afford room for sitting and rising, and movements of necessity. Space for casting rubbish, for building, and cultivation, there could be none.88 This being the result in eight hundred years or less, from the duplication of these what could follow? Thus, the horror of death and desire for perpetuity of life may be set down for a fancy of those who deal in impossibilities — a blunder of those who harbour absurdities: no rational being should allow the reflectors of his mind to be sullied by these mists. The proper conclusion is, that whatever is seen to be a part of the world’s arrangement proceeds on the most perfect and comprehensive course: to imagine any improvement upon it, is to imagine perversely.89
But for any one, who, not desiring perpetuity of bodily life, doth yet extend his hope in behalf of life lengthened beyond the equable limit, let him reflect, that the previous arguments may be applied to this. Certain too it is, that in age all the powers verge upon decline; the senses internal and external suffer from exhaustion, the delight of health, which is the root of all delights, is lost to us, and, according to the text, long-lived, we retrovert our nature, all our circumstances are reversed; strength changed to feebleness, health to sickness, and honor to vileness; till even our own family and children weary of us. To crown the whole, we are visited at every instant with the loss of a contemporary — at every glance with the departure of an intimate — every hour brings its calamity — every look shows us an affliction.90 In reality, then, every one who desires life prolonged beyond the average limit, desires likewise these trials which attend on it. Wherefore, knowing as we do, that death is inevitable, and really consists in the release of a pure and noble spirit from bearing the burden of a gross and earthy body — in the escape of the soaring faculties encaged in this mortal frame91 — and sure as we are, that the resting-place of the human soul is in another world, it becomes us as rational beings to exert ourselves agreeably to these sublime doctrines and everlasting enjoyments: not casting down our heads like the brutes engrossed in food and drink, but lifting them like men to the world on high, and employing our powers of body in securing that which leads to felicity of mind.92 To this end, renouncing all ties of personal attachment, according to the text, Die ye before your deaths,93 let us die the death of desire, that when the decease of nature overtakes us, we may pass at once from the narrow bounds of time and place to that unlimited expanse which is beyond them — to the august vicinity of the Lord of Worlds — to that seat of righteousness where prophets and holy men are appointed94 to repose: thus shall we be rewarded with a life of nature, and one that knows no end; or, as Plato tells us, “Die in your appetites, that you may live in your faculties.”95
Such is the cure for diseases in the repelling power. Next, of the acquisitive power the diseases are, likewise, either in the department of excess, or in that of deficiency, or from perversion of state. Under each of which are several species; but the most formidable of them are four: excess of appetite, levity, sorrow, envy; the cure of which it seems sufficient to give in the form of compendium.
Cure for excess of appetite. If in eating and drinking, let the patient contemplate the vileness of the indulgence, and the meanness of those partaking in it, as well as the trials and evils it induces: such as degradation, humiliation, lapse of honor, loss of reverence; with every description of evil producible by exhaustion of intellect and incidence of stupidity, and the outbreak of all the complaints which, according to the plainest principles of medicine, it produces. It is a maxim with physicians, that all diseases proceed from excess in eating and drinking. His holiness the first of aphorists has likewise said, “Eat with a portion only of your stomachs, and ye shall be well;” and again, “The stomach is the root of all malady.”97
But if the patient’s appetite is to venery, in addition to the previous considerations he must observe, how the most cogent of all causes to weakness in body and decay in mind, curtailment of life, and ruin of property, is this very appetite for venery. Imām Ghazāly, the defender of the faith, has compared this appetite to an unjust administrator, who, were the prince to give him the rein, would take possession of the subjects’ property, and reduce them to poverty and want, without applying it to enriching the treasury or paying the troops. So too the power of lust, if not restrained by an overruling intellect, would expend on its own purposes all the wholesome supplies and requisite juices procured from its vassals, the powers of nutrition, to the exhaustion of all the members and faculties. But when, under the direction of reason, in the course of equity and to a proper degree, it limits itself to the perpetuation of the kind, it resembles an administrator, who, collecting revenue in the course of justice, devotes it to the interests of his sovereign’s dominions; such as fortifying defiles, repairing bridges, and paying troops. Let him consider likewise that different women are more like each other in the power of pleasing,98 than are different dishes in the power of satisfying hunger.99 In like manner, then, as it would be abhorrent from reason to leave the meats your own home affords, and go round to other houses begging at the doors for the like of them, it should be held disgraceful to slight the privileges sanctioned by reason and religion, and leave one’s own lawful wife to trespass upon interdicted grounds, and taste the fruits of impurity, in defiance of all the ill consequences which law and reason tell us it induces. We have it in a dictum of the Sanctified, “Women occasion the curtailment both of life and fortune;” and in the Psalms we find it said, “Loss of sufficiency in fortune is the smallest of the evils to which the lascivious man is subject.”100 Were we to give the reins entirely up to this passion, it would reach to such a height, that were there for instance but one woman in the world whom we had not got at, we should fancy some satisfaction from mastering her, such as was not to be supposed of any other. All this may be termed the height of ignorance and folly; from which and from all other attendant evils, we may be secured by a timely and moderate exercise of the appetent power.
Now here there is a school101 who have placed love among the diseases of appetite, and asserted it to be the most pernicious of any to which this faculty is liable; being itself the devotion of the feelings through overwhelming desire to the pursuit of one particular person; and its cure, the turning of the thoughts from that person, and engagement of them in strict studies and amusing occupations, such as demand particular attention and surpassing care; together with the reduction of the appetite by purging away the stimulant matter, and using anti-phlogistic remedies.102 This however applies only to animal love, which takes its rise from excess of appetite. Spiritual love, which arises from harmony of souls, is not to be reckoned a vice; but, on the contrary, a species of virtue.103
A refined nature may be said to be powerfully attracted to the forms of beauty by the general law of specific affinity, which is itself a cause of coalition. In discoursing upon equity, the secret of this matter having been pointed out already, our present purpose may be answered by the following observations. The nobler and better the equipoise of personal temperament may be, the stronger is the soul’s attraction to fine forms, sweet sounds,104 and admirable qualities. For assuredly when both buds of perfection expand themselves in one and the same atmosphere, and both off-shoots of equipoise are fed from one and the same fountain, they must manifest a tendency to communion, which is the essence of love. When this noble relation is established in any two indices, difference of capacity and peculiarity of habit will cause its developement to a fuller and higher degree in one, and to a lower and lesser degree in the other. Loving-ness then takes root on the side of the deficiency, and loved-ness105 displays its attractions on the side of the surplus; the former courting secrecy and suppression,106 the latter arrogating declaration and permanence. Hence with regard to amicable numbers, that is, two numbers such that the divisors of each make up the sum of the other, like 220 and 284, the wise assert that if two persons agree in any matter (as of food, &c.) by the expression of these numbers;107 and each keep by him an amulet108 inscribed according to one of them, there is no doubt of affection and concord being established between the two; the lesser number being used to denote love, and the greater to denote the beloved.
This is that love, the watchword of the theological divines, which contributes so much to harmonizing the disposition and enlightening the mind. No sooner does this sun of the moral world, for such may love be termed, (agreeably to the text, It illuminated the earth with the lustre of its Lord,) dawn upon the mental horizon, than the thick darkness of natural inclination retreats in the opposite direction, and rolls itself away. This fire which inflames the universe, (and of which the mystery is thus expressed, it abideth not, neither doth it pass away,) no sooner does it enkindle the rubbish of our lives, than the propensities of disposition are altogether consumed.109
Hence the wise have said, there are three things conducive to excellence of intellect and benevolence of mind: “chaste liaison, sober reason, and a word from the wise spoken in season.”110 Indeed, the elders of the Súfy persuasion recommend a student to commence with the science of love.111
Among the Prophet’s dicta is the following: “He that loves, shuns, conceals, and dies; dies the death of a martyr:” and again, “God knoweth, goodliness must be dear to the good.” Zúlnún of Egypt used to say, “He that yearns for God, yearns for all delight and all beauty.” That prince of erotics, Abú Muhammad Rozbahān, expresses himself thus: “The traits of divinity may certainly descend upon humanity112 — the human, indeed, is only a reflex of the divine beauty.”
The truth is, according to that law whereby we are taught that the principle of the radix reaches to the extremities, the tendencies of eternal love penetrate the inmost recesses of all created things; the essences of beings are manifested only as component particles in an effluence from that love, the initiative of all, I loved that I might be known. That same effluence it is, which, displayed in the heavens in the form of appetent tendency, is the cause of circular motion; pervading the elements in the quality of physical tendency, is the cause of nutriment and developement of vegetables; is rooted in animals in the form of cupidinous faculty, and unfolded in the perfected minds of men in the quality of spiritual love. And if any one should speed with open-eyed intelligence about the naked world, if he should mount from that transcendent class who are purified from the stains of their conformation to the region of the spheres,113 and thence should plunge again to the centre of earth, he would find no atom unpossessed of this effluence which we term love.114
Which movement, indeed, of love throughout creation, the greatest philosophers have demonstrated.
The distinction, however, between spiritual and animal love being difficult, and few having power to control their appetent powers and physical propensities, (for
and those strenuous wayfarers who can throw their love open to the invasions of self-command, and die the death of desire, out of the way of bodily passions and cupidinous delights, being rarer than the philosopher’s stone; as most men are bondsmen to desire, and have never thrown off the yoke of propensity, calling crime by the name of love, and laying claim to the highest perfection of humanity on the strength of attributes belonging to the brute; slaves as they are to appetite, arrogating the rank of nobility — alas, alas,
perhaps for this reason abstinence may be the safer course. “Live single: for as to love, its beginning is want, its middle sickness, and its end death. In this advice lies the science of passion; but to thee, whosoever thou art, who thinkest otherwise, I would only say, suit thine own palate.”
Now a mark whereby to distinguish between spiritual and animal love, as Imām Ghazāly lays it down in many of his works, is this: If any one finds the same sort of delight in beauty as in looking on the verdure of nature, the course of waters, and the like, it is a sign that lust slumbers; and on this ground it is admissible. But if the delight is of another kind, such as to put lust in motion, it is the cupidinous and animal inclination, and therein illicit. Likewise the wise aver, that in spiritual love the yearning is more upon gestures and words than upon parts and symmetries: for if the spirit yearns, it is for spiritual things, and not for corporeal ones. But love being a subject on which there is no discoursing so as to obviate all its inherent taints, we limit ourselves to this instalment, and pass on to our original matter.
Next the cure of sorrow; which is a mental suffering produced by losing something desired, or missing something pursued:116 the cause of it being a greediness of desire after animal gratifications and bodily delights, with a supposition of permanence in regard to the baubles of the world. To cure this, we must consider, that the beings of this world of existence and decay are incapable of permanent endurance, as has already been shown under the cure for fear of death. Permanent and lasting belong only to intellectual concerns and spiritual attainments; which are exalted above the precincts of time, the bounds of space, the influence of opposites, and the inroads of decay.117 By this course, the certainty we attain we shall preserve from corrupt desire and vain opinion: not setting our heart on the things of this world, which is a passing shadow, nay, a false idea,118 but making it our endeavour to perfect that understanding and those high qualities which are imperishable blessings, and means of bringing us near to the holy and glorious Supreme; releasing ourselves from the house of envy, that haunt of endless sorrow and thrice-piled tribulation, and settling in the dwelling of content, — that home of true enjoyment and perpetual peace; all which is intimated in the glorious text, Are they not holy Fathers in God? fear comes not near them; they sorrow not again.
If we would live in enduring peace, we must satisfy our feelings with what we have, and not be anxious for what we have not. We are told in the dicta, “Verily in his wisdom and to his glory is it, that God hath placed cheerfulness and happiness in content and knowledge.” Should this appear difficult, let us consider men in their several classes, and observe how all, though each has his separate calling, (according to the text, Every class rejoiceth in his own,) delight in their peculiar practices and pursuits; even to regarding others with a contemptuous kind of pity.120 Surely then the follower of virtue will not fall short of these benighted and bewildered classes; surely he will not fix his regards on the worldly baubles which are in others’ hands, or lay himself open to chagrin for the want of these. Thus it is that the holy Lord addresses the refuge of revelation in those words which embody all miracles: Fix not thine eye on that wherein we have endowed some among them with the flower of this world’s life, that we may discover them thereby. The philosopher Ptolemy observes, “The greedy man is always poor, even though he possesses the world, and the contented man always rich, though he hath nothing.”121 Among the rescinded passages of the Kurān is the following:122 If the son of Adam had two valleys full of gold, he would desire a third to be added unto them, and would find ample room for all except the dross.
Yakub Kandy has furnished us with a demonstration that sorrow is not an inevitable matter, but a state into which volition largely enters; which is this.123 Whatever object eludes the pursuit of whatever person, undoubtedly there is a class, who, being debarred from that same object, are nevertheless contented and happy; which shows sorrow to be no necessary concomitant of its loss. And again, whatever affliction or trial may overtake us, doubtless the time will come when our sorrow will be changed into joy and our tears into laughter. He that desires the perpetuity of worldly enjoyments may be likened to a person who is present at an entertainment where each of the company partakes in turn, and every one has his moment for enjoying its refreshments, yet who wishes, when his turn comes, to appropriate the whole, not to pass it on to others, and gives way to disappointment and chagrin when they are taken away.124 For all the things of this world are deposits from God, which he passes in vicarious succession to every class of his servants, and takes back again as soon as their inclination is unreasonably attached.125 Imām Shāfei observes, “Property and retainers are nothing but deposits, and the time must come when deposits are to be restored.” Such restoration ought not to make a reasonable being dissatisfied, or to occasion him any sorrow or disappointment. Another great man declares, that if the world had no further fault than that of being borrowed, that alone would be enough to deter a man of spirit from paying it any respect. Socrates was asked how it was he was supplied so plentifully with cheerfulness, and so scantily with sorrow; “I never set my heart,” he said, “on any thing which it will grieve me to lose.”126
Cure of envy, which is longing for the cessation of another’s good, whether we desire the acquisition of it for ourselves or not.127 If the feeling demand such acquisition, it belongs to the appetent power; if it only demand an unwelcome incident to the person envied, it is a vice of the vindictive power, without junction of the appetent. Now these are the worst of diseases. He that envies the possessions and enjoyments of others cannot fail to be worn out by his feelings: for a stop can never be put to the advantages redounding from God’s bounty to the people of his world, neither then can a stop be put to the sorrow and suffering of the envier. There is a dictum, “Envy devours good deeds, even as fire devours its fuel.” Of all envy the worst is that prevailing between men of learning. In worldly matters, piled as we are upon each other from confinement of space, the case can never befall where the accession of good is to be looked for to one, without loss of it to another. Learning, on the contrary, is exempt from any such taint; for to it unquestionably and peculiarly no lapse or detriment can extend. In reality, however, the envy of this class is referable no less to worldly incentives. Now the cure of envy closely resembles that of sorrow.
Emulation is a longing for the acquisition of such advantages as are possessed by others, without desiring the passing away of them from others. This, if manifested with regard to worldly advantages beyond the sufficient and beneficial point, is culpable; if within this, it is praiseworthy; invariably so with respect to the advantages of the world to come, and the excellences of the spirit.128
Now any intelligent reader, who attentively considers these disquisitions, may be enabled, by their assistance, to undertake the cure of other diseases. In the cure of falsehood, for instance; let him reflect, that by speech we are meant to apprise others of what passes in our own minds; falsehood contraverts this end: so that to make this use of speech, is to place a thing out of its natural position; which is all we express by the term injustice. Moreover, the incentive to it is always a longing for some property or station, the viciousness of which longing has been found:129 and so on of other vices.
It is hardly necessary to say, that in the number of the cardinal virtues, as well as in the derivation of them, these writers follow Plato (Rep. iv.), Aristotle (Ethics iii. v. and vi.), and Cicero (Off. i. 5.): nearly every definition may be paralleled by a corresponding one of theirs.
↩A most important distinction in the shape of a platitude. We must not attempt to create circumstances, but only to select them. Power is only an avoidance of the causes of weakness.
↩This applies to the social rather than the individual state, and hardly agrees with some of the rules in Sect. 3; where the mental realization of virtue for its own sake is so much dwelt on. It is, however, a standard dogma with the schools. — Shakspeare, Troil. and Cress. III. 3.
After Akh.-nās. ii. 4, which is more brief and less entertaining.
↩These two subdivisions are dwelt on by Aristotle, Eth. vi. 10. 11.
↩Not held a distinct faculty. See Section i. note 3.
↩Referred by Cicero to the same principle, Tusc. iii. 17. “Jam tibi aderit princeps fortitudo, qui te animo tanto esse coget, ut omnia quæ possint homini evenire, contemnas et pro nihilo putes:” by Aristotle to temperance, Eth. iv. 3. “Wealth, power, good or bad fortune, it will meet and sustain with the same dignified composure, neither elated by prosperity nor dejected by adversity” — (Gillie): and by Plato, throughout his Republic, to justice.
↩Cicero, Off. i. c. 23. “Exercendum corpus et ita afficiendum est, ut obedire consilio rationique possit in exequendis negotiis et in labore tolerando.”
↩Or at one breath; the word signifying both. The passages proceed on Genesis ii. 7. “And the Lord God ——— breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”
↩The head of merey is omitted in the text.
↩Alluding to St. Paul’s expression, 1 Corinth. iii. 16, 17. “Know ye not that ye are the Lord’s temple,” &c.
↩By referring to instances of former prophets who were disregarded by their hearers, Muhammad sought to reconcile his pretensions with the unbelief of those whom he addressed. See Kurán, chaps. vii. xiv. xv. x. xx.
↩ The province (situated between the Caspian Sea and Persian
Gulf) which gave its name to the Persian and Parthian empires.
These seem to differ only as the dynasties came in contact with
Greek or Roman governments; though this is not yet admitted
by western scholars.
Equivalent to our Sunday service. See in Book iii. Sect. 2.
↩Much dwelt on by Aristotle under the same head, Eth. iv. 1.
↩Supposed by the later Muhammedans to have been constantly employed in bringing to their Prophet the messages of God. Muhammad himself does not seem to have pretended to such frequency of privilege. The Kurán is generally put as if internally suggested. (See chaps. xlii. and lxxv.) In all its 114 chapters, there are but two visions asserted (ch. xlii.); and two more assumed by commentators (chaps. lxxiii. and lxxiv). In all cases asserted or assumed it is clearly taken for a very rare and astonishing event.
↩A supposed factionary of the Jewish camp, and fabricator of the golden calf (Exod. c. xxxii), according to Kurán, ch. xx. The name seems derived and the person inferred from the feuds of Jew and Samaritan, notorious in those parts (Joseph. Ant. xiii. 3. iv). But the Samaritans were not of Jewish origin; setting aside their alleged introduction from Khotā or Tartary (Ant. ix. 4), the city of Samaria derived its name from Semer, a native chieftain or tribe, of whom it was bought by Omri (Ant. viii. 4. iv., Joshua xvii. 12, 13). Under the name Zemaraim they seem mentioned both in the early and late settlement of Syria (Genesis x. 18, Joshua xv. 48, xviii. 22).
↩This relation is remarked by Aristotle as regards their negatives, intemperance and cowardice. Eth. iii. 12.
↩See the passages from Plato’s Parmenides, in Introduction, note 36, and beginning of Sect. 5.
↩This delightful expansion of the “humanum nihil a me alienum ” is from Saädy’s Bostān (chapter on Affection): for date see Introduction, note 17. (See Cic. Off. iii. 5.)
↩Not mentioned by Khondemir, nor even to be found in D’Herbelôt. He belongs then to the obscure period, one of the early Arab prophets, (of whom Sale says they number thousands,) previous to the Mosaic dispensation. Another anecdote of him is given in Saädy’s Bostān. Having brought a bundle of corn from some distance to his own residence, he discovered among it a single ant that had been accidentally tied up with the grains. On this, tired as he was, he returned to the spot where it had been procured, and restored the ant to her home, before he allowed himself to rest in his own.
↩See Introduction at note 33. The meaning of the passage is clear. The only question is, how they distinguished, as they did, so widely between the human and animal nature, admitting at the same time so near an affinity between them.
↩These opinions belong to the Súfy or Pantheistic school. They were the Eleusinian mysteries of the Muslim sages. Being carried a great deal further than the tenets of the church, it was not safe to avow them. (See Introduction, note 51.) Haneefa, their most orthodox Doctor, died in prison.
↩This preference is pushed further in Sect. 2 of Book iii. q. v.
↩Kurán, chap. iv. vs. 57. 61. Said previous to the establishment of his religion, in order to prevent his followers from resorting to the tribunals of his enemies. The regulation is one of self-defence in a party so situated. Similarly St. Paul, 1 Corinth. vi. 1. “Dare any of you go to law before the unjust?” &c.
↩Alluding to Kurán vi. vs. 58. 61. “With him are the keys of hidden things: none knoweth them besides himself: he knoweth that which is on the dry land and in the sea: there falleth no leaf but he knoweth it; neither is there a single grain in the dark parts of the earth, neither a green thing, nor a dry thing, but it is written in the perspicuous book.” (Sale.) This use of the word treasure is as old as Job: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” &c. &c. c. xxxviii. 22.
↩See however in Sect. 2. Book iii. an attempt to explain some of them.
↩Cicero, Off. i. c. 30. “We are endued, it may be said, by nature with two characters; one common to all, the other peculiarly assigned to each. Great as are the diversities of person, those of mind are greater. * * * Innumerable are the diversities of nature and disposition, all equally exempt from blame.” The question was discussed in the Introduction.
↩Cic. Tusc. iii. 15. Off. i. 29. “Licet ora ipsa cernere,” &c. “Look at the faces of those who are angry or perturbed by appetite or fear, or exulting in inordinate delight: countenance, voice, gesture, posture, all are altered.”
↩Tusc. Disp. i. 33. “Jam similitudo magis apparet in bestiis,” &c. “In beasts, which are void of reason, resemblance is more perceptible.” This is no doubt a genuine reference to Aristotle; as in every one of these passages Cicero extends the consideration to the case of other animals, and in the last passes directly to Aristotle’s authority on another point.
↩See Exordium, note 9.
↩Introduction, p. 21. Sect. 1. note 16.
↩End of Sect. 1.
↩Aristotle, Eth. ii. 8. “One of the extremes often bears a false resemblance to the middle, and is frequently mistaken for it. Thus rashness often passes for bravery, and profusion for liberality. ” (Gillie.)
↩Henceforward this section is one entire extract from Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry, ii. 6.
↩Still more roughly handled in a passage towards the end of Sect. 1. Book iii.
↩
A different reading or imperfect recollection it seems of Prov. x. 5. “He that gathereth in summer is a wise son; but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame.” See too Ecclesiastes, vii. 11, 12.
↩The indulgence of divine bounty being the first object of creation, (I was as a treasure concealed; then I loved that I might be known. Sect. 8. on Love;) and all other objects (as the employment of divine or improvement of human intellect) being contingent. The first part of the sentence may be paralleled in Cic. Off. i. c. 14. ii. 16.
↩Arist. Eth. iii. 8. “Anger in man ought to originate in a sense of honor, whereas in beasts it springs only from a sense of pain.” (Gillie.) Cicero, Off. i. 23. “Temere in acie versari et manu cum hoste confligere, immane quiddam et belluarum simile est.”
↩
Compare in the Iliad the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus.
↩“Mors et fugacem prosequitur virum,” &c.
↩Muhammād’s cousin, son-in-law, and friend, Aly. He could think of no one dearer. So Ulysses, Odyssey ii. 260. swears by the head of Telemachus; as does Æneas by Iulus.
↩After Aristotle, Eth. iii. 7. “To die rather than endure manfully the pressure of poverty, or the stings of love, or any other suffering, is the part of a coward.” (Gillie.) Suicide is not to be so often noticed in Eastern as in Western history; though in the Akhwān-us-safā (chapter on the viper) it is said to have been usual for princes to carry poison in their rings, in case of requiring its assistance; as was done by Demosthenes, Hannibal, and Mithridates. Perhaps the interdiction of the Muhammedan institutes may have tended to repress the practice.
↩Said in order to enable us to form complete ideas of the virtues in their perfect state. For mere purposes of practical acquisition, Aristotle advises us to begin by aiming at that extreme to which we are least prone. (Eth. ii. 9.) In the next section our author fully admits the general impracticability of the high standard which he here lays down.
↩In terms more familiar to our ears, we are to love virtue for its own sake: the individual form of virtue, as in Sect. 2. (note 3), he has already insisted on the social.
↩Wisdom of Solomon ii. 16. “We (the wicked) are esteemed of him (the righteous) as false coin.”
↩See the discussion in Sect. 1.
↩Followed upon Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry, i. s. 4, except the passage from note 4 to note 9.
↩A theory with which we are all familiar —
Aristotle was the first to assert it fundamentally, Eth. ii. 2. “Propriety of conduct always consists in a mean or middle between two vicious extremes:” and again, v. 6. and vi. 1. (Gillie.) It is an analytic and therefore a partial view of virtue. Equipoise, implying antagonist as well as equal principles (see Introduction, note 78), cannot be maintained in the last resort, because the contrariety of motive upon which it depends is always superseded in the end by preponderating advantage. This is in fact admitted by these writers when they say there is a higher standard of virtue than that which rests on proportion. (See on Love, Sect. 5 and 8. Book i., Sect. 2. Book iii.) Those who look into this principle for a formula of universal virtue (Cicero among the rest, Tusc. Disp. iv. 26), will be disappointed; for such virtue results from its operation: but for a clear standard of that virtue which men are earliest and oftenest called on to practise it has great value. As regards moral obligation they do not seem (any more than the Greeks) to consider it as open to debate. Aristotle rests the theory only on a loose appeal to experience; that is, in fact, to social order and the moral sense. This, it is now generally agreed, is entirely the creature of religious persuasion, though a creature man is obliged to entertain by his conformation as well as for his good.
↩The question being one of action, (that is, of motion,) equipoise is to be predicated positively, and equidistance only as a type. Equipoise, however, applying to every single act, a course of action will present points of equipoise in continuation; that is, a line of equipoise (or its contraries). Different lines having a bearing on each other, deviation will occur not only in the direction of given extremes, but in that of different means: that is, the line of action may approximate to the circular form.
↩See some instances in note 8.
↩Kurān i. vs. 2, 3. “Thee do we serve, and thee do we entreat. Guide us in the right way: ———— the way of those thou hast been gracious to — not of those thou art incensed against, nor of those who go astray.”
↩These reasonable opinions were first advanced by the Mutazelites, in opposition to whom the Mujassemites and other fanatic sects insisted on a literal acceptation of all such figurative expressions, till they made the next life as material a one as this is. The Bible itself was similarly misinterpreted by the Jewish Rabbi. In the same way Grecian and Hindu mythology was no doubt an extended perversion of the sublimest truths; for it is only when meaning outstrips the resources of ordinary language, that men have recourse to figures. Metaphor, which, in the rise of national intelligence, is the best auxiliary of truth, proves in its decline her worst enemy. The profoundest discoveries circulate undetected, till in some happier generation the lost clue is regained, and the treasures of knowledge re-opened. See a passage in Sect. 3. Book iii., where the necessity of expressing religious truth in figurative language is ingeniously demonstrated.
↩From Saädy’s Bostān. Cf. Xenophon. Cyrop. I. c. 6.
↩The bridge of good works is not mentioned in the Kurān, nor does the idea belong exclusively to the Muhammedans, having been current in the East from time immemorial: not only the Magians in their Pul Chināwal (Sale), but the Jews and Christians had led the way. It is in fact one of those literal perversions of figurative truth which we have just been considering, “Strait is the way, and narrow is the gate, that leadeth to life, and few there be that find it:” Matthew vii. 14. But the Muslims were more influenced by Esdras ii. c. 7. “The entrance thereof is narrow, and is set in a dangerous place to fall, like as if there were a fire on the right hand, and on the left a deep water; and one only path between them both, even between the fire and water, so small that there could but one man go there at once:” and perhaps at Job c. xxviii., “There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen,” &c., the path of absolute perfection, or what the writer would call the true equipoise, is intended. Pythagoras illustrated the same idea by the form of the letter Y (Persius 5. Sat.) The figure is indeed one that occurs unbidden. Butler’s Analogy i. 5: “The case would be as if we were to suppose a strait path marked out for a person, in which such a degree of attention would keep him steady: but if he would not attend in this degree, any one of a thousand objects catching his eye might lead him out of it.”
↩No less a question is here timidly entertained by the writer, than whether man’s destination in the next world be not a physical consequence of the moral fitness he has acquired in this; instead of being, as the fanatics in all religions have always held, simply retributive without reference to his actual capacity for good or evil. The affirmative of this question is used by Bishop Butler, throughout his treatise, as the last and best means whereby to justify the ways of God to man. “We experience that what we were to be was to be the effect of what we would do; and that the general conduct of nature is not to save us trouble or danger, but to make us capable of going through them, and to put it upon us so to do,” &c. Anal. i. 5. This passage is the product of the author and the age (and much it was for them to arrive at), not of the preceding moralists, as no vestige of it is to be found in the corresponding section of the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry.
↩This fine allegory is well known to European moralists.
↩For equilibria we should here say, agreement with the distinctive standard or specific essence.
↩“Propriety therefore is intermediacy: but this intermediacy, in practical matters, does not consist in an invisible point, but admits of considerable latitude, and is to be modified in different cases by different circumstances.” — Arist. Pol. v. 7. See too, ib. i. 8.
↩For latitude of temperament, see Introduction, p. 36.
↩See Introduction, note 40. The perfection so much insisted on throughout is therefore not absolute perfection, but only that degree in it of which nature may have made a given object capable, and to which she has therefore intended it to attain — which may pass for the words of Cicero, (after Plato,) Tusc. Disp. v. 13. “Unde igitur ordiri rectius possumus quam a communi parente Naturâ? Quæ quidquid genuit, non modo animal sed etiam quod ita ortum esset e terra ut stirpibus suis niteretur, in suo quidque genere perfectum esse voluit.” He then traces this perfection (much in the manner of Akh.-nās. i. 4.) step by step through vegetable, animal, and human, up to its divine manifestation.
↩Not meaning to supersede what he has just asserted of the vices, (and virtues no less,) that they are infinite in particulars, but giving those generic standards of them to which in a summary sense they are all to be referred. A very important practical consideration he here omits, that of the physical capacities of the powers, as distinguished from their moral management. We cannot determine (in application) what the mental mean ought to be till the physical mean has been ascertained. When he comes to apply his theories in Sect. 8, he puts this consideration in another form. There would be no objection to its omission here (the fact being easily discerned) were it not that he is led in some instances to confound the two classes of qualities, and join physical extremes with mental means. Flightiness and stupidity, for instance, as regards wisdom, lasciviousness and indifference as regards temperance, relate to the physical rank and order of the faculties, more than to their moral government as bestowed. In fact, the theory does not hold so readily or so far with these (which are individual) as with the other (which are social) virtues.
↩Acknowledged at least for a vice by the men who are so prone to it. See however the tale in the next section.
↩“A just action is intermediate between doing and suffering an injury.” Arist. Eth. v. 6.
↩An anticipation (in converse) of Rousseau’s celebrated maxim: “There is no virtue without self-denial.” Ansāry was a Súfy Shaikh, author of Kanz-us-Sālikìn and Nishāät-ul-Ishk (Stew. Cat. pp. 41 and 43); the first on morality, the second on Súfyism.
↩Among the rest, St. Augustine, in his City of God, says finely, “Certain persons there are, not altogether asleep in ignorance, nor yet fully awake in the light of reason, who hold that right is nothing but that which is commonly received; and since law and custom is no where the same, that therefore there is nothing binding in its own nature; but, look, whatsoever a man in his own mind is persuaded of, the same is right and good. These good folks have not yet looked far enough into the world to discover, that ‘do as you would that others do unto you,’ is a maxim upon which all nations under heaven are agreed.” See too Arist. in Eth. v. 7.
↩Túsy gives extremes to the seven species of wisdom (Akh.-nās. i. 4. ad finem), more, however, by description than by name; many of the means being hardly distinguishable from others, both in the same and in different powers. Men’s nomenclatures are framed upon results: we cannot expect to find common terms for uncommon distinctions.
↩Re-written and abridged from Akh.-nās. ii. 7, much new matter being introduced — as the exordium, the theory of harmony, and the story of Malik Shāh, for the reason of their exalting equity above other virtue. See note 51.
↩For the purpose of application throughout the chapter. See below — “Hence it is” (note 11.)
↩The moth and taper is a standard illustration, with the Persian poets, of the soul’s eagerness to go beyond itself: they are not without authority. “And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish.” Exod. xix. The Greeks embodied this persuasion in the legend of Semele.
↩ Note, p. 18. Plato’s illustrations of an almost identical
subject may here be useful.
“God spake once, and twice I have also heard the same, that power belongeth unto God.” Psalm lxii. 11. “God is king of all the earth.” Psalm xlvii. 7. See too Wisd. Sol. vi. 1—6.
The last line might be rendered, there is no polity but his,
Other applications of the metaphor noticed in Introduction, note 54.
↩More probably because all existence being maintained by the Deity, those who deny his unity contravert a principle of their own nature, and those from whom his support is withdrawn have none other to depend upon.
↩“Amongst all the ideas we have, as there is none suggested to the mind by more ways, so there is none more simple, than that of unity or one. It has no shadow of variety or composition in it. Every object our senses are employed about, every idea in our understandings, every thought of our minds, brings this idea along with it; and therefore it is the most intimate to our thoughts, as well as it is, in its agreement to all other things, the most universal idea we have.” Locke, Essay, II. c. xvi. s. 1. Imām Rāghib is named at length, Husain Bin Muhammad Ur-Rāghiby-l-Isfahāny; lived in the early part of eleventh century. Quotation from his work Ihtijāj-ul-Kurān. “Scripture Requisites.” (D’Herbelôt.)
↩In different parts of Plato’s Parmenides it is proved, that the one is a whole, and has parts; and again, that it is not a whole, and has no parts; that it has figure, limit, and place; and again, that it has neither of the three; that it touches both itself and other, and touches neither; that it both stands still and moves, and does neither; that it is both same and different, similar and dissimilar, equal and unequal, both with other and itself; and again, that it is neither with either, &c. The key to all which we have in a Synthetic passage, where it is admitted to change from each state to the opposite, and be for an intermediate period in neither. Appalled by these mysteries, some Muslim sects went so far as to personify the divine attributes (by implication): these were called Sifātites, and were opposed by the Mutazelites, the juste milieu of Islām.
↩Identity in difference having been shown to be the characteristic of divinity, other natures will be perfect, he argues, in the measure of their realizing the same principle. After pointing this out in the nature of beings, and the laws of inanimate objects, he goes on to apply it to the feelings of men and the members of society; resolving the proper conduct of both into a state of proportion, which is such a distribution and arrangement of parts as at once indicates the whole to which they belong. All this is entirely agreeable to the old philosophy quoad operation. Plato (Timæus) describes the world’s soul as blended of two principles: one the principle of same; the other the principle of different. But quoad nature, it must again be remarked, the Muslims are not sufficiently clear in propounding the higher principle, into which no division can enter. Thus the compounded soul of Plato’s Timæus is essentially a product; whose divided nature the producer shares only externally in producing — not internally in devising. For the reason of this omission, we must go back, I suppose, to Sect. i. notes 7 and 19.
↩See a species of magical proportion at the end of Sect. 8: magic is much counted on in the East at the present day (see Lane’s Egypt), especially by princes. It is but forty years since Tippoo relied on his talismans, after he had lost almost every thing but them.
↩In material dynamics equipoise may be allowed to the full length in which they use it; there can be no rest, no stability, no power, and no being, without it. For any tendency that is not countervailed must hurry the object it possesses out of being: this again is true of the matter in which that tendency subsists, and so on ad infinitum. Equipoise and proportion are different statements of the same fact; equipoise being the result, and proportion the efficient arrangement. Cicero, in a remarkably apposite passage (Tusc. Disp. v. 13), takes up the subject at the next step — that of virtual perfection, the result of equipoise. Proportion (on which both bottom) is itself the result of unity.
↩Túsy (Akh.-nās. i. 4.) gives the connecting links of the several orders, as coral, &c. between mineral and vegetable — ficus Indicus (the social tree), spunge, polypus, &c. between vegetable and animal — ichthyophagi between animal and human.
↩ A very long passage on the theory of harmony has been
omitted here, and inserted in the Appendix at the end of the
work, where it may be consulted (as it deserves to be) without
interruption to the immediate subject. That they should have
paid such attention to a profane subject (for so they held it, see
Sect. 7.), shows that even their fanaticism had yielded to the
veneration they felt for their Grecian masters.
An anticipation of Pythagoras’ idea (if indeed it be not the source of it) we have in the opening of the 19th Psalm, so beautifully paraphrased by Addison:
Here, too, we may refer to that fine peroration in Hooker’s Eccles. Pol., where by law is meant, what these writers would term the line of equipoise. “Of law no less can be acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the spheres; all things in heaven and earth do her homage; the very greatest, as submitting to her power, and the very least, as not exempted from her care,” &c. And Shakspeare, M. of V. v. 1.
Hence the Platonists inferred that soul must at least be co-original
with body, and therefore (as being the most important)
most probably præoriginal.
Plato’s Timæus is devoted to the enunciation of this doctrine in detail; but in all the ancients we shall look in vain for any passage in which it is so comprehensively and movingly put: as regards its application to the subject before us, many will think more is done to assemble other difficulties than to explain this one.
↩Here we have the secret of the divine love so much dwelt on in all the Eastern schools. Delight being only the apprehension of proportion, and proportion being a partial form of unity, the highest of all delights must centre in the purest of all unity — that of God; every present blessing being at once a partial manifestation of the Divine nature, and an argument that higher manifestations may perhaps be found, and should at least be sought for, around us. Cicero comes very near their notion when he says: “Cui, qui non parebit, ipse se fugiet ac naturam hominis aspernabitur.” (Rep. iii.) “He that would disobey God must fly from and renounce his nature and himself.” The Eastern Erotics go a step farther and say, that to satisfy the dictates of nature, we must not only obey God, but endeavour by contemplation to approach to him.
↩This part of the section is an abstract of Aristotle, Eth. v. cs. 4. and 5., where justice is divided into distributive, commutative, and corrective. The ratios which have such a strange appearance in our eyes are there given still more at large. In Plato’s Timæus the coherence of matter is explained by similar ratios, supposed to prevail between earth, fire, air, and water.
↩We must here take in a few words from Túsy. “It will often happen that a little labour is commensurate with a good deal. The investigations of the mathematician are equivalent to the labour and fatigue of many mechanics, and the skill of the general equivalent to the fighting of soldiers without number.” Ak.-nās. ii. 7. The right of property is rested in the text on prescription; which itself rests on that law of our being, whereby gratifications that are long enjoyed become indispensable to our general comfort, that is, to the enjoyment of other, and of all gratifications: so that the loss of a given use occasions more pain than its acquisition brings pleasure. Hence two important corollaries: 1. The fact of having given confers no right to take away — so property is good against the public. 2. Property is of more value to the previous possessor than to any new one — so it is good against the individual.
↩Ubi supra.
↩Taliation must be at the bottom of all corrective justice, because it is the expression of revenge, which is the only species of penalty which uncivilized man will combine to support or execute. As society advances, its application becomes obscured by the creation of a secondary species of injury redounding from the first; that namely, of moral outrage and alarm. When a soldier strikes a general he has to be punished, not only for assaulting one person, but for outraging and alarming all. So that the mere return of the blow does not liquidate a millionth part of the offence: taliation may be claimed not only by the general, but in some sort by every member of the community. For this reason legislative politicians (as Aristot. Eth. v. 5. Blacks. Com. iv. 7.) consider the principle as superseded, when in reality it has only taken a wider range.
↩See Sect. 4. page 101.
↩ After Aristot. ubi sup. Why the precious metals should
be so invariably used for this purpose, our author tells us in
Book ii. Sect. 2. Aristotle says that money (
In the original, námoos — two other words constantly used
with similar import are kānoon and kistās; the Greek
If Herodotus is to be believed, the early Arabs seem to have
worshipped a personification or symbol of equity in the shape of a
weight. Their Gods, he says, were
“He beareth not the sword in vain.” Rom. xiii. 4.
↩After Romans xiii. 1—6. 1 Peter ii. 13. “The powers that be are ordained of God.”
↩Third and greatest of the Seljuks — familiar to western scholars from Gibbon’s 57th chapter: contemporary with William the Conqueror. Reigned 1072-1092.
↩The Muhammedan Lent, but much more strictly kept; being voided by any thing passing the lips or being even inhaled with the breath. — The ninth month of the Arab year, and that in which later Muslims hold that the revelation of the Kurān commenced. — Enjoined in Kurān ii. vs. 183—9, &c. — After sunset, and before sun-rise, they might eat.
↩Arab years and months being lunar, the fast could only terminate when the new moon appeared.
↩Literally of the well into which his brothers threw him. Kurān c. xii., after Gen. xxxvii. 2—29.
↩With which the fast terminated.
↩Not in the Muhammedan only, but in all the Asiatic systems, law has always been held a part of religion, and the ecclesiastical and judicial functions been more or less combined — partly a cause and partly an effect of social immaturity.
↩Mecca and Medina.
↩Founder of a sect, the third in order of origin, and foremost in prevalence, out of the four fundamental sects, into which, not Sunnites alone (as Sale says) but all Muhammedans were at first distributed. Both name and lineage he derived from an uncle of Muhammad. Lived A.D. 767-819.
↩Note, p. 31. The connexion of Ghazāly and Jobìny noticed by Dowlat Shāh (at Hakim Sanāi).
↩It was not only on points of faith, but sometimes on points of deference and etiquette, that the Eastern despots found the limits of their power in dealing with the “genus irritabile vatum.” There are continual instances of their urging and entreating, even kidnapping and confining eminent men, in order to attach them to their courts and persons, and all to no effect. The celebrated Mir Kāsim, when ordered by Shāh Rukh to quit his capital, questioned his right to expel an unoffending person from a Muhammedan community: and it was only when the heir apparent condescended to visit and coax him into compliance, that he would discontinue this negative hostility. (Dow. Shāh in loco.)
↩ The indoor dress of the Eastern nations is a very light
one. Their shoes are only worn abroad, being put off and
on as often as they leave and enter an apartment. So
with the Greeks;
A long panegyric on Hasán Bēg has here been omitted. In the outset of Muhammedanism all power was lodged in the same hands, those of the Prophet and his successors. By the gradual decline of the Caliphat in political power, while it retained (at first) its ecclesiastical privileges, the two functions were effectually severed; and there are obvious reasons why, when once severed, there could be no approach to their reunion. When therefore the Caliphat was entirely subverted, law and religion devolved absolutely on the priesthood, on which (after the first flow of conquest had subsided) the successive dynasties chiefly depended for public countenance and support. The Eastern princes were only despots as long as they kept within the channels of public feeling. There wanted only energy in the citizens, and Asia might have constituted a parcel of religious aristocracies, each with a military and executive Doge. The absence of this social energy in individuals is the great problem of Eastern politics. Climate and unbroken extent of territory go far to explain it in the hands of Montesquieu. The truth is, that social energy is a highly artificial and elaborate production, and the question is rather how it has arisen than how it fails to arise.
↩Aristot. Eth. ubi sup.
↩The meaning of this obscure passage seems to be, that their own and children’s interests, will, in the end, be best consulted by respecting those of others.
↩What is this but to admit that the individual is the paramount form of virtue?
↩Another panegyric is here omitted.
↩The twelfth century seems to have been the æra of this re-action. Ghazāly, we know, after the sciences had been perfected by the aid of Greek translations, reflected on his predecessors for adopting them.
↩He means to insinuate that the Greeks were indebted to the Jewish scriptures for the rudiments of truth. Take the views of a lively and ingenious writer: “‘Whence have you these arts and sciences of which you boast, but by deriving them, some from the Israelites in the days of Ptolemy, and some from the Egyptians in the days of Psāmstiyas (Psammitichus)?’ The Greek said, ‘True, we have taken most of our science from other people, just as they have taken theirs from us. How have the Persians their knowledge of astronomy, but by deriving it from the Hindus; and how the Israelites their knowledge of magic, but by Solomon’s transferring it from the libraries of the various people he conquered?’ ‘True,’ said the philosopher of the Genii, ‘science perpetuates itself by passing to different people at different epochs. But power and religion pass with it; and then its possessors subjugate the rest of the world, master the virtues, the sciences, and the books of other people, transfer them to their own territories, and infix them in their own minds.’” — Akhwān-us-Safā. Chapter of the seven representatives.
↩An idea constantly recurring in St. Paul’s Epistles; as in Romans, c. vi. and xii. “Your members as instruments of rightcousness unto God,” &c. Vāiz Kāshify, a contemporary of our author, has dwelt on it at much length in his Akhlāk-i-Muhsiny.
↩Here then is the key to the preference accorded by the Muslims (not consistently, see pages 22, 61, 63,) to justice over wisdom. In their case, as well as in that of the Greeks whom they follow, it is a consequence and a symptom of social insecurity. The social being intended for the perfection of the individual state, it is the last whose interests are really paramount. It happens however that till the social state is adjusted, no progress can be made in the regeneration of individuals: the social virtues are therefore for a time unduly exalted over the personal. Aristotle says, “It must be remembered that we have chiefly in view that kind of justice which may be called political.” — Eth. v. 7. (Gillie.)
↩One of the early Shaikhs, to whose cemetery at Hít of Mesopotamia, frequent pilgrimages were undertaken. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩See in last Section, p. 105.
↩Stated without reserve in Book iii. Sect. 2. So Aristotle: “When concord ripens into friendship, the rules of justice are superfluous.” Eth. viii. 7. (Gillie.) Aristotle however was more careful than these writers in keeping open the reference to private virtue, although, like them, most engaged in considering its public form.
↩ The Greek cosmogonists made
See Introduction, note 97. It comes really in the political part of the treatise. See Sect. 2. Book iii.
↩Little more or less than Akh-nās. ii. 8.
↩ The Muslims drained Aristotle to the dregs: this use of
motion (
There are many more limited assertions of this, with which we are all familiar; as, “Summa ars celare artem;” a maxim propounded at greater length by Longinus. “Nunquam naturam mos vinceret, est enim ea semper invicta:” Cic. Tusc. Disp. v. 27; and last, not least, our own Bacon’s “Homo minister et interpres naturæ.” They all proceed on a fine passage of Aristotle, (Natur. Auscult. 1. II. c. viii. p. 336, apud Gillie,) where he proves the works of man and of nature to be like in kind and manner, with this difference, that among the works of the latter man is one.
↩Take the passage on which the chapter is founded. “Those parts of our complex frame which are first in origin are last in dignity. The body is made before the soul; and the desire and anger of the soul, constituting its irrational part, appear in young children and infants long before the age of reason. Yet the rational part is that which properly constitutes man; being the end and perfection of his nature. With reference to this end, therefore, culture should early begin to operate, by means of custom and habit, on the appetites and passions; so that when reason first dawns, these may already be disposed to acknowledge her authority. The body is first to be formed, and that for the sake of the soul; and then the irrational part of the soul is to be disciplined, and that for the sake of the rational.” Arist. Polit. iv. 15. (Gillie.)
↩This fact by some is insisted on to the present day, as proving, in opposition to Hume and Locke, that man is born, if not with ideas, at least with instinctive tendencies.
↩Crying is also intended by nature (according to Arist. Pol. iv. 17.) for an exercise to the lungs and spirits of children, being the only one of which they are then capable. Cf. Locke’s similar account of the progress of the mind, Ess. B. II. c. i. ss. 6—8.
↩A virtue only in the young. Arist. Eth. iv. 9.
Modern Muhammedans are very conversant with this Aristotelian distinction of things according to their partial or universal aspect, constantly appealing to it when speculative topics are discussed.
↩An exemplification of Aristotle’s expression, Pol. i. 8. “Children are unripe and defective.” In the original they have different words for the ripe and unripe fruits, which therefore seem as distinct as bud and blossom would to us.
↩According to the second exposition, p. 57; justice being superinduced.
↩From the 93rd chapter of the Kurān, a text much agitated in a discussion of great interest to Muslims; viz., whether their Prophet had ever been himself an unbeliever, as seems to be here admitted. On the other side it is argued, that he was only in danger of becoming so.
↩See this more forcibly stated in the following Section.
↩This notion, at which all the ancients commence, of virtue being an art consisting, like all other arts, of a scientific and a practical part, is one which would naturally prevail in communities like theirs, where both the proper end of life and the proper means of pursuing such end were held open to discussion. Among ourselves these questions are happily determined for us. Acquainted with no theory of conduct but that which is the best of all, we in a manner forget that there are any others to be argued on.
↩Introduction, p. 30.
↩By Eesa they designate our Saviour. The word is nearer to the original Hebrew and Syriac, than is Jesus, the name by which we know him, which comes to us through the Greek. As to Galen’s letter, they must mean it to have been written in anticipation of our Saviour’s second coming, to which they look forward as well as ourselves. Nothing can be more certain than that they know as well as we do, that Galen was not contemporary with Christ. Take Khondemir’s own words: “The birth of Galen took place in the city of Feragās (Pergamus) two hundred years after the legation of Eesa (blessed be he!”)
↩This then is the consideration which should have been adverted to in Section 4. See note 15, p. 108.
↩Re-written and abridged from Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry, ii. 10.
↩ Plato, Timæus:
Professed fabulists are still more hardly dealt with in iii. 1.
ad finem. This subject is treated at great length by Plato in
his 2nd and 3rd Rep., where he decides on excluding poets from
his city. He begins with saying that fabulists should be placed
under surveillance (
Wine is specially prohibited in the Kurān (c. ii. v. 219, and elsewhere), not music; which seems, however, in the East, to be an invariable concomitant of the other. We know from the Alf Leilat (Arabian Nights), that though all professions connected with either were infamous, both were indulged in by all classes, except the dignitaries of religion. In later times, Dowlat Shāh says of [email protected] Shāhy (an eminent poet of the 15th century), “he was an adept in the science of music, and played the guitar well.” Not, as he puts it, a very rare accomplishment, and certainly not a disreputable one.
↩Hesiod:
Virgil compares it to rowing up or down a stream —
Sic in or.
↩Quoted from some biographer.
↩Abú Bikre, Omar, and Othmān, having been successively elected to his prejudice. In his consciousness of deserving success, Aly constantly neglected the ordinary means of attaining it. In physical and moral character he was an anticipation of our Richard Cœur de Lion; but excelled him intellectually.
↩In the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry this relapse from the human to the bestial shape and nature is put, not metaphorically, but positively.
↩One of the current adages with which Eastern writings abound, and which, if collected, would form a very valuable work. “Plato died writing at the age of 81.” Cic. Sen. 5. This whole page agrees very well with Locke, Ess. B. II. c. x. ss. 3—5.
↩ Plato, Lāws, viii.
Horace passim, Od. II. 3. 17. and 14. 21. Sat. I. 1. 84. II. 3. 122, &c. Ecclesiastes vi. 2, &c.
Arist. Eth. x. 8. “The sage, indeed, requires bodily health and bodily accommodations; but the measure of his external advantages need not be large. * * * A mediocrity of circumstances is sufficient for the exhibition of moral excellences. * * * This mediocrity, as it contributes most to virtue, is most conducive to happiness.” And again, i. 5. “A life of money-making and commerce is plainly a state of toil and trouble; and riches cannot be the good inquired after, because they are desired not on their own account, but for the purposes they answer.” (Gillie.) His meaning is a little overstrained in the text, where health seems synonymous with happiness. He placed it in virtuous energies.
↩Ecclesiastes v. 10, 11. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance, with increase. This also is vanity. When goods increase, they are increased that cat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes?” And Hor. Sat. I. 1. 45.
Such was Dr. Johnson’s practice. See in Boswell’s Life. Most of these arguments and expedients may be found in Thomas à Kempis, Im. Christi., and Jer. Taylor, Holy Living and Dying.
↩This was a notion of the early Muslim kings. Bahrām the Ghaznavite pressed his own sister upon Hakim Sanāi, who persisted in refusing her. (Dow. Shāh.) The writer applies to other people what was true of his own. The mistakes of Eastern writers upon European history we ought not to censure till we excel them in knowledge of theirs.
↩This was supposed or suspected by later writers (Ælian. V. H. ap. Lempriere), but there is no good authority for it. Xenophon certainly seems proud of Xantippe’s ill-humour, but that is all.
↩Cic. Off. i. 41. “Si acres ac diligentes esse volumus animadversores vitiorum, magna sæpe intelligemus ex parvis.”
↩Some traces of the Stoic doctrine of parity in offences.
↩All this passage (it appears from Ak.-nās.) is an extract from Galen’s treatise on Faults.
↩Hence a subtle maxim in Book iii. Sect. 7, that we are not always to publish an enemy’s faults; for they are the causes of his weakness: and if made conscious of them, he may correct them, and so increase his power of injury.
↩Attributed by Saädy to Lucmān, the eastern Æsop. See Sect. 8, p. 180, note 18.
↩The rest of the chapter is taken from Yacob Kandy (see in Ak.-nās.), a Jewish physician and magician of great eminence at the court of the Caliph Māmoon (9th century). Among other of his maxims, is the Pythagorean one, of recalling before sleep the acts and events of the past day.
↩Thus Shakspeare says, to represent others is to “hold the mirror up to nature,” &c. Hor. Sat. I. 4. 128, &c.
“In which matter it is not amiss to estimate our behaviour from
others; that what is unbecoming in them, we may ourselves
avoid: for it somehow happens, that we are clearer to see what
is wrong in others, than in ourselves. It is also desirable,
for the determination of doubtful points, to consult the learned,
or even the practised, as to the opinions they entertain on any
department of duty.” — Cicero, Off. i. 41. As usual, Aristotle is
the source both of fact and illustration. “As when we wish to
see our own countenance, we must view it in a looking-glass; in
the same manner, when we wish to know our own characters and
virtues, we must contemplate those of our friend.” * * *
Re-written from Akh.-nās. ii. 10, where the reasoning on death and fear is not so close and convincing, and the treatise on Love is altogether wanting. In this Section we have, no doubt, the arguments of the old philosophers, whose works on this subject, though they have not come down to us, we know to have existed: —
Cf. Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iii. c. 1-4 and 34. iv. c. 5 and 19, where we learn that the Stoics treated more of the nature of mental malady, and the Peripatetics more of its cure. This important science is avowedly too much neglected in our own day. Hear Locke, Essay, B. II. c. xxxiii. s. 8. “Though impressions relating to health of body are minded and fenced against, yet I am apt to doubt that those which relate more peculiarly to the mind, and terminate in the understanding or passions, have been much less heeded than the thing deserves; nay, by most men have been wholly overlooked.”
↩Hence we are intended to imply, that the contrary to be resorted to in the cure of vice, is not so much the corresponding virtue, as the opposite extreme of it; in other words, the opposite vice. See at note 10.
↩Artlessness is the contrary of art. It is the producing of works awkwardly, “according to erroneous principles of reason.” Arist. Eth. vi. c. 4. ad fin.
↩“Alterum est vitium, quod quidam nimis magnum studium multamque operam in res obscuras atque difficiles conferunt, easdemque non necessarias.” Cic. Off. i. 6.
↩“The vice opposite to intemperance consists in rejecting, through insensibility, even necessary or commendable pleasures.” Arist. Eth. vii. 7. (Gillie.)
↩“Some persons, through disease or custom, delight in plucking out their hair, in biting off their nails, in eating coals or earth. In nearly the same class we may place pæderasty.” Arist. Eth. vii. 5. See in Sect. 4. Book iii. the anecdote of the Caliph Māmoon’s addiction to earth-eating. According to Herodotus, Clio, c.cxxxv., pæderasty was introduced into Persia by the Greeks.
↩Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. c. 33. “Ipsi animi, magni refert, quali in corpore locati sint,” &c. “Much depends on the sort of body in which minds are placed: many causes originate in the body both to sharpen and to blunt the faculties. Thus Aristotle says, that all men of genius are melancholy,” &c. This then is the important consideration omitted in Sect. 4: how important, we are told by Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iv. 14. “The disorders and diseases of the mind are less easily eradicated than those graver vices which are the opposites of virtue; for the vices may be removed while the diseases continue,” &c. This re-action of the body on the mind it was the fault of the old philosophy to overlook, and particularly of the Stoic sect. The Epicureans, on the contrary, allowed it too much weight.
↩ Proneness, literally revertence. The proclivitas of Cicero,
Tusc. Disp. iv. 12: the
That is, to treatment of such severity as would destroy life, were not the disease to diminish the susceptibility to that particular action. This is familiarly illustrated by the term counter-poison — that is, one deadly influence counteracting another of opposite nature. The poison to be counteracted in this case is that of the disease.
↩See at note 2. This is the advice of Aristotle, Eth. ii. 9. “In order to correct his character, he must bend it in the opposite direction, as we straighten a crooked stick,” &c. (Gillie.)
↩These analogies are pointed out in brief by Plato, (Timæus, ad finem;) more particularly by Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iv. 10—12, who says: “On this subject too much pains have been wasted by the Stoics, especially by Chrysippus, in tracing the resemblance of mental to bodily diseases.” Our authors follow the Peripatetics. See note 1.
↩Cicero takes the matter up sooner. “On this point two faults are to be avoided; first, that we do not take for ascertained things that are not so, and so give them a premature assent; which, whoso wishes to avoid, must employ both time and application in their scrutiny.” Off. i. 6. (Continued in note 4.)
↩Cf. note 63, p. 31. Logic being applied to expounding their Scripture, was the one great accomplishment outweighing all others. Cf. Hariri. Makām. iii. ad init. It is needless to refer to any more of the numberless passages which prove, that wherever there was society, there was also a debating society, in whose discussions any one was at liberty to join who could bring an accession of knowledge or refinement.
↩See in Sect. 6. p. 151. A similar analogy is insisted on by Bishop Butler, with a similar purpose. Anal. i. c. 5. ad fin.
↩Cf. Sect. 4. pages 101—5.
↩“For brutes, being incapable of deliberation and election, cannot be deformed by vice, strictly so called: their ferocity, how formidable soever it may be, is a less evil than human vice; since they are destitute of that best principle of man, which by corruption becomes the worst.” Arist. Eth. vii. 6. Again, Polit. i. 2. “Perfected by the offices and duties of social life, man is the best, but rude and undisciplined, he is the very worst, of animals,” &c. (Gillie.)
↩ An apt compression of Hesiod’s well-known lines —
From some of the uncanonical Gospels which the Muslims prefer to our canonical ones.
↩“Sapientia prima est stultitiâ caruisse.” (Hor.) By this quaint term of compound ignorance they intend the same as Horace and Locke by that unconscious insanity from which no one is free. Hor. Sat. II. 3. Locke, Essay, B. II. c. xxxiii.
↩
“Ira ulsciscendi libido.” Cic. Tusc. Disp. “Anger is uneasiness or discomposure of the mind on receipt of any injury, with a present purpose of revenge.” Locke, Essay, B. II. c. xx. s. 12. Cf. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living, c. II. s. viii. § 2 and 2.
↩As of fast, which would be broken by drinking; or of uncleanness in the vessel, &c.
↩Even offenders had their rights; much more the unoffending. Their reason for observing these rights is stated in the next sentence — the love of God.
↩The sentiment of Archytas and of Socrates himself — “That much commended expression of Archytas when provoked by his bailiff — How I should have used you, if I had not been in a passion.” Cic. Tusc. Disp. iv. 36. Hence that expression which Socrates used to his servant, “I should beat you if I were not angry.” Seneca de Irâ, i. 15. ap. Davis. The rule is not for application beyond the forum domesticum. Of course magistrates should not give way to passion; but, if they do, society is not to suffer for it by the release of an offender. By such striking exceptions to general rules, however, it is well for arbitrary power to impress a valuable moral upon those whose lessons are but few. Arab Shāh tells us that Bajazet executed a soldier for taking a peasant’s milk, and perhaps the state of his army and of the surrounding country might (as a military act) have excused him. Adde Cicero, Off. I. 25 ad fin.
↩Causes, that is, of excessive anger. According to their theory, anger neither can be nor ought to be entirely eradicated. “The Peripatetics are prolix in praising resentment, calling it the sharpener of fortitude.” Tusc. Disp. iv. c. 19. This however is the power, not the state. It is a pity no other name could be found for the disease than that which is all along employed to denote the faculty.
↩Paley, Mor. Phil. iii. 7. “Add to this the indecency of extravagant anger; how it renders us the scorn and sport of all about us; the irretrievable misconduct into which irascibility has sometimes betrayed us; the friendships it has lost us, the distresses in which we have been involved by it, and the sore repentance which it always costs us.”
↩Arist. Eth. vii. 3. “Anger and lust plainly alter the bodily frame, and sometimes produce madness.” (Gillie.) Cic. Tus. Disp. iv. 36. “Ira vero,” &c. “As long as anger disturbs the mind, there is no doubt that it is a species of madness. * * * Of angry persons we properly say, that they are out of their control; that is, out of their judgment — their reason — their mind.”
↩Cf. in Sallust the speech of Marius; and Ovid:
and Juv. viii. 40.
All half-civilized nations pride themselves on pure descent — one argument for showing the absurdity of the feeling among certain classes only of the civilized ones.
↩Diogenes perhaps might have done this. We know he wiped his shoes in Plato’s best carpet; of which he might have given the same defence.
↩ Eastern philosophers of all persuasions (these being invariably
religious ones) affect to carry meditation so far as to
disembody their spirits, or rather perhaps to sublimate their
bodily perceptions into perfect harmony with those of mind. —
The germ of this idea we have in the English word absent.
In southern Europe the notion approaches nearer to the above.
“Dum peregre est animus sine corpore velox.” — Hor. Ep. I. 12.
The ancient Greeks went nearly the whole length. Socrates
himself was noted for his fits of abstraction, during which his
scholars did not venture to disturb him. (See for instance in
Plato’s Symp.) The Pythagoreans professed an
Here is a very intelligible application of the rule of general consequences: many others have occurred, and will occur. Paley says, “The good of mankind is the subject, the will of God the rule, and everlasting happiness the motive,” of that which we call virtue. The early moralists, then, were not incorrect in slipping from one to other of these four points of view; for the object was every where the same. They allowed them all, but had not settled where and when to adhere to each.
↩Once in parturition and once in conception. They hold the old Greek notion (see in Æsch. Eum.) of the father being sole generator, the mother only a nidus. Jeremy Taylor uses the same arguments, Holy Living, c. II. s. iv.
↩Imitated from Romans xii. 19. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
↩Paley makes the same use of our moral imperfections — a consideration anticipated by these writers under the head of conceit. The same treatment will hold to a certain length in both. “Imagine us thus humbled and exposed, trembling under the hand of God, crying out for mercy; imagine such a creature to talk of satisfaction and revenge, refusing to be entreated, disdaining to forgive,” &c. &c.
↩“He that is despised, and hath a servant, is better than he that honoreth himself, and lacketh bread.” Prov. xii. 9.
↩See in Sect. 4. passage and notes upon the bridge of good works. This is another such allegory, signifying the causes and manner, as well as the nature, of the future destination.
↩ With this slight notice this vice is passed over as one too
heinous to require argument. This is all the support I have been
able to find in Persian authors to Xenophon’s assertion on the
subject of ingratitude, as regarded by the ancient Persians. He
says, “This they hold to be the great usher of all vice.”
Not the Turks of Asia Minor, who had lost, with the growth of settled habits, the feelings of their native state (and who after all were Turks more quoad rulers than quoad population), but the marauding tribes and soldiers of fortune with whom Asia was then infested. See them mentioned again at the end of Book ii. Sect. 5. as treacherous servants. Ibn Arab Shāh gives them the same character in his life of Timur.
↩The Roman and Byzantine territories.
↩Abyssinia (Habash), but meant to include all Africa beyond Egypt.
↩And the best way of preventing further injury, adds Machiavelli, is to ruin utterly: “gli nomini si debbono o vezzeggiare o spegnere,” &c. — “Men should either caress or extinguish: they may requite slight injuries, but the heavier ones they cannot; for it is a condition of such injury to be safe from requital.” Il. Prin. c. iii. The Italian policy may have fed upon the Asiatic. What follows as to the worldly expedience of forgiveness is not true. Men cannot forgive so thoroughly as to make a friend of an enemy, unless they are more or less than men; and to forgive an enemy who continues to be such, is to invite him and others to renew the attack. Heaven has so fenced this its highest virtue from contamination, that it cannot be simulated, and (in the general) had better not be. Bayle and others have asked why it should be a virtue, if it is not a rule of expedience. It is a rule of expedience, and the largest of any: — for though it invites the second or third attack, it tends to prevent the first, on which they depend. When passions are once irritated, it flies (like justice) to the heaven that sent it; but its efficacy lies in indefinitely postponing the cause and moment of irritation.
↩Observe the philosophic distinction between the causes of ruin: 1. The nature of the thing given; 2. The nature of other things affecting it. Cf. end of Sect. 2. Book iii.
↩Cf. Psalm cii. 26, 27. “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure. Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed. But thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.” The italics in the text are from the Kurān, as elsewhere.
↩ In one of Plato’s letters to Dionysius, he says,
To express the height of affliction, the Asiatics melt or pound jewels, and then drink them: whether there is a tonic in crystallized stone, or whether the tribute to the lost satisfies them, or the tax upon grief deters, or the rare indulgence consoles. As mere matter of luxury, the Roman emperors used to swallow jewels in the same state.
↩Thus is power avenged of its abusers: they who begin by neglecting great objects, end by being the sport of trifles. Who was this childish potentate? Or was it only a case supposed, in order to prevent the occurrence? These writers are not apt to give royal anecdotes without a name, unless relating to their own immediate sovereign: at any rate, the disgrace rolls back to the tenth century, and the dynasty of the Bowides and Dilemites. For the story is in the Akh.-nās.; and as Túsy wrote for a provincial governor, he would not have scrupled to give the real name, if he had known it. He took it then with the rest of his matter from Abú Aly Mashkovy.
↩A sad comment on the politics of Asia: so far was the hardihood of the people from supporting the enlarged views of their instructors. Not that such experience is confined to Asia; not all the memory of the past, and the worth of the present, could save the Roman empire from similar degradation, when it grew beyond the mechanism on which it rose.
↩Literally “I am the world’s soul, the world is not my soul.” Alluding to the metaphysical fact of all experience being contained in and governed by perception, an antitype of that famous line — “My mind to me a kingdom is.”
↩
That is, the passionate soul, anger and desire; anger dwelling as they supposed in the heart, desire in the liver, and reason in the brain. (Akh-nās. i. s. 3.) This too is Platonic doctrine: “Plato triplicem finxit animum; cujus principatum, id est rationem, in capite posuit: et duas partes ei parere voluit, quas locis suis, iram in pectore, cupiditatem subter præcordia, locavit.” Tusc. Disp. i. 10.
↩In the original, cat and pigeon: some fanciful conjunction of the two.
↩Another glimmer of Grecian history. Xerxes scourging the Hellespont, and Cyrus draining off the Gyndes, come familiarly to the mind. No traces of these circumstances are to be found in Persian written history; so that (if not re-circulated from the Greek accounts) they must have been preserved from tradition.
↩The last two lines contain the author’s rebuke to the satirist. So old is Pope’s idea:
Juvenal, of vindictive passion:
Rather an unfortunate example. Alexander was as little for controlling self, as he was much for controlling others; and the railers he had to deal with, such as Clitus, Calisthenes, and others, we know how he served. The story (or something like it) is really of Augustus Cæsar, (Suet. in Vit.) Thus it is that the popular hero comes in for other people’s merits, and the first great king in any history is a compound of half a dozen.
↩This was said not on the occasion of Porus’s capture, but in the debate on Darius’s proposals of peace before the battle of Arbela: “Et ego, inquit, pecuniam quam gloriam mallem, si Parmenio essem.” Quin. Curt. IV. c. xi.
↩Hor. Sat. II. 3. 14.
The schoolmen had the comparison before and after. Jer. Taylor, Holy Living, c. IV. s. viii.
↩Mansoor II., 9th of the Samanian dynasty; succeeded 996 A. D. and reigned not quite two years, when he was captured and put to death by Tozan Bēg, a Tartar chieftain: only one more of his line reigned after him. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩ Kulzum, supposed to be the Greek word
In the original, balgham for
“Timor metus mali appropinquantis.” Tusc. Disp. iv. 8. “Fear is an uneasiness of the mind upon the thought of future evil likely to befall us.” Locke, Ess. II. xx. The arguments following are those of Epicurus, preserved Tusc. Disp. iii. 15. “To dwell upon calamity not yet arrived, perhaps never to arrive, is folly: the evil is bad enough when it happens. To be always anticipating it, is to render it perpetual; but if it should not happen, we torment ourselves for nothing,” &c.
↩The same argument applied by Cicero to sorrow. “What could be more efficacious for its discontinuance than to be convinced that it answers no object — that it is born to no purpose.” Tusc. Disp. iii. 28; and again 32: “It is the height of folly to be overwhelmed with affliction to no purpose, seeing that there is no object to be obtained.”
↩“Atque etiam, ex omni deliberatione, celandi et occultandi spes opinioque removenda est.” — “All hope or expectation of concealment must be kept out of the question.” Cic. Off. iii. c. 8. Cf. Plato, Rep. ii. The other branch of the argument, viz., that even if concealment were certain, it would yet be our interest to avoid wrong, we have a little below. — (Causes of fear of death, 4th head.)
↩An approach to this argument we have in Paley’s Nat. Theol., where it is argued that members and organs are instruments, but sentient ones; a nearer still in Butler’s Anal. P. I. c. i. s. 2, where it is argued that the sentient principle is above and behind these instruments. Even the expressions: “We see by experience that men may lose their limbs, their organs of sense, and even the greatest part of their bodies, and yet remain the same living agents.” The argument in the text is a deeper and stronger one; inasmuch as it applies to being rather than to life, which in compound creatures is a very ambiguous term.
↩Many of these scholastic arguments may be traced in Shakspeare. The vagueness and uncertainty that lends death its terrors, in Meas. for Meas. III. 1. “Aye, but to die — to go we know not where,” &c. The worthlessness of life, ibid. “If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep,” &c. The evil, whatever it may be, only aggravated by fear. Jul. Cæs. II. 2. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” &c.
↩ A limitation of Plato’s argument (Axiochus);
Plato’s other argument,
Aristot. Eth. x. cs. 7, 8. “The intellectual life, therefore, must be the best and happiest for man, since the intellect is that which is peculiarly himself,” &c. — (Gillie.)
↩After the Jews and Christians. Paul, 2 Cor. xii. 2. “Such an one caught up to the third heaven.”
↩Juvenal, 13th Sat. passim. Seneca, Ep. 97. “The first and greatest punishment of sinners is, that they have sinned; the second, that they are always in terror, doubt, and apprehension,” &c. Gifford supposes the Pagans of this age to have been unconsciously influenced by the spread of Christian morality. Certain it is, that though the office of conscience was implied by Socrates and mentioned by Cicero, it was never brought prominently and fundamentally forward with a force commensurate with its importance, till after the preaching of the Gospel. In this, as in other respects, the Muslims follow the old philosophy. It is easy to see that they admit self-punishment; but they do not dwell on it enough.
↩See instances given in Plato’s unfinished dialogue on the Communicability of Virtue. Thucydides, Aristides, Themistocles, Pericles, all had sons whom they endeavoured in vain to make distinguished. See at note 45. There is a secret connexion between the two subjects: we have nothing to fear from a monopoly of virtue.
↩See note 97, p. 51.
↩See above, at note 46:
Their influence before birth, see p. 15, note 31, and end of Sect. 2. Book iii. The repulsion is intended as prevailing between constituents of different elements, not between those of the same. — See Sect. 5. p. 122.
↩“Vitaï lampada tradunt.” See the well-known passage in Lucretius.
↩The argument is stretched too far: it is not that calamities are less calamities for being inevitable; but that, being of Nature’s appointment, we may be sure some greater good must follow from them. This is clearly put at the end of the passage.
↩See the metaphor pursued below, (Cure of sorrow, ad fin.)
↩See note 64, p. 32.
↩Doubling once in twenty years, a single person produces 1,048,576 at the end of 400 years: such then was Abú Aly’s basis of calculation. It is much to find that he used any, however erroneous. This rate of increase may be obtained by merely removing the checks of misery and vice, without superseding the law of mortality. On the supposition in the text, numbers would double in half the time.
↩See note 38, p. 18, and note 8, p. 158. They were persecuted not only by the Omian, but by the Abassidan Caliphs, who had succeeded by their countenance. The Bowide dynasty (to whom Abú Aly Mashkovy was minister) sympathized deeply with their calamities, and even contemplated restoring them to the Caliphat. (D’Herbelôt in Aly, ad fin.)
↩That is, genuine Alites in the line of Hasán and Husain, which the Edrissites and Fathimites (Alite dynasties reigning in Africa) were not; otherwise there would have been more than 200,000.
↩That is, proceeding by geometrical progression — a curious approach to the theory of Malthus — and convincing evidence of the progress which science was then making. Statistical speculations are the after-birth of knowledge.
↩Not the four quarters, as we understand them; but the four directions of inhabited land, east, west, north, and south. (Pomp. Mel. i. 1. De Mundo et Partibus ejus.) America was unknown.
↩There are four great æras in Muhammedan astronomy: 1. The reign of Māmoon, (coeval with the Saxon Heptarchy.) “In the plains of Sinaar, and a second time in those of Cufa, his mathematicians accurately measured a degree of the great circle of the earth, and determined at 24,000 miles the entire circumference of our globe.” Gibbon, c. lii. from Abulfeda. — 2. The reign of Malik Shāh, the Shaljuk, (coeval with the Norman Conquest,) “was illustrated by the Gelalæan æra; and all errors, either past or future, were corrected by a computation of time, which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.” Gibbon, c. lvii. — 3. The reign of Hulagu, (coeval with Leicester’s Civil War,) when the Zikh Alkhāny, or astronomical tables, were formed under the direction of Nāsirodin Túsy, (the author of Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry.) — 4. The reign of Ulug Bēg, (coeval with the Wars of the Roses,) when the Zikh Alkhācāny, or revision of the former tables, was completed, — the age in which the Akhlāk-i-Jalāly was produced. These last tables have been published by Dr. Hyde (Syntag. Diss. vol. i.). For the originals, see Stew. Catal. pages 101, et seq.
↩Increasing in the same ratio, the numbers at the end of another 400 years would be 1,099,511,627,776; which, though at least a thousand times the present population of the globe, is little more than a hundredth part of the number of square yards contained in Europe, Asia, and Africa: so that the state of things described would not follow till after 900 years. Abú Aly was thrown out probably by the state of African geography.
↩This argument we find first in Cicero: “Nihil in malis ducamus quod sit,” &c. — “Nor take any thing for a calamity which is appointed by the everlasting Deities, or by Nature, the parent of all” Tusc. Disp. i. c. 49. His treatise on Old Age is entirely built on it.
↩Up to a certain point, as Cicero argues (De Sen.), the very reverse of this is true: of a life properly conducted, the age would be the most delightful portion. The arguments in the text apply only to excessive age, where they are borne out by higher authority. “Though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow.” Ps. xc. (attributed to Moses.)
↩Cicero passim — “evolet tanquam e custodiâ vinculisque corporis, ” &c. Plato, Axiochus.
↩Aristot. Eth. x. 7. “We ought not, therefore, according to the vulgar exhortation, though mortal, to regard only mortal things, but as far as possible to put on immortality, exerting ourselves to taste the joys of the intellectual life.” (Gillie.)
↩Borrowed from the Christian doctrine — “Dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God.” Rom. vi. 11.
↩Cf. Cicero, De Sen. 23. “O præclarum diem, cum ad illud divinum animorum concilium cœtumque proficiscar,” &c.
↩ Plato’s words are,
“Næ ille, medius fidius, vir sapiens, lætus ex his tenebris in lucem illam excesserit.” — Tusc. Disp. i. 30.
↩The subject is treated at great length by Plato, Rep. iii. ad fin.; whence Horace, Sat. II. 2:
See in the Gulistān Muhammad’s answer to the Greek physician.
↩In sensu obscœno.
↩The same illustration is intended, Prov. vi. 30—32. “Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry,” &c. “Whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding,” &c. because (among other reasons) such hunger may be otherwise provided for. Ib. v. 15. “Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.”
↩It is not easy to say what passage in the Psalms (Zabúr) is here intended. In the Proverbs several occur of similar import, as vi. 26. “By means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread; and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life.”
↩The school of Epicurus only. Tusc. Disp. iv. 33. “Let us turn to the philosophers, the very masters of wisdom; even they deny the turpitude of love: being at issue on this point with Epicurus, who, in my opinion, is not much beside the truth.” In fact, he denied the existence of any but animal love, which all agree in condemning.
↩Cf. Ovid, Rem. Am., Cic. Tusc. Disp. iv. 35., who add (strangely the latter after his opinion avowed as above) second love as a cure for first.
↩The distinction between the higher and lower love was first strongly put (as is well known) by Plato (Symp. and Phædrus), who was here followed (see note 101) by almost all the Greek and Latin schools. His arguments in favour of the higher species (which, like most of his opinions, are more indicated than declared), are germane to those in the text. But neither he nor any of his followers, (as far as they have reached us,) who admit the higher love, are as explicit as these writers on the danger of confounding it with the lower. The corruptions from which it is inseparable, and the atrocities for which it has been made a pretext, would almost justify Cicero in denouncing it altogether. For the origin of the doctrine, see in Sect. 5. p. 123.
↩Hence Shakspeare —
and Milton, of a sweet singer —
Sic in or. Aāshikiat and maashúkiat, abstract nouns made for the occasion. We must be careful to recollect of what thing the deficiency or surplus necessarily belongs to the lover or the loved — only of the quality, whatever it is, concerned; by no means of other or all qualities, in which indeed the converse must generally hold. The more or less either may have in one respect, the less and more they will have in others; supposing parity to prevail (as is natural) in the aggregate: thus the sueing sex is still the superior one.
↩Because presuming its own unworthiness and inadequacy; the attention in such a state being engrossed with the particular quality concerned.
↩Divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, 110, the sum of which is 284:
The divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, 142, the sum of which is 220. For the developement of the relation between these two numbers, I am indebted to my friend Mr. Heaviside, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
↩ Amulets are still of universal use in the East, as they seem
to have been from the remotest times. See Exod. xxxix. 30.
Numb. xv. 37. 41. Deut. vi. 7. 9. xxii. 12. Prov. iii. 3. They are
used likewise as febrifuges. So too are incantations, as with the
Greeks. Plato, Rep. iv., enumerating all the possible species of
medical treatment, says, “Neither drugs [internal and external],
nor cautery, nor incisions, nor incantations, nor amulets, will
ever be of the slightest assistance:”
All virtue and all good consists in acting for others as well as for ourselves. But these two tendencies are to a certain length the contraries of each other; and hence the true foundation of mental equipoise (see Sect. 4. p. 99). Without this tendency to act for others, nothing but vice and misery could prevail. In this extended sense, love is here represented as the source of good: on the other hand, from love proceeds appetence, from appetence passion, from passion excess, from excess ruin and decay.
↩This is a specimen of the construction of Arabic prose, which rhymes without metre.
↩Not the practice of it (which the author is presently going to condemn), but the science: the study, that is, of its theory and principles; which, in the extended sense here given to them, need not apply at all to love (vulgarly so called), but to social feeling.
↩It is interesting to observe the confirmation given to the mysteries of Christianity by the speculations of the most enlightened heathen: though they cannot discover its facts, they often unconsciously advance sound reasons for our reception of them. Plato and Cicero passed with the early Christian fathers for half-inspired.
↩Cf. Psalm cxxxix. vs. 7—12. “If I ascend up to heaven, thou art there,” &c. &c. The expressions are in Cic. Am. xxiii.
↩Cf. Sect. 5. pages 118—122. Deity is the principle, love the quality, and equipoise the process.
Here, then, love is used in the still more extended sense of affinity
and cohesion, appetence and motion, (which they seem to
consider a consequence of the first.) The old theory noted by
Cicero, de Am. vii. “Throughout universal nature there is no
system, and no motion, but what is combined by friendship and
scattered by repugnance.” It is the
For Solomon’s power over the Genii and elements, see Kurān cs. xxi. 78. 82. xxvii. 16. 46. and xxxvii. The legend here particularly referred to, is that of his flying throne; which, we are told in the Shāhnāmah, Kai Kāus endeavoured to imitate by fastening a number of birds to a seat, for which attempt he was severely rebuked by his assembled nobles.
↩“Sorrow is uneasiness in the mind upon the thought of a good lost which might have been enjoyed longer, or the sense of a present evil.” — Locke, Essay, B. II. c. xx. s. 8. Cf. Jer. Taylor, II. vi. 4. on Contentedness. (Holy Living.)
↩Arist. Eth. x. 7. “Contemplative wisdom offers pleasures the most admirable in purity and stability. * * * Intellectual energies are complete and perfect in themselves, * * * all-sufficient, peaceful, and permanent,” &c. (Gillie.) And Cicero, de Sen. iii. “Nunquam deserunt, ne in extremo quidem tempore ætatis,” &c. Neither of them looks further than the present life, which makes their expressions tame, compared with the text.
↩An approach to idealism. See at note 51.
↩Cf. Juvenal:
For Jamshíd, see p. 37, note 73.
↩Horace (Sat. I.) advances the very contrary; and the reason is, that he speaks of men in the moments of saticty (“multo jam fractus membra labore,” &c.), whereas our author speaks of them in their moments of hope. As matter of habit, Horace afterwards remarks, that all practically prefer their own. (“Nolint; atqui licet esse beatis.”)
↩“Semper avarus eget: certam voto pete finem” — the most favourite adage of the Roman moralists; after whom Shakspeare, “Poor and content is rich enough,” &c.
↩Many of the early passages of the Kurān Muhammad taught his followers to consider as rescinded, or superseded by later ones.
↩For Yakub Kandy, see Sect. 7. p. 167. This is an able exposition of Cicero’s favourite argument against sorrow (Tusc. Disp. iv. passim); namely, that it results from arbitrary views, and those mostly false ones, of life and nature. If we compare as well the arguments of the two treatises, as the space devoted to their respective exposition, we shall find that we are paying too high a compliment to the Muhammedan school in supposing theirs to be original. To have improved upon such predecessors is sufficient praise. See again Jer. Taylor, II. vi. 4.
↩Horace, Sat. I. 1. 118.
Another of their favourite metaphors, expressed in the word sipange, and comparing the world to a caravanserai, we find in Cicero, Sen. 23. “Ex vitâ ita discedo, tanquam ex hospitio, non tanquam ex domo. Commorandi enim natura diversorium nobis, non habitandi dedit.”
↩“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job i. 21. For Shāfei, see note 37, p. 132.
↩Attributing to Socrates the nil admirari of the later schools.
↩Cic. Tusc. Disp. iv. 8. “Envy they term sorrow on account of another’s good fortune, which harms not the envier.” — A bad definition, as the text will presently show. “An uneasiness of mind caused by the consideration of a good we desire, obtained by one who we think should not have had it before us.” Locke, Ess. B. II. c. xx. — Bad too.
↩ The distinction between envy and emulation is as old as
Hesiod, (
As before remarked, p. 133, note 2, they do not consider the question of moral obligation open to debate, thinking the viciousness of any feeling to be a sufficient argument for its abandonment. Cicero complains that this was not universally acknowledged in his day: “Men who make it a question whether they shall follow what they see to be proper, or shall wittingly defile themselves with wrong.” Off. iii. c. 8. As to that want of self-command whereby men are sometimes impotent to follow out their convictions, it is itself a separate disease, which Aristotle, after some discussion, pronounces to be curable. Eth. vii. cs. 7 and 8. The cure of this (under the name of Levity) the writer meant to give us, but overlooked it. See in p. 224.
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