| TITLE PAGE | |
| DEDICATION | iii |
| PREFACE | v–x |
| PROLEGOMENA. | |
| I. Depreciation of Muhammedan systems — should now be at an end — II. Literary and political condition of Western Asia at the period when this work was produced — III. Derivation and growth of its materials — IV. Its bearings on the question of education in the East — V. Its general value as a piece of historical evidence — VI. Its power of illustrating Greek writers, and particularly those of the lower empire — VII. Its resemblance to the scholastic treatises of the middle ages — VIII. Importance of the moral canon it applies throughout — IX. Its subservience to religious objects — X. Its illustrations of Pantheism — sources of moral obligation — sketch of the Súfy metaphysics and their tendencies — indigenous to Asia — Muhammedan politics — their pressure upon the scientific classes | xv–lxiv |
| EXORDIUM. | |
| Praise of God, the Prophet, and the king — occasion, object, and material of the work — statement and division of the subject | 1–11 |
| INTRODUCTION. | |
| All things have their allotted end and province — that of man the vice-regence of God upon earth — his peculiar qualifications for the post — beyond those of other beings — even of the angels — to be realized by knowledge and practice — necessity of combining the two — the rule and method of pursuing them — it is the object of morals to set forth — consequent importance of the science — chief objection to it the immutability of character — discussed and overruled | 12–51 |
| BOOK I. THE INDIVIDUAL STATE. | |
| SECT. I. Sources of action — reason, desire, and resentment — proper adjustment of the three — virtues belonging to each — wisdom, equity, temperance, courage, — equity the paramount virtue — whether an element or a product? | 52–64 |
| SECT. II. Definitions of the generic virtues — must be realized in act — species of wisdom, of courage, of temperance, of equity | 65–87 |
| SECT. III. Counterfeit virtues under each of the four genera | 88–98 |
| SECT. IV. The vices — extremes of excess and deficiency — the mean of virtue, real and approximate — the generic vices — flightiness and stupidity, rashness and cowardice, lasciviousness and indifference, tyranny and servility | 99–111 |
| SECT. V. The divine nature a unity in distribution — proportion a recurrence of it — the rule of all excellence — proportions of equity — three preservatives of — three infractions of — anecdote of Malik Shāh — equity embodies all the virtues — its divisions — affection held to supersede equity | 112–145 |
| SECT. VI. Art an approach to nature — the order in which the powers are produced — should be that in which they are cultivated | 146–154 |
| SECT. VII. Natural proneness to evil — to be resisted — by avoiding temptation — practising blameless pursuits — and consulting others on the subject of our own defects | 155–168 |
| SECT. VIII. Genera of mental disease — excess, deficiency, and perversion of state in each of the three powers — influence of the body — methods of cure — application to instances — in the power of reason — perplexity — ignorance simple and compound — in the power of resentment — anger and its ten causes — faint-heartedness — fear, and especially fear of death — in the power of appetite — gluttony — lasciviousness — love — sorrow — envy | 169–244 |
| BOOK II. THE DOMESTIC STATE. | |
| SECT. I. Preparation and accumulation of food — requires the assistance of a partner — wife — children — servants — the five constituents of home — with home itself — how to be regulated | 245–250 |
| SECT. II. Variety of stores — money — income, its three sources — farming, trade, profession — compared — professions, how characterized — preservation of property — expenditure — its three divisions | 251–261 |
| SECT. III. Object of matrimony — rules for the choice of wives — for the management of them — plurality of wives indefensible — rules for the conduct of wives — divorce — Arab proverbs | 262–274 |
| SECT. IV. Suckling of children — naming them — training them — choice of an instructor — choice of a profession — cultivation of it — settlement of sons — education of daughters — manners — conversation — motion — meals | 275–298 |
| SECT. V. Rights of parents — how to be discharged — of parental friends | 299–303 |
| SECT. VI. Utility of menials — rules for selecting them — employing them — attaching them — dismissing them — slaves — national characteristics of | 304–311 |
| BOOK III. THE POLITICAL STATE. | |
| SECT. I. Perfection — instantaneous and progressive — means of effecting the latter — subserviency of other things to man — of men to each other — division of labour — diversity of qualification — inequality of property — generate dissension — Law and the Law-giver — the Executive — his functions — his art an aggregate of all arts | 312–328 |
| SECT. II. Affection perfects civilization — its analogy with attraction — natural or arbitrary — modes of the latter — between the young — between the virtuous — promoted by the Institute — between parties differently actuated — lover and loved — high and low — king and subject — father and son — orders of affection — between patron and patronized — Creator and created — the proper aim of intellect — creation an operation of intellect — predestination — Muhammedan Trinity — circuitous transition | 329–364 |
| SECT. III. Good and bad civilization — orders among the governed — degrees and process of perception — the treatment to be regulated accordingly — corrupt classes | 365–376 |
| SECT. IV. Grandeur of sovereignty — good and bad government — spirit of the age — qualifications for reigning — political harmony — empire of opinion — dissensions among adversaries — classes of the state — the learned — the martial — the mercantile — the agricultural, &c. — prevention the end of punishment — species of — rights and benefits — public and private wrongs — access to the sovereign — anecdotes of Pharaoh — rules for the sovereign — internal relations — external relations — how to prevent war — how to carry it on — sanctity of mercy | 377–416 |
| SECT. V. Rules for behaviour to those in authority | 417–426 |
| SECT. VI. Friendship ensures affection and its results — nature and value of — rules for commencing and conducting | 427–438 |
| SECT. VII. Intercourse with the remaining classes — enemies, secret and declared — moderation — indifferent parties — conciliation — inferiors — kindness | 439–449 |
| CONCLUSION OR EPILOGUE. | |
| PART I. Platonic Maxims on Ethics | 450 |
| PART II. Aristotelian Maxims on Politics | 452 |
| APPENDIX. The Laws of Harmony, omitted from Book I. Sect. v. | 458 |
| ADDENDA, &c. | 465 |
| INDEX | 471 |
| INDEX OF PROPER NAMES | 494 |
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE OTHER;
| “A portion at least of your precious opportunities you should contrive to rescue from the hand of Time the deceiver, and apply to the study of morals; — the essential aim and abstract of the whole round of science. The works of antiquity indeed, may not, in the present age, be procurable; but the study of the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry and Akhlāk-i-Jalāly will afford you ample occupation.” |
| Letter from the Minister of Akbar to the Khānkhānān or Commander in Chief, Inshāï Abul Fazl. Daftar I. Lett. 13. and Daftar II. Lett. 13. |
THE present production is not offered to the world as a full discharge of the ample promise of inquiry which the title-page exhibits, but only as that instalment of it, than which no writer seems disposed to offer, and few readers prepared to welcome, a fuller. The classical and the oriental scholar will each complain that much has been omitted in his own department, the want of which he may perhaps be ready to excuse, in consideration of the ready insight he obtains into the other: and if either should feel that what to him is the foreign ingredient could not be more plentifully scattered without overpowering his willingness to deal with it, he will perceive at the same time, that what to him is the congenial one could not be augmented without carrying proportionate disadvantage to many of the opposite faction. The literatures here exhibited in friendly juxtaposition have heretofore been cultivated with such hostile views, that a work which should propound in order to reconcile the highest mysteries of both, it is a question, not only who should execute, but how many would be found to comprehend.
Let it not however from this be understood that the Translator lays claim to any profounder erudition than he has here put forth, or indeed to any greater acquirement than his professional education and pursuits will readily explain. The work has rather executed itself than been executed by him; every department has grown up from suggestions which some other department supplied; and for this very reason it is, that the result is presented with greater confidence, as the aggregate of parts indispensable became mutually dependent. When the Writer undertook to occupy his leisure residence in England by translating a curious, and, in the East, a celebrated work, he little knew the magnitude of the task before him, or he should have shrunk alike from the labour and the pretension it involved. The first is now over; and will never be regretted by him, if he is here successful in deprecating all imputations of the last.
In the text of the version, at least, no responsibility has been incurred; not even that of selection: omission, however desirable in particular instances, has been carefully avoided, as tending to lower the authority of the whole; a few sentences of vague panegyric have been curtailed, as the asterisks denote; names and titles have been shortened and compressed; and benedictions which, by one of the most pleasing of oriental usages, invariably follow the names of distinguished persons, have been limited to the few occasions where the reader can sympathize with their expression. In the conclusion or epilogue of the work, which, for reasons, as there stated, applicable only to the people for whom it was composed, is of a fanciful and romantic cast, a few indifferent passages have been omitted, in order to relieve the tedium of that incongruous portion. With these trifling exceptions, the paraphrase is an exact counterpart of the original, even to the imitation of peculiarities, obscurities, and defects in style, — a fact which the reader is requested to bear in mind, as often as these present themselves to his remark.
The Notes have generally been drawn from direct reference to the originals referred to or transcribed; except in the case of an author, “quem fallere et effugere optimus est triumphus.” The quotations from Aristotle are taken only from Dr. Gillie’s translation of the Ethics. Much valuable information has been gained from other parts of the same work. Davis’s annotations on the Tusculan Disputations (Oxford, 1805,) have also afforded two or three important parallels. For the residue there is no boast in saying that the Writer is indebted solely to his own reading. Many of the most interesting references, (those to Galen and Hippocrates for instance,) after making several fruitless efforts to obtain access to the originals in the library of the British Museum, he laments to say he has been obliged to leave unauthenticated. But enough has been done to show how much more may be done by those who possess greater facilities for doing it.
A natural desire to cover the salient points of a literature that is little understood, and to enliven the course of discussions more addressed to the judgment than the taste, has led the Translator, in some instances, to enter upon debateable topics to a greater extent or a greater frequency than may prove agreeable to persons prepossessed with opinions of a different bent; — and if it should appear to these that the scale is sometimes inclined in favour of the absent party, when the evidence adduced is not decisive, let it be considered rather as a feint to promote inquiry, than as any deliberate defiance of received opinion. In most of these cases it will be found that, though judgment has been given, the issues were never fairly drawn; and to the advocates of a neglected cause it may be permitted to claim more than their due, where that is the only condition on which they will obtain as much.
It is to the Dissertation as well as to the Notes that these remarks are intended to apply. The questions opened in these speculative pleadings are often of vast and universal application. The familiarity with which they are approached need not be considered unbecoming in one of the élevés of Malthus and Mackintosh — the member of a profession, conversant, beyond all others, with first principles, because having little else to go by. The slenderness of the materials from which they are sometimes raised need not be objected to in the present state of Eastern knowledge, the interests of which, for many years to come, boldness will more promote than caution. In the ruin of Empires we dig for treasures concealed. The first step is to mark every spot where search may be feasibly conducted: to prosecute the mass of inquiry, and determine how far the hastiness of all the suppositions may be excused by the soundness of many, is the work of another and a later period.
I. IN an age when less communication and greater rivalry prevailed between the nations of the East and West, it was natural for each to regard the institutions of the other, and all that emanated from them, with depreciation and dislike. The lurking consciousness entertained on both sides, that either was involuntarily a debtor to the other, for social improvements of so important a character as to force their way into national use, either before national prejudice was awake to their origin or in spite of all the obstacles which such prejudice could oppose to their reception, must have tended to aggravate rather than appease this mutual irritation. To blind unreasoning animosity there is no greater spur than the suspicion that it is unjustly entertained; for to be compelled to condemn themselves is the keenest injury that antagonists can sustain from each other. At present the question of superiority is so fully determined in our favour, that on our side, at least, the jealousy should cease; and some readers would be indignant if they were told that its relics have any existence in their own minds. Yet if the attention which they would otherwise be disposed to pay to the subject matter of the following pages is, in the present instance, at all affected by the fact of oriental character and origin — if they suffer themselves to be repelled by the vague war-cries of heathenism and Muhammedan licentiousness, when they ought to be searching in the work itself to discover the extent to which these may really prevail, and the most hopeful means of correcting them as prevailing — they would do well to consider whether they may not be amenable to some such charge: whether, if the moral code here propounded, were that of some people equally misunderstood, but between whom and themselves no hostile feeling had ever prevailed, they would be equally indifferent to the sources of truth and the materials of amendment; and if not, whether the original bias is indeed so completely removed as the honor and interests of an intellectual age and country would seem to require. The mere rivalry so long and closely maintained by the Muslims, not so much with ourselves as with all the western nations, ought to be sufficient to bespeak our interest and attention, even if there were nothing else in their previous history or internal condition calculated to attract our notice. From the eighth to the sixteenth century the contest seemed to threaten the liberties of Europe. The Turkish and Egyptian dynasties — mere outposts of the great body of Islām — were able at different periods to encounter and baffle the united forces of Christendom; and while Europeans consoled themselves with imputing to their adversaries a social barbarism and vitiation inconsistent with their political power, they tacitly belied the flattering apology by borrowing1 that scholastic literature, which, however worthless as an end, was valuable enough as a means, to raise the borrowers to their present state of mental and physical superiority. Of a people once so distinguished in the opposite achievements of arts and arms, are the laws and habits of action to be counted among the contemptible phenomena of history? Look at their results as compared with those of other institutions; even (at one time) of our own. Are they worthy of authentic elucidation and remark? The following is their own exposition of them; formed in the age of their greatest prosperity, and received by their then most polished people as the completest ever produced.
II. During the infancy of the Osmānly empire, while its shocks were already felt to the remotest limits of Europe, but before it had completed the occupation of the fairest of European provinces, its energies were curbed and controlled on the east by the imposing aspect and vast resources of that great central monarchy, which, differing only in its limits and the blood of its ruling tribe, has always been paramount in the heart of Asia. In the days of which we speak it had lately been restored with unusual splendour by the arms of the great Timúr, and was still governed by the greatest of his descendants. The æra of Ulug Bēg and Husain Abulghāzy (or latter half of the fifteenth century) may indeed be considered as the Augustan age of Persian letters. Few potentates of that time but were themselves adepts in the learning they patronized. Ulug Bēg was a distinguished astronomer; Abulghāzy a poet and essayist of no mean rank. At the court of the latter, in particular, his excessive encouragement of the lighter literature to which he was devoted, had raised up a host of polished and enlightened writers, who seemed to make up, in elegance of expression and refinement of idea, for the want of that solidity and power, which is seldom to be found except in the train of re-action from the hardships of unmerited neglect. Over estimation proves in the end the most fatal form of discouragement.
While the Timúrian princes of this period were struggling with each other for paramount supremacy, or devoting themselves in supineness to an ostentatious rather than a wise cultivation of their subjects’ interests, a character of a far different school rose silently into power on their south-western frontier. This was Hasán Bēg, the representative of a house placed by Timúr in precarious authority over the province of Mesopotamia, and forced to depend for the maintenance of their position, not on the influence of a name, but on a perpetual and practical display of nature’s best title, the ability to maintain it. Called late in life, with the example of his brother’s inefficient reign before him, to defend a tottering throne against the assaults of surrounding powers, each his more than equal in all resources but those which lay within him, his short and triumphant administration presents a singular mixture of audacity and caution, each alternately pursued on their appropriate occasions to a successful issue, which stamps him as one of the most remarkable, though not (from the insignificance of his dominions) the most remarked, of the Asiatic potentates of his day. By this dexterous management of perilous junctures occurring in the early years of his short reign, two hostile princes, one of them the reigning Mogul, were captured and put to death; and such was the resolute demeanour he maintained, and the capacity on which it was known to rest, that Abulghāzy, the succeeding emperor, dreaded to attack though unable to conciliate him. His next attempt entitles him in some sort to be considered as an auxiliary of the Christian cause, being directed against the Turks, then hardened by yearly contests with the Hungarian chivalry, and led by the enterprising conqueror of Constantinople, Muhammad II. In an invasion of their empire he was repulsed; but the light in which he was held as an antagonist may be inferred from the fact, that his dominions were safe from reprisals as long as he was alive to defend them: and had his reign been one of longer duration, the words of the panegyrist2 who asserts his ability to become the paramount sovereign of Asia, might have been justified by the event.
Under the auspices of this prince, and in analogy, it may be said, as regards the prevailing literature of that period, with his political position, the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly” was produced: a work, which, in the importance of its subject matter, and the forcible character of its treatment and language, contrasts strongly with the empty elegance of the compositions most in vogue at the court of Abulghāzy. On this too, as on other occasions, the victory of letters proved more durable than that of arms. Long after the names and fortunes of their respective patrons had been consigned to the sepulchre of history, the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly” continued to afford delight and instruction to statesmen,3 while the polished essays of Kāshify and Suhaily were abandoned to the imitation of boys.
III. Those who are acquainted with the slow and laborious progress of human improvement, and who know how much more the individual is always indebted to the age than the age can be to the individual, will not be disposed to think less highly of the work when they are told that it is far from being an original one. Whether the knowledge of any writer or of any age can be said to be self-created, is a question that will recur in another place. For the present it will be sufficient to observe, that in modern Europe at least, where more has been done to solve the great problem of human felicity than at any previous epoch of the world, the successive changes of life and feeling have, all along, been only so many improved applications of what for ages have been given principles. In common then, at least, with the authorities to which we are all accustomed to appeal, the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly” is not the first but the best digest of the important topics on which it treats. The study of morals, indeed, being that which has the closest connexion with religious persuasions, was likewise that to which the attention of the Muhammedan world was earliest directed; and it seems that the stricter sciences were then recommended and introduced, only by the bearing they were found to possess upon this one.4 At a time when it would have been held impiety to propound any principles of conduct for which an authority could not be found in their Scripture texts, the ingenuity of the Muslim schoolmen was exercised in reducing to this simple standard the phenomena of a social state wholly different from that to which it had been intended to apply; and the result was, of course, a chaos of scholastic subtlety and jargon, which insensibly operated its own extinction.5 A simpler and sounder process came gradually into vogue; which was first to ascertain that course of action and that rule of duty which was most agreeable to the interests of the individual and the species, and, this being found, to assume it by self-evidence for that line of conduct which it must have been their Prophet’s object to instil. Having thus detached morals from religion, they found no difficulty in consulting and adopting the opinions of their predecessors in power, the Byzantine Greeks; and the works of pagan philosophers became the laws of action to a people who mastered half the world only to abolish paganism. Not only such universal authorities as Abú Nasar and Avicenna, but even the minor luminaries of provincial capitals, now made it their endeavour to compile and digest the systems of the Grecian masters (partly studied in translation, but more often transferred in extract from writer to writer,) into the form best reconcilable with the exigencies of their social system and the peculiarities of their religious belief. The most successful efforts of the entire people may be said to be concentrated in the work before us; but the treatise from which it more peculiarly originates is the “Kitāb-ul-Tahārat,” an Arabic work composed in the tenth century by Abú Aly Mashkovy, the minister of the imperial house of Búyah.6 The work being inaccessible in this country, we can only judge of it by what we find in its transcribers; but this is enough to convince us that it is an amalgam of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, carried out however to most minute practical applications, and this in a manner which leaves little doubt that the author, or those to whom he was indebted, had the benefit of lower classics not extant, or, at least, not in vogue among ourselves. Two centuries later it was translated into Persian, under the title of “Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry,” by the celebrated Nāsirodín Túsy; with the important addition, however, of treatises on the domestic and political states, mostly taken, we are assured, the first from Avicenna, the second from Abú Nasar,7 — themselves the most distinguished followers of the Grecian school. This improved compilation it is, which, re-written and revived with the additional acumen and experience of three more centuries, by a writer of whom no further particulars are at present known, again appears before us under the title of “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly. ” The comparative merits of these two latter works are characteristic of the æras in science to which the writers respectively belong: the first dealing more with principles than consequences — as clear and collected in the strength of his own convictions as he was diffident of the reception they might obtain from others — minute to satiety, and cautious to the sacrifice of his own advantages; — the second rather neglectful of fundamentals in his haste to arrive at that which they involved — impressing at a hazard on the reader’s mind that which was hardly ascertained in his own — familiar with mysteries which the other seldom ventured to approach, — and adorning them with an enthusiastic eloquence which the other was seldom at liberty to indulge in. This free and fervid character of treatment it is, as well as higher developement of subject, which more peculiarly qualifies the Jalāly for the task of advocating its own merits in the face of other nations, and winning, let us hope, for itself and others of its class, the tardy acknowledgment of an enlightened age. To those who are wise enough to welcome Truth on its own account, in whatever garb appearing, the Nāsiry might perhaps be the more valuable and congenial performance. But to most minds something is necessary to kindle as well as instruct. The Jalāly makes us sympathize as well as perceive. There is something Ciceronian in the veneration with which he encircles knowledge, and the delight with which he unveils it. He speaks not only with the certainty, but the exultation, befitting one, who strives to renew and perpetuate “the voice which has gone forth through all lands.”
IV. The translation of this abstruse and elaborate work was undertaken principally in order to illustrate and exemplify the resources of Persian literature, with a view to their bearing upon a question of great practical importance in our Eastern possessions. Of late years it has become a favourite position with those who know not how to explain by any more modest or humane theory the social degradation of the Asiatic people, to attribute it to some radical error in their scientific systems; in other words, to a want of average capacity in the inhabitants of that half of the globe to which the supposers do not happen to belong. The consequences they deduce are worthy of the liberality of their premises, — that Asiatic learning must be extirpated root and branch, and replaced by that of Europe. Now with such a treatise as the present in our hands, we might be excused, perhaps, if we overlooked the fallacy on which the conclusion proceeds, and chose to retort the charge of incapacity on the opposite side. Here, we might say, is a work of the fifteenth century, displaying a knowledge of the nature, and an enthusiasm in the cause of virtue, which will render it a delightful and improving study, as long as duty and inclination continue to contest the world. What European work of the same æra, as richly laden, as widely known, and as long surviving, will you venture to weigh against it? Political convulsions cut short the flattering promise of further improvement; but as long as the opportunity was given, where will you find a richer harvest?
Such, however, is not the warfare of a minority. Until the general mind is better qualified to enter on such a discussion with the impartiality it requires, we must leave the diversities of Muhammedan literature to work their own way in public estimation, and take our stand on the surer ground of its resemblances.
From a comparison of the present work with the authorities it professes to consult, it appears that Muhammedan philosophy is neither more nor less than Grecian philosophy in an Eastern garb; a twin offspring of that common parent from which the sciences of Europe are proud to acknowledge their derivation. Admitting that for the last two hundred years, the period during which these latter have made their greatest advance, the former has been comparatively stationary, the two systems must still have so much in common, as to make it mere contradiction to speak of establishing either on the ruins of the other — of destroying that which, properly used, will be found to afford the best and safest means of effecting the purpose for which it is destroyed.
But with sciences (which are near akin to institutions) the question is not merely what had better be done, but what can be done. The processes of developement, to be genuine, must be voluntarily or rather spontaneously conducted. Where mental relations are formed and mental systems transferred, previous analogies must subsist in order to make them applicable; and in the instance of Greeks and Arabs we trace them in the resemblance of their early national traits. The predatory habits and generous cast of feeling — the government fluctuating between the paternal and fraternal forms — the national independence maintained for ages in defiance of the great powers by whom they were successively assailed — the prevalence of the imaginative, the traditional, and the mysterious — the airy kingdoms of antediluvian beings — the swarms of genii retreating from the visible creation and the face of lordly man, only to lead a more congenial existence in the hidden powers and principles of nature — the hosts of heavenly messengers ever on the wing to comfort or admonish an erring but still favoured race — the tribes of birds and animals softening and hallowing the course of life by the moral lessons fabulously associated with their habits and appearances — these, the primitive characteristics of either people, require only a little adjustment of names and instances, in order to be at once identified with a counterpart in the other. From these princely savages it is, and from that purified abstract of their principles and feelings which the laws of Muhammad present, that all the races and ages of Islām have taken their form and character. As if to maintain the analogy after as well as before the point of social organization, corresponding to the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks we have the Súfyism of the Muhammedans; a transcript probably of the same doctrine, concealed by a phraseology which rendered the secret little less impenetrable than the imposing mechanism of the mystagogues. The transfusion of science from one to the other of these two people was the introduction of nothing but formulæ and processes. The rudiment — the element — the embryo — was there ungiven; ready in the one case as in the other, on the application of the requisite means, to unfold itself into progressive maturity.
What resemblance, what analogy, has the cold and gloomy spirit of the North to offer in furtherance of a similar union — now too, when its nations have outlived the first tendencies of their rudiments — when the influence of the elements themselves seems lost and overwhelmed in the uniform pressure of intense civilization? One, and one only — the pre-constituted affinity of their speculative systems in virtue of a common and intermediate origin. Singularly enough, then, this futile endeavour to unite the people of the East and West by depriving the former of their intellectual treasures, turns out to be an attack against a bond of union most providentially provided already, and the only one of which the parties are readily susceptible. As Greece was the border or neutral ground upon which the opposite elements of Asiatic and European character resolved themselves into harmony, so Grecian science, the offspring of this intellectual concert, is still the moral mean or menstruum of its maintenance at other times and places. The Asiatic treatises and tongues in which this science is modelled after eastern prepossessions, instead of being extirpated as superfluous, should be cherished as the best and only vehicles of an invaluable sympathy not otherwise to be obtained.
V. Of the following sample of such treatises — the earliest ever given to the modern world — it is only on these casual and limited grounds that the importance admits of debate. We have here an analysis of the motives and opinions by which a third part of the human race have for ages been actuated — and this an analysis coming to us under no less authenticity than that of their own acknowledgment. To all who are anxious to elicit truth by a comparison of the varying forms and phases of national persuasion — all who are interested in tracing the fortunes and characters of men in the different scenes and periods of their development — all who would pretend to decipher the phenomena of eastern politics, or apply to the future the great lessons of the past, — to all these and such as these the Muhammedans’ own exposition of their own rules and aspirations has a meaning which is not to be misunderstood. Indeed it is the peculiar privilege of this class of writings, that their value as pieces of political evidence, is utterly independent of their value as pieces of reasoning. Let the reasoning be ever so false, many great purposes are answered by displaying its falseness. Man’s progress towards truth is only an infinite rejection of error, every established instance of which is a contribution to the other. We may be startled sometimes by the wide contrast, sometimes by the great resemblance, in foreign practices and opinions to our own; but each will in turn afford us means for better knowing, and more highly valuing, the privileges of national superiority. And if the benefits derivable from such inquiries should, in some cases, seem to argue in the institutions of other people, a larger share of intrinsic excellence than we were previously prepared to allow, let us shrink neither from the admission, if just, nor the obligation, if offered. It is only the common tax which all must pay who continue to form parts of this material system, where the very highest natures are often deeply indebted to the very lowest, and where benefits are not so much the acts of those who (often unconsciously) confer them, as of that hidden cause by which both material and process are provided. Let us pass then to the consideration of some instances of this debateable class; in dwelling upon which the scope and nature of the work will receive an illustration, not, it is hoped, less appropriately ushered, from appearing in connexion with the purposes to which they may be applied.
VI. First and foremost it may be read as a comment and complement to those old writers of whose works it professes to be a digest. The Grecian masters never exhausted a subject. “The world was all before them where to choose;” and before they had well cleared one division, they were called off to deal with another, and so on till the circle was complete; the connexion of all with each preventing the exclusive cultivation of any. Hence though their gigantic fragments are still the admiration of the world, nothing has descended to us at once so comprehensive and so unique as the present treatise; which, constructed undeniably from their materials, may be received, in the absence of any genuine work, as a far and faint reflection of wisdom in the olden time. Treatises of this compendious and complete character subsisted, there can be no doubt, in the second age of Grecian philosophy; most probably indeed subsisted in such numbers, as to prevent the superlative celebrity of any, and thus occasion the neglect and loss of all. Not only then may the work before us be a resemblance of more valuable and authentic compilations, but it may well, in some measure, be a copy of them. For if they existed, (and they must have existed,) where might they more probably be brought to light than in the schools and libraries of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, the haunts alike of Grecian and Muhammedan philosophy? The eighth Section, in particular, should be read with reverence as a representative of treatises, composed, we learn from Cicero and Horace,8 by the standard Peripatetics, on the very same subject.
This element of antiquity we may expect to recognise with greater ease, and recover in greater purity, when we consider the veneration, approaching to servility, with which every succeeding generation of Muhammedan schoolmen have invariably regarded the great body of their predecessors; and particularly (after the merits of these had been discovered) the masters of Grecian philosophy. Where they have happened to innovate, it has been insensibly and unconsciously done, not as corrective, but supplementary, to science as before subsisting. This modest and unostentatious mode of proceeding renders it less necessary, as well as less easy, to specify the instances in which it is their merit, or may be their fault, to differ with their originals. But there is at least one improvement, not so much in the fabric of the ideal structure as in the means of man’s access to it, which redounds to the credit of their philosophy, if not of its teachers. Without at all abandoning the supremacy of mind over matter, they abandoned the false refinement of arguing upon the first as if it could be, or ought to be, entirely uninfluenced by the other. “Of a compound being,” says the younger Sherlock, “the happiness is not to be secured by attention to a single element;” and of course the argument is good against the entire neglect of either. It is not to be supposed, that the great men who first promulgated the canons of Truth intentionally committed the oversight, or would not have provided against it, if the state of science had permitted them to combine as well as analyze: but so it was, that being necessarily most engrossed in the more important and abstruse constituent, the materials which they left to their successors were such as insensibly led these to conclusions repugnant to the true interests of man, because formed upon premises incommensurate with his entire nature. Beings who were to live in the world, if not for it, and to act and feel from and through matter, if not by it, were gravely told that the world and its events — the body and its necessities — were nothing to them; and taught (by implication) to consider it their first duty to defy society rather than support it. The incorrectness of these impracticable standards was detected at an early period by one himself not exempt from their influence. In his dialogue on Friendship, Tully casually remarks, that the wise man of the Stoics, if ever realized, would be little better than a block of wood or stone.9 Nor was this all. The abuse of virtue brought virtue itself into disesteem; and whatever may have been the case with Epicurus, his followers, at least, pushed into the other excess, and exposed the lesser error only to fall into the graver one themselves. If any school was free from this deception it was that of the Peripatetics; in adopting and maturing the principles of which, while they entirely abandoned the rest, the Arabs must be allowed to have reformed as well as restored the most valuable productions of human thought. Small as might have been the difficulty, or may still be the credit of the achievement, the fact itself constitutes an æra in the history of mind. How far the monks of Europe, in their blind veneration for languages which to them were sacred, could have eradicated the fallacy as effectually as these fanatic voluptuaries, had learning been restored by its natural channels, instead of passing through the acumen of these last, — and how far in consequence we may be said to owe our emancipation from this dangerous delusion to the works of which the following is a specimen, — is one of those questions which may be thrown out for future discussion.
Thus much of the Arab school in the capacity of adversary to that one of which it is itself contented to be the expositor and handmaid. It is in this latter form that something more remains to be said of it, as a repository of illustration to the works of antiquity. Some instances of its efficacy for such a purpose may be found in the following pages, where the bald assertions of Herodotus are occasionally clad with meaning,10 the authenticity of Xenophon11 corroborated, and the triumphs of Cicero’s12 genius recognised in a quarter of the world to which it has been hitherto supposed the influence of the Latin school had never found a path. These however do but illustrate the nature of the materials — the adequate use of them would require an erudition of the amplest and profoundest class. It is only in the writings of the lower classics — among the historians of the Byzantine Empire — that these comparisons can be worthily conducted. The best comment on any age is to be found in the state of the succeeding one. We should mount from the known to the unknown, from the present to the past. The more distant the epoch may be, the greater, à priori, is the difficulty of apprehending its peculiarities. If the time should ever come when the conflicting statements of the Eastern and Western historians shall be digested into one harmonious whole, and the naked summary of political facts be forced to yield to clear and consistent evidence of social condition, it will be brought about by the combined study of the manners and institutions of both people — by interpreting the representations which each gives of the other by the light of the other’s admissions, and using the result to correct the representations which each gives of themselves; — in fact, by an extended application of the knowledge which this very treatise may afford, if it ever attracts the attention of scholars who are competent to deal with its resources.
VII. Another value the work may possess in the eyes of the curious, at least, inasmuch as it is a specimen — certainly a favourable but still a specific specimen — of those scholastic treatises by which the intellect of Europe was exercised and prepared for the paramount achievements of the present age. It happens, singularly enough, that the capture of Constantinople, and the dispersion of learning among the western states, synchronize within a few years with the publication of the “Akhlāk-i-Jalāly.” So that at the very period when the earlier systems of moral philosophy were in course of communication to the confines of Europe, they were being promulgated afresh in Central Asia in the improved form given to them in the present compilation. Smile as we may at the crudity of their notions upon some points, and the extravagance of them upon others, there is an interest that must always attach to the ideal systems which have strongly influenced large portions of mankind, and our own progenitors among the number.
How far utility may combine with curiosity, and the wisdom of past ages be held to contain rules and maxims of conduct by which the wisdom of the present age need not disdain to profit, — is a question which those who glance over the version may answer for themselves. That which has once largely and permanently contributed to the interests of society must always contain something worthy of serious attention even from the most favoured and enlightened communities. Much as it is now the fashion to decry the moralists of the middle ages, there are certain imperishable monuments of their practical insight into the nature and interests of man to which the world is still paying an unconscious homage. The old English drama is the poetry of the Schools, originating just as the nation turned from its dormant to its active condition, and combining the advantages of both in a measure denied to the men of a more settled æra. The learning of the Schools, being inseparably associated with the monastic order and the papal religion, fell gradually into oblivion. But it was the learning of a shrewd and sagacious set of men — raised to influence on the condition of keeping watch over the follies and foibles of others — set apart from the common partnership of social life and social passion, that they might perform the condition with punctuality — and feeling that their position depended on the use they made of these advantages in studying, controlling, and improving their fellow men. Hence, in the writings of those who were early enough to profit by their influence, that unfailing richness of maxim and remark, which, when attributed, as it often erroneously is, to the individual acumen of the writers who repeat them, seems to indicate a more than mortal range of intelligence; — hence that consistent and dignified assertion of the eternal interests of man, which now falls with something akin to the majesty of revelation on the sickly impatience of an ambitious age. At present minds are disciplined by processes more congenial to the active and independent spirit of the times. But of moral expedients it often happens that the use is proportioned to the distastefulness. The wisdom which in Shakspeare we reverence is the immediate offspring of the scholastic morality which we despise; and well would it be in days like these, when passions are stimulated and restraints removed beyond all former precedent in the history of man, if we could be prevailed on to test and temper the knowledge of excitement by a reference to the sincerer knowledge of repose.
VIII. To go into any lengthened enumeration of the valuable but neglected lessons of antiquity that may here be recovered to the benefit of our own age, would be an endless and repulsive undertaking. But the purposes of a preliminary discourse would hardly be answered, if the reader’s attention were not especially directed to the great moral canon on which the practical part of the work is conducted,12 — the Aristotelian doctrine of extremes. In many respects the theory is open to objection. As it is only to be expressed and explained by the habitudes of matter, the dignity of the soul’s nature seems compromised when we resort to it. As it propounds a virtual proximity of right to wrong, the first principles of rectitude appear endangered by it. As it falls short of some of the highest forms of scriptural virtue, our hearts and consciences are at first dissatisfied when we examine it. For when we admit that propriety is determined by striking a balance between the claims of others and ourselves, we must first have admitted that there is an opposition between the two: whereas it is the great achievement of the science to establish their ultimate identity. For these reasons it is not surprising if the rule has been gradually dismissed from the minds of men in Christendom, conversant as they are with the laws and models of a superhuman excellence. And yet, when these objections are followed to their source, they terminate merely in this, that souls, being attached to bodies, are likewise restrained by them; and that not being able to do all we would, we make the nearest practicable approach to it. The fault is not in the standard, but in the objects to which it is applied. The modern rule of general consequences, the consistent developement of which constitutes an æra in the science of morals, is liable no less to the same line of invalidation, from which it must be delivered by similar means. Let the great rule of Christian charity be followed rigidly and literally out, and it will lead to a community of property. By reasoning on general consequences we learn that a community of property cannot be maintained; that any persevering attempt to establish it would be fatal to all habits of order and unanimity, charity itself being one of them: and therefore that charity is best pursued by adhering in the first place to the habits and institutions without which it could not be realized even in its present imperfect form.13 The contradiction then is only apparent; and we are bound, in some sort, to contravert the final aim, in order to secure the nearest possible approach to it. So in the theory of extremes. The limit that we abandon is one that we cannot attain: and if we attempt to attain it, we destroy the modification we secure by its abandonment. There are higher forms of virtue in which this expression seems to disappear; but on closer examination, it will be found still to possess a latent subsistence, and one that must be admitted to real estimation before any practical results can be obtained.
Thus tempered by the limitations which its nature requires, this formula will be found to present advantages, which, though not co-extensive with those of the modern standard, are, in their own sphere and for their own purposes, unequalled. The law of general consequences comprehends every thing; and, for that very reason, may sometimes comprehend too much. The elements may be too vast, the relations too complicated, to find a ready expression in the minds of young and partially informed inquirers. The law of extremes is liable to no such inconvenience; or at least a far slighter one: its operations are confined to a single line; those of the other extend over innumerable ones: its elements may be found without travelling beyond our own experience; those of the other must be gathered from points with which we have no, or only a fallacious, acquaintance. The law of consequences, in its severe indifference to the circumstances of the particular instance, is likely to dishearten its adherent, and end by losing him altogether. The law of extremes adapts itself to every variety of situation; and, professing only to be a re-statement of private interest, is sure to be applied, even in the lowest fluctuations of the moral sense. The law of consequences, as it dwells more on the interests of others than our own, tends to give false ideas of the insignificance of these latter. It contains no sufficient security against that most treacherous and pernicious form of error, extravagance in right; which the law of extremes, by the very terms of its nature, is certain to prevent.
Let it not be supposed that it is the aim of these observations to detract from the value of the modern standard, the very imperfections of which have themselves a sort of merit; inasmuch as the virtue that escapes uninjured from the difficulties of the ordeal is sure to be elevated and improved by them. The object is only to show, that though the new rule may have many advantages which the old cannot pretend to, the old has likewise some which the new does not possess. The new rule may carry out the science to a perfection unattainable without it; but it leaves vacancies, within which the old may continue, with advantage, to exercise concurrent jurisdiction. That the tests may be reconciled without prejudice to the higher of the two, is best evidenced by the simultaneous use of both in the treatise before us. Though no where expressly expounded, the law of consequences is often introduced as the basis of most important conclusions;14 and, perhaps, had the sciences of Asia been allowed to continue their advance, the next treatise on eastern ethics would have exhibited the combined application of the two on principles of mutual adjustment, such as a well sustained inquiry could not fail to establish between them.
IX. The subject of morals inevitably suggests the kindred one of religion. The utility of this and of all eastern translations in familiarizing us with the objects and associations by which the scriptural writers were surrounded and influenced, is too evident to require explanation. The Scriptures may not only thus acquire a significance which is otherwise lost to our perceptions; but that particular significance which would best enable us to introduce them to the knowledge of the eastern people. Those points upon which the persuasions of the Muhammedans are near akin to our own should also be particularly noticed and examined. For offensive as their misuse of sacred terms and symbols may often appear to us, before it can be superseded it must at least be understood. With this view, wherever coincidences of this nature presented themselves, the Translator has considered it one of his essential duties to point them out.
But besides these general bearings on the religious question, the present work possesses a third, peculiar to its own nature. False religions are most aptly and familiarly attacked by showing their rules and tendencies to be at variance with the real interests of man, of which the science of morals professes to be an elucidation. Hence, when we have mastered the morality of a people, we are in possession of the premises, on which, to be convincing, our arguments should be conducted; and where, as generally happens, the morality is sounder than the religion, it is easy to show the inconsistency of one with the other: and then the example of other and more favoured nations may be adduced to prove that the fault does not lie with the morality; that it is the religion which must be given up. A striking opportunity for the application of this line of reasoning we find in the second Section of the third Book; where the highest and purest form of morality is declared to be that resting on love or affection: the morality of interest, or even of equity, (which, unactuated by the first, is only a refinement of interest,) being only good as it represents or approaches to that of sympathy. It will at once be seen how difficult it will be for them, consistently with these premises, to deny that the great moral canon of the Gospel, which directs us to suffer injury rather than inflict it, is the only one that would or could characterize a universal and eternal dispensation. While the rules and practices of their own religion, constantly appealing to compulsion, and established only by the exercise of it, are alone enough to show, that if proceeding at all from heavenly authority, (which is what they will not at first be so ready to give up,) it could only have been with a view to temporary purposes, and in subservience to the final establishment of those universal principles embodied only by the other.
To persons more conversant with the subject many more instances will present themselves, under each of the three divisions, than have been noticed by the compiler. Questions of this nature, involving the honor of the national faith, are perhaps better left to those who are its constituted guardians. In this, indeed, as in every other department, it is not intended to exhaust the subject, but only to introduce it; a function, in the present instance, of no mean or secondary importance. Pages like these, to which few might otherwise care to devote the attention necessary to master their contents, acquire a certain awfulness of interest when we consider that they are calculated to afford material for the country’s last and best triumph over the vices and errors of less favoured nations.15
X. Lastly, the treatise is valuable as containing the opinions of a speculative people, in their most enlightened age, upon the everlasting subjects of human inquiry — the nature, purposes, and results of being. The propriety of mixing questions of every-day occurrence with these stupendous problems — the discretion of resting that which all should recognise on that which must always be open to debate — may well be doubted. And yet the latent connexion which kept the subjects together is of that undeniable kind that perfectly explains, though it may not justify, the arrangement. All that we arrive at by reasoning from the external relations of things is the mere form of that which we agree to call right — the interests of the several parties, the bearing of each upon each, and the adjustments whereby the highest amount of interest may be obtained throughout; and this is all that the science of morals is usually concerned in discussing. Another question remains, the foundation of all the rest. Why the right thus ascertained is obligatory? — why a person who may choose to prefer a given indulgence, with or without its attendant penalty, to all the immunities or gratifications obtainable from self-denial, — why such a person should still be bound to prefer the general will to his own? Here most systems of national morality abut at once upon religion either natural or revealed: he is bound to the general will, because it expresses the will of God.16 And it is a singular fact, that fanatic and intolerant as the Muslims are in maintaining the claims of their ritual and so-called revelation at their utmost height, they should yet go farther than any other people in arguing this great question on its abstract ground, and thus in a manner acknowledge philosophic religion, as the basis of their morality, to possess a force and validity concurrent with revealed. Not merely the relations of objects, but, in the last resort, their habitudes and natures also, are the ample grounds of duty on which these enlightened bigots delight to expatiate. They deem it the province of morality not only to affirm the will of God, but also to produce the considerations from which such sanction is to be presumed, and by which its scope and limits are to be determined. Nay, more, by keeping up a constant reference to divine pleasure as the source of life and feeling, no less than of the restraints upon either, and thus in a manner identifying right with existence itself, they seek to place the validity of duty upon higher grounds than the sordid considerations of personal interest can supply. Virtue, in this noble theory, is only a higher species of instinct; — the proper guide to virtue, not advantage, but nature itself. Systems of stricter limitation and lowlier range may perhaps be more tenable and more safe; but the very errors of this one are all of an elevating and redeeming cast.
Whatever may have been the influence upon the morals of the eastern people of this intermixture of morality with physics, to ourselves, with whom their views are only valuable as historical evidence of the workings of human intellect, the interest of treatises such as the present is much enhanced by the familiarity with which they exhibit this singular phenomenon in the form of what we may call the practical Pantheism of Asia. In this mysterious subject (here scientifically handled) it is, that we must look for the origin and force of almost all the peculiarities of Asiatic literature and speculative opinion. A principle of such extensive and influential range is entitled to a place among the political elements of the eastern world. No correct judgments can be formed, no creditable calculations drawn, in ignorance of its workings; and if these pages contained no other claim on public attention than the authentic insight they afford into this one metaphysical tenet, this alone would entitle them to go boldly forth as conscious vehicles of new and important information. One of the most singular facts attending its enunciation it is, that the student is all along presumed to be already in possession of its leading principles:17 and as many may be glad to see the theory expounded who may not have leisure or inclination to search for and compare the passages in which it lurks, and many more may be well pleased to enter on the search with precise notions of what it is they are to search for, a few pages may be advantageously occupied in giving, what is no where else to be found, a connected outline of this remarkable system; not with the view of exposing its inconsistencies, (which might be an easy task,) but of illustrating the opinions and practices of its professors.
Indeed it is more in this minute and elaborate application of the principle, than in its primary nature, that it carries any thing at variance with European views. The general assertion belongs to every religion, and to the familiar phraseology even of the irreligious. We every day speak ourselves, and hear others speak, of Nature as an intelligent and powerful agent: “Nature works, Nature provides, Nature dictates,” &c. though few by nature mean any thing more than a certain arrangement or influence, whose cause must be external to itself. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ is another popular approach, and a still nearer one, to the Súfy system.
Christian theology, to a certain point, bears it company. Deity is allowed not only to pervade, but actually to produce and maintain, all things.17 Scripture gives it a degree of sanction, and particularly that remarkable quotation by St. Paul of an earlier Pantheistic writer, “He is not far from every one of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The ardent temperament of the eastern people has not allowed them to rest satisfied with a distant acknowledgment of the fact. They have hailed it — exulted in it — canvassed and contemplated it in all its bearings — welcomed it to their homes and bosoms — carried it about with them in their journeys and avocations — in short, given to the impression the same preponderance in their ideas and feelings, that the principle professes to possess among the other functions and elements of being.
Better enunciations may perhaps be found for the doctrine, and the best may be open to ridicule; but the train of thought by which the Muslim schoolmen actually arrived at their conclusions seems to have been as follows. The universe being an entire whole, while its parts are different, those parts must be kept together in order to constitute it;19 and the mode in which they are kept together is this, that they may have a relation and respondence, in virtue of which one is not complete without another; nay, without many others: and therefore each part strives to meet and unite with its correlatives.20 How then is this mutual aptitude acquired? By the simplest arrangement adequate to such stupendous results; by the mere fact of their having originally belonged to a single and more compact unit, out of which the present is an expansion.21 Each being thus in a manner torn from its collaterals, each has something belonging to collaterals; and neither party can be complete till they are restored to each other. What then is the unit so ramified and expanded? It can be but one, the earliest of any; and if so, then that being of which the negation is least conceivable; that is, divinity.22
In this spontaneous resolution of the first cause into fragmentary portions, some will possess greater and some less dignity and power; but none can be equivalent, as regards either, to the whole to which they essentially belong. The qualities and characteristics of the fragmentary state cannot, therefore, be permanently attached to any portion, not even the highest of all, without permanently lowering the powers of a portion of divinity; and therefore of the whole of it: neither of which is conceivable. Since therefore no single portion can continue in any single state, all portions must alternate in all states; and the indefeasible title which each has to be all, is realized, without prejudice to the new arrangement, by each becoming each in succession; till the units of which all is composed have been passed over: and so on ad infinitum. That is to say, a constant transmutation is going on of being into being; lesser things passing into greater, and therefore the greatest of all back into the least, as the only conceivable way of passing into that whole, now composed of many less, which is greater than the greatest.23
The conversion of mind into matter, or homogeneity of the two, which is the great preliminary difficulty to the theory, we may perceive how they would dispose of, if we attend to their ideas upon the equipoise or equilibrium:24 not by the subterfuge of idealism, but by granting the reality of power (that is, tendency in opposite directions) and denying any entity of matter beyond or beneath it. Among the physical theories of modern Europe there is one which, by a very trifling alteration, may be made to supply all the postulates of their metaphysics. In the system of Boskovich the primary particles of matter are described as molecules surrounded by two contending atmospheres: — an outer atmosphere of attraction, by which intercohesion was maintained; an inner atmosphere of repulsion, by which the other tendency was countervailed and prevented from reducing matter to a single point. In this theory every one must see that the essential molecule of matter is entirely superfluous: let concentric powers be supposed, of opposite tendency and different distance, and we have atoms without matter — consistence without substance: solidity may be explained as a spasmotic state of elementary mind; and the important link usually wanting to complete the Pantheistic theory is at once supplied.
The next objection that presents itself they would palliate with equal skill. It is the old remark of Cicero,25 that if the social virtues are a form of want, that is, of weakness, virtue would argue natural defect; and the greater the virtue, the more, to be consistent, we ought to despise the nature that exhibits it. To this they would answer, that the more perfect a whole may be, the greater is the relative detraction of a given defect; and the stronger the incentive by which the residuum is urged to regain that of which it has been deprived. Where weakness is absolute, there is want not only of the adjuncts to be desiderated, but of the very energy to desiderate. Excessive virtue only argues excessive weakness, inasmuch as it first argues excessive strength: the weakness therefore can only be of a relative kind.
Another important difficulty there is which they do not equally elucidate; and that is the inutility of the vast and operose mechanism resorted to. If all end where it began, there seems to be no result in the process, and therefore no cause for it; or if the primum mobile is held to be under any physical necessity for carrying it on, or to derive any advantage from so doing, then is the divine nature not a perfect or self-sufficient one. These consequences are both alternately denied throughout the Treatise;26 but as they are negative of each other, these writers must have further means, though not here apparent ones, of reconciling or adjusting the two. Whether the Muslims had yet arrived at it does not appear; but the tendency of the theory certainly is, to admit that the vital principle returns to its source in an improved or amended form — that the great work of transmutation is carried on with an ever-increasing capacity for its own mysterious purposes.
How the Muslims contrived to reconcile this theory with their religious persuasions, we may learn at length from pp. 42, 43, and 44 of the Introduction; according to which, each separate revolution of this stupendous mechanism would constitute an analogous æra in the celestial dispensations, on the close of which, all the adjustments required by the state of existing relations between the Creator and created would be carried into effect, in conformity of course with pre-established engagements; and the order of nature would be left at liberty to commence a fresh, and probably, as we have seen above, an amended course. The scriptural account of human beatification, to which the allusions are so frequent, would only indicate an intermediate state or stage of being, as intervening between earthly existence and that final re-union with the supreme nature which is implied in the fact of original derivation from it. The pains of Hell they would admit; but only as a restorative process, the severity of which argued its completeness, and the eternity of which was evident in its effects.27 Though the lower natures, as we have seen, were held to pass into the higher, it was only to the last that immortality could be properly attributed. Any approach to the Indian and Pythagorean28 tenet of convertibility, — or return from a higher to a lower state, was stigmatized as a pestilent heresy under the name of Tanāsukh29 — scepticism, or invalidation of scripture truth. The survival was true only of the element: there was no survival of the meaner being; no lasting identity of the man with any pre-existent individual; except in a very few cases, where it was held of certain scriptural characters, that the earlier had re-appeared in the latter. The initiatory processes of vegetable and animal formation were indeed intended to invest the spirit with qualities indispensable to its further improvement in the human form; but they did not bring the spirit to that point at which the faculties and impressions could combine themselves into an inseparable system. This it was the intent, the privilege, and the responsibility, of human nature, and of no other, to accomplish.30 So understood, their doctrine is not without support from the greatest of Protestant divines. In his third sermon on the Immortality of the Soul, Archbishop Tillotson argues at great length,
“That the most general and common philosophy of the world hath always acknowledged something in beasts besides their bodies; and that the faculty of sense and perception, which is in them, is founded on a principle of a higher nature than matter. And as this was always the common philosophy of the world, so we find it to be a supposition of scripture, which frequently attributes souls to beasts as well as to men; though of a much inferior nature. And therefore, those particular philosophers who have denied any immaterial principle or a soul to beasts, have also denied them to have sense, any more than a clock or watch or any other engine. * * * * *
“This, I confess, seems to me an odd kind of philosophy; and it hath this vehement prejudice against it, that if this were true, every man would have great cause to question the reality of his own perceptions: for to all appearance the sensations of beasts are as real as ours; and in many things their senses much more exquisite than ours. And if nothing can be a sufficient argument to a man that he is really endowed with sense, besides his own consciousness of it, then every man hath reason to doubt, whether all men in the world besides himself be not mere engines; for no man hath any other evidence that another man is really endowed with sense, than he hath that brute creatures are so. * * * * * *
“Immortality imports that the soul remains after the body, and is not corrupted or dissolved with it. And there is no inconvenience in attributing this sort of immortality to the brute creatures. * * * Whether they return into the soul and spirit of the world, if there be any such thing, as some fancy, or whether they pass into the bodies of other animals which succeed in their rooms, is not necessary to be particularly determined. It is sufficient to lay down this in general as highly probable, that they are such a sort of spirits, &c. * * * *
“Immortality, as applied to the spirit of man, imports that their souls are not only capable of continuing, but living in this separate state, so as to be sensible of happiness and misery. * * * And this is that which constitutes that wide and vast difference between the souls of men and beasts; and this degree of immortality is as much above the other as reason and religion are above sense.”
The continually contracting space within which these speculations could be canonically conducted received its last limitation in the airy regions of idealism. This subtle doctrine it has been usual to consider the offspring of a more accurate philosophy than that of the Peripatetics: and yet if ever there was a system which contained undeniable elements of the purest idealism, it was this of the Muhammedan Súfies.31 For, holding all visible and conceivable objects to be portions of the divine nature, it was impossible that they should admit the imperfections observable in them to have any real existence. Thus, far the greater part of all assignable qualities, as they could only exist in the perceptions of those observing them, passed at once into the precincts of a quasi delusion.32 Here however the danger was imminent. Sin and evil were the most notable of the qualities thus disallowed: and this being granted, the distinctions of virtue and vice would be rendered in a great measure nugatory, and the foundations of morality dissolved.33 This difficulty, which is no more than what all ideal systems have to contend with, as we know the Muslims utterly repudiated and condemned, it is fair to suppose they met, as other idealists do, by insisting on the palpable distinction between the nature and relations of objects. It is only by reasoning from relation that we have all along determined nature; and if we withdraw the first, we can no longer maintain the second. But in point of fact the contradiction cannot really take place. All that we do is to change the modus of existence; we do not and cannot affect existence itself, or any the least of its consequences. The whole system of relations, therefore, with all their train of rights and duties, virtues and vices, punishments and rewards, must be preserved and observed to the last, precisely as if no such discovery had ever been arrived at.
So completely, however, are men the creatures of habit, that it proves difficult to change the grounds of reality, without bringing reality itself into suspicion. The heresies were in every instance so much more palpable than the arguments which rebutted them — the cause of moral laxitude and neglect meets with such a powerful advocate within us — that the dangerous tendency of the Súfy metaphysics was commonly admitted to form a serious objection against their profounder cultivation.34 A yet more cogent dissuasive lay in the difficulty of satisfying others as to the soundness of those limits, which it was sufficiently troublesome at all times to maintain to their own conviction. The princes and commanders, who, like our own Henry, were invariably dabblers in scholastic science, could hardly have pursued its conclusions to equal lengths with the recluses over whose opinions they never hesitated to arrogate a jurisdiction; and many a profound theologian must have suffered in reputation, fortune, and even life, for the incapacity of his self-created judges. Hence, in this very work, the reserve and ambiguity with which the subject is treated.35 But it is chiefly in the works of the Poets that neophytes are warned of the perils that await them in this treacherous path. The vast and recondite nature of the subject, supplying those conversant with it with sources and symbols of feeling only distantly to be apprehended by others, made it the very food on which poetry would delight to feed. A connexion was at once established between the minutest and the vastest considerations. The simplest details of fact or feeling acquired an importance which nothing else could give. What to ordinary hearers might be an indifferent subject, to them became an awful one. What to others were metaphorical devices, the ordinary type and figure of poetic ingenuity, to themselves became sober assertions of a stupendous truth; the particular instances of one universal rule, giving to all things in heaven and earth their significance and their worthlessness — their immeasurable value and their indescribable emptiness. But while the Poets themselves seem labouring with the burden of thoughts too big for utterance, revelling in the conscious possession of treasures too rich for every-day expenditure, to their imitators and admirers the pursuit of similar attainments is represented as fraught with certain labour and sacrifice, very uncertain success, and possible perdition in this world and the next:36 expressions too readily explained by the bold and impious tendencies of the opinions we have just examined.
The general influence of the Pantheistic theory upon
the minds and morals of the many, is of course not to be
estimated by its liability to abuse in the hands of the few.
Though here too, it must be confessed — politically as well
as scholastically — its effects would be, and were, of a
chequered and questionable character. All that the great
mass of mankind would have leisure or inclination to
receive, would be the broad fact, that the objects of
creation, in its every department, were so many portions
of embodied divinity: a persuasion singularly calculated
to refine and elevate the thoughts and feelings; to inspire
men with high ideas of moral obligation, and warm
emotions of fraternal regard for every part and parcel
of animated life.37
In this, in fact, as in every other
instance of the moral impressions, whenever and wherever
prevailing, we trace an intimate and inevitable connexion
between opinion and the circumstances under
which it is entertained. It is the creed of a people more
conversant with the phenomena of nature, than with
those of society; experiencing more the bounty than the
rigour of the elements; free to explore the beauties of
the earth, and appropriate a sufficient portion of her
products, without being interrupted in their enjoyments
by the conflicting claims of a dense and redundant population.
On the other hand, the apathy and improvidence
which unearned comfort never fails to engender (often to
its own destruction) would draw from such a doctrine, as
by them interpreted, a support and sanction to their own
anti-social tendencies. Where all was deity, all must be
right; to innovate would be impious, to improve impossible;
the world and all its constituents must be left
as they were found: thus all abuse becomes incurable,
and most of all the abuse of power, already, in its own
right, possessed of an imposing aspect. This is the
passive injury, the active one is still more serious —
Neither the use nor the abuse of the theory, in these its wider applications, can be attributed to the Muhammedans, who, while on points of metaphysical discussion they made it peculiarly their own, had the better fortune to be guided, on points of popular practice, by a science taken from the Greek, and a religion that imitated the scriptural. But from this extended view of the doctrine as the product of local causes and social exigency — the temporary organ of functions indispensable to national economy — we may perceive that this, at least, the purely speculative portion of their philosophy, was indigenous to the Asiatic people: and hence one cause and one justification of the length at which it has been discussed. The same principle occupying an analogous though a less prominent position in the Grecian school, it is natural, in the first instance, to suppose that it was communicated to the Muhammedans, only as an ingredient in the drafts they were so constantly making on the latter. The conclusion, however, is at variance not only with the nature of the doctrine, but the characteristics of the people, and the general analogy of nature. The aim and genius of the Greeks, as growing out of their political energy, lay, indeed, in every direction, but in the practical more than any. From the example of surrounding nations, they saw that every thing was at stake; that all depended on their discovering a remedy for the approaching abuses of the civil power. Their legislators and philosophers travelled,38 so we are assured by themselves and their successors, to collect and mature principles, which they applied, on their return, in that brilliant series of political experiments from which the constitution of society dates afresh. Unless they had commenced at the outset with that preponderating bias to the speculative which the pre-existence of this doctrine explains, in the process of their national development there was nothing to generate it: the tendency lay all the other way. As part of the great Asiatic family, of course they originally shared in the great Asiatic persuasion. The very different lengths to which they pursued knowledge, and the very different results that attended their cultivation of it, make it only more indisputable that they must have bottomed upon some latent principle common to the whole: or how at a later period were their conclusions so easily incorporated with the rudimental science of the East? As the Asiatic nations could not have waited for these gallant borderers to initiate that, without which their corrupt society could not long be held together, so neither could the exacter notions of these last have proved reconcilable with Asiatic institutions, apparently so opposite, if the opposition had not been merged in some more elementary, and therefore less noticed, resemblance. In this very Treatise, it is easy to observe, that while the practical portion retains the form and pressure of the foreign school, the Pantheism transpires with a redundance peculiar to its native assertors. There is no constituting a whole out of parts that have not a natural and pre-constituted correspondence. For her physics and ethics western Asia is indebted to Greece, as what western country is not? Her metaphysics were her own, before they became another’s.
It is usual to burden the merits of Muhammedan science, as well adoptive as indigenous, with the demerits of Muhammedan politics; — to argue that if the people had possessed sound knowledge, they would have been sure to apply it, in the first place, to the proper adjustment of their own internal relations, — in other words, that if the best use is not made of a given advantage, its existence cannot be admitted. A certain vague and general presumption this argument might be sufficient to raise, in cases where the knowledge in question could be fairly held to subsist in the people, and not in a very limited portion of them. But as nations do not commence their careers together, but alternate with each other in opposite epochs of prosperity and decline, it must always happen, that some are at the height of knowledge, while others are in its commencement. Thus there will be a portion of exotic knowledge, always in advance of their own, which rising states will continually adopt from those already risen. But how — through what channels — by whose means? Obviously through the enlightened and observant classes, which, in nations so circumstanced, (not being commercial ones,) are both few and scanty; priests and statesmen being all upon the list. To these, or rather to the most intelligent portion of these, the improvements are long restricted. On the general mass, then occupied only with the material objects of want and desire, and averse from pursuing any speculations, most of all such as originate with foreigners, the influence is slow in extending, and partial when it extends. A continually increasing hoard of intelligence lies dormant at the extremity of the body politic, until the time arrives when the general system becomes capable of absorbing it. Now this time never has arrived with the Muhammedans, or with any other nation of modern Asia. With them, and with all people, its arrival depends upon other contingencies. Knowledge, though the great instrument, is not properly the element of political strength, which must have obtained a foregone existence, before the other can be welcomed or applied. Where knowledge is entirely of home production, its prevalence will, indeed, always argue a proportionate soundness and security in the grosser elements, on which its use, and therefore its cultivation, depends. But where, as with the practical portion of the science we are now considering, it happens to be a foreign exotic, it can no more supply the room of political powers, proper so called, than medicine can create the organs it is intended to regulate, or any exercise of mental faculty can alter or remedy a constitutional failure in the body through which it acts.
Yet, if any improvement short of complete political regeneration may be admitted as evidencing the presence of an ameliorating principle to which the Asiatic nations had previously been strangers, such may with certainty be inferred from their rivalry so long and closely maintained against the more favoured and durable institutions of Christendom. National energy, as it is the infallible consequence, must also be the sure evidence and test of an analogous step in the scale of social worth: the first being, in fact, only the sum of units which the latter supplies. Systems may indeed be adduced, like those of ancient Sparta, where, by a partial and misdirected cultivation of its elements, such worth was drawn from sources, which, ere long, gave birth to hostile products: and then both the unit and the aggregate were necessarily short-lived. But, as long as either may endure, it argues the existence of the other. Tried by this test, the question is merely this: Had the chivalry of feudal Europe immeasurably degenerated, in both respects from the standard of the Greek and Roman pagans; or had that of Muhammedan Asia immeasurably advanced beyond the standard of the old Asiatic barbarians, whom the contemporary soldiery of Europe despised? Even supposing the first of these suppositions to be to a certain extent affirmed, it will never be maintained that the vast difference in the ratios of equality can be attributed wholly to an inferiority in all modern to fractions of ancient Europe; and if not, then to whatever extent this inferiority may be denied, to the same extent the superiority of modern to ancient Asia must be affirmed: superiority dating only from the forcible assertion of the Muhammedan faith, and maintained under a careful cultivation of Muhammedan science.
But even if the inefficacy or worthlessness of their science were as clearly established, as they have here been disproved, neither the one nor the other, we have already seen, would militate against the peculiar value attributed to this its solitary specimen. It is not for the information it contains, but for that which it affords, that it is now offered to the attention of the learned; as an accurate index of views and feelings little understood, — a comment on some of the greatest revolutions that the world has ever seen, — a repository of novel and authentic characteristics, often interesting and always important. Among our obligations to it in the last particular, let us reckon our acquaintance with the better qualities of a class so bold as to maintain these principles, and so ill-fated as to see them constantly outraged. The defects of social science or of social system, to whatever degree prevailing, (and in the latter instance the degree was great,) seem to shed an equivalent lustre on the character of a priesthood constantly engaged in unavailing attempts to improve the one and reclaim the other. The social feeling of men in immature society, may indeed, as before remarked, be generally of a freer and warmer order than that prevailing in a civilized community; but only because it is less strongly tried. The moment that keener incitements to abuse arise, the defects of their institutions are betrayed; and the community must either amend its systems of self-control, or lose, by the action of vicious indulgence, the opportunities of amelioration which time and fortune may present. The consolidation of political authority is the first form in which this great national trial is induced. The power which is given for the good of the whole is too often applied to the enjoyment of a few. Intelligence and determination in the mass are the true and only correctives of this abuse; and where these were nationally wanting, those who could realize them in their own bosoms, scattering, not all in vain, the seeds of popular regeneration, — pleading, not always unsuccessfully, at the bar of arbitrary power, the cause of a public that deserted its own; — and this too, in spite of thanklessness from the client and danger from the judge; — the men who could so act are surely entitled to rank among the disinterested benefactors of the human race. Such a piece of pleading is the following Treatise: crude and extravagant perhaps in its doctrines, as compared with the productions of more favoured countries, but embodying at least some principles sacred to the interests of right; — capable in most of being reduced to the purer standards we ourselves enjoy; — and, above all, teeming with that ardent enthusiasm for the cause of right (however dimly apprehended) which gives to wrong itself some of the best attributes of virtue.
OUR book opens,1 as it ought, with the name of that glorious Power, who, marshalling by his mandate, issued before time began, the “thronging squadrons”2 of conceivable objects from remotest inexistence to the very capital of being, assigned in his bounty their vice-regence to Adam the earthy,3 invested him with a title to his friendship and approbation, and ennobled him by admission to his presence and his regard; — that gracious Creator, who made human nature as a page whereon the names of all things were recorded, and gave it to be worn4 for an amulet by the capacities of the reasonable soul; to the end that the intent of his own divine appellations and eternal attributes, together with all the minutiæ of scientific and practical wisdom, might thus be mastered (according to the text,5 God taught Adam the names, even all of them;) that in the gradual developement of its energies the heights of lofty acquirements and splendid faculties might one by one be climbed, and the elevated fruition of paramount exaltation in the school of spirits (according to the text, God said, O Adam, distinguish them by their names,) be merited as well as enjoyed.
Hail, too, to that perfect one, who, in the divine lucubrations, is as an opening to the volume of production and design, or, in the chapter of humanity, is as an exordium to teach the commendable in disposition and the becoming in act; — that perfecting one, by whom, from the guidance of propriety in the shape of “institutory distinctions”6 and less explicable7 observances of ritual, all who were seeking after the paths of divine direction were brought out of the perils of bewilderment to that perfection which they wished to reach, — all who were fainting with thirst in the moral deserts they had rashly entered were supported by means of right instruction, as it were by the beasts of a friendly caravan, to the limpid waters of reconciliation with God.
Hail, also, to his family and his companions:8 champions are they of our pure faith; guides are they of our bright path; chevaliers in the religious arena, and sentinels of our transcendent institute.
Next to the praises of that king whose bounty surpasses all others, and to our prayers and benedictions to the Prince of all mankind, (ever-blessed be he!) it is but right to adorn the ruggedness of our discourse with a few commemorations of an earthly potentate,9 the light of whose extended equity lends new lustre to the luminaries of heaven, and banishes all the obscurities of earth. * * * * * * * * * * And that is the greatest of sultans and highest of khācāns,10 in whose hands are the keys of the age, in whose grasp the reins that guide the interests of the human race, the protector of the land of God from assault and disaffection, the extirpator to their last remnants of oppression and aggression, sultan in the right of three generations, the glory of temporal and of spiritual dominion, alike of the world and of the faith; Hasán11 Bēg Bahādar Khān, the shelter of whose caliphat12 and the lustre of whose clemency may the Almighty make eternal, and never may the exalted standards be lowered which now float over the earth’s fairest portion, or his enemies cease to be raised — above all connexion with terrestrial affairs.13 * * * * * * * * * * * * * Among other marks of divine favour the greatest is, that this Lord of the conjunction14 has been favoured by the bounty of Providence with a virtuous son,15 who (according to the text, a good son takes pattern by his father, and not by others,) appears in justice and equity, and the other rules of government and administration, to take his father’s glorious character for his own model; like him, leaving no one of the minutest principles of church and state without its due observance. * * * * * * * * * * * * * Of his highness’s exalted nature and destiny a remarkable sign is this; that in spite of the freshness of youth, and the demands of youth and royalty, unlike those headstrong wassailers in arrogance who pass their leisure time in animal enjoyments and the encouragement of their passions, the greatest part of his auspicious moments (after the discharge of his religious duties, and attention to the claims and interests of his subjects,) he condescends to devote to the principles of science, the wonders of art, the exhortations and parables of the masters in wisdom and virtue, the histories of kings who were guided by justice, and of fathers who were pillars of the faith. This is sufficiently demonstrated by the book of choice precepts and rare apophthegms culled from the discourses of famous kings, pious fathers, and eminent philosophers, which (agreeably to the text, well is it for the assiduous in study,) he so constantly makes the companion of his enlightened mind.
Doubtless it is a book of valuable uses and lofty truths; and, as such, was deservedly kept by his highness’s great predecessors in the rich repository16 of their choicest jewels. Yet, as it was compiled by some ancient writer,17 and contains terms no longer known, and curious metres such as are now not current, his highness was pleased to direct even the unprovided author18 of the present to correct and complete it. On examining it for the purpose, it proved to be complicated and diffuse, as touching the unity of parts in the composition; and deficient, as touching its material, in not embodying the entire authorities on the science of morals and politics. Hence it was that the writer’s mind became impressed with a different plan; which was to form a fresh compilation, such, as while it contained the radices of the active science, might be illustrated as to evidence and proof from the shining light of Scripture passages, from the loop-hole where the lamp of prophetical tradition is preserved, from the torches gleaming amidst the language of the Prophet’s companions and followers, the elders and leaders of the faith, and from the rays of explanation scattered in the writings of the foremost divines of nature;19 adhering as far as possible in appropriate places to the scope of the former treatise,20 and, where congenial sentiments occurred, giving prelibations from the striking passages of those who look beneath the veil, in order that the whole may be supported by the conspicuous authority of the age’s chiefs. Such a work, with the Almighty’s assistance, and under the countenance of our glorious prince, I hope it may be rendered, that neither the principles of science, nor the ways of practical wisdom,21 may be inadequately or unworthily supplied to their respective votaries.
Now since it is the object of this work to ascertain the principles of the active wisdom, (which implies a knowledge of the nature of the human mind; because it is from this, through the medium of the will, that actions, whether praiseworthy or culpable, proceed,) in order that by means of such knowledge it may be cleared of vice and graced with virtue, and so arrive at the due perfection of which it is in search; and since these actions are divided into two classes,22 one that which relates to every person in the individual, (which we call the science of morals or propriety,) and the other that which relates to domestic society, or that which leads to the arrangement of domestic affairs and the unity of families, (which we call the science of housekeeping and management of home,) and a third, that which relates to the society of city and country, or empire and dominion, (which we call the science of government or political control,) such objects of such a work (which is named ‘Glances of a Speculation on the Commendable in Morals’23) are necessarily comprised in three divisions: and since the courtesy of composition requires the prefixing of a preface embracing sundry matters connected with the science, such as may enlighten the reader and assist him in mastering the subject, the whole has been distributed into an Introduction treating of the said matters, and three Books24 on the three subjects of inquiry, with sections and explanatory divisions at the writer’s pleasure. — Grace is from God; we serve not, we turn not, to any but to him.
GOD saith, The heavens, the earth, and all that is between them, we created not in sport; — and again he saith, Then think ye we have created ye in jest, and that ye are not to return to us? From the light thrown by these two important passages on each other, it is clearly evident to the eye of investigation, that all the particles of being, all the essences of this existent world, which have been wooed and won from infinite nothing to the consummation of sensible presence, and ushered into the state of being in all the glitter of God’s own baptism, (and who is better to baptize us than God, whose servitors we are?) have each and all (agreeably to the text, I gave every thing its nature, and direction moreover,) an end as regards others, and an interest as regards themselves, which may be considered as their respective fruit. For the act of absolute goodness, and all justifiable acts, though not perhaps resting upon any design, are yet never void of influences, advantages, ends, fruits: both which propositions are established in the science of divinity25 by proofs of definite nature and arguments of wide application.
Now the proper end of man,26 who is the abstract of all things, the model of models, and the quintessence of the world, is the vice-regence of God, as is clear from the text, Verily I am about to place a vice-regent upon the earth; and again, He it is who placed ye as vice-regents upon earth; and that noble passage, We offered our trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains; but they were loth to undertake it, and sought to be excused: man undertook it, and now hath he become ignorant and unjust. This trust if we impute to man’s reason or exertions, (as we find in the received commentaries,) let it be considered, as to the first, that both genii27 and angels partake in reason with mankind; and as to the second, that the genii may vie with men in labour likewise: so that this undertaking would not be peculiar to mankind; whereas from the tenour of the passage we perceive such peculiarity to be intended. We must impute it then to its connexion28 with the vice-regence of God, the difficulties of which none but weak man was fitted to support:
Now man’s title to the office of this vice-regence lies in his entire capacity for supporting contrary qualities, in such wise as to represent the contrary29 designations of God, and embody the twofold structure of this figural and intellectual world. As to the angels, although on the side of spirituality and its concomitants, the intuitions of knowledge, and all to which these lead, they are physically susceptible of the delights of reason; yet on the side of coporeality and solidity of substance they are entirely unprovided.30 The heavenly orbs again, although according to the principles of philosophy they possess a reasonable mind,31 still the virtues of such their minds are constitutional and innate, and their bodies exempt from conflicting conditions and differing propensities; so that they enjoy not that fluctuating movement through various steps and in divergent directions, that circum-lation32 through all the limits of imperfection, that shifting with the revolution of all things, so as to master the whole mass of reality in all its ramifications, which forms the essential peculiarity of human nature. In the outset of existence, advancing from the state of concretion to the stage of growth, and from growth to the state of animation,33 it passes on to consummation in the rank of humanity. Here, when graced with equability of temperament and the due adjustment of bodily and spiritual powers, he becomes like to the celestial orbs as touching both spirit and body; for to be intermediate between opposites is to be void of them.34 In the course of such his purification, his mind becomes figured with the pictures of past and coming events in their fragmentary aspects, even as are the spirits of the orbs: and this either35 from insight exercised into the world of patterns (for this world, in the opinion of the chief philosophers, may be perceived as well as conceived), or else from a retroversion of these pure pictures or ideas continually thrown off by the reasonable soul to illuminate the conception; after the fashion (as many philosophers think) of man’s bodily make, which rests on a principle of detrusion and propensity to revert. Advancing from this stage he practises a mental negation of all being but God’s — gains admittance to the transcendent rank of seeing unity36 and nothing else — and is classed with the angels of the presence, nay, in a higher order even than they; and this withal, not confined or limited to a single spot, but empowered to pitch his tent and carry on his inquiries in any quarter he may choose.
And hence the fathers of our Catholic38 persuasion, whose powers were equal to any discussion, are unanimous in determining that the best of men are superior to the best of angels:
As to ordinary men compared with ordinary angels, they give it the other way; as we find in the most popular treatises, though some have pronounced differently. At any rate, that the best of angels are superior to ordinary men, is not to be questioned. There is a saying of his reverence Aly the accepted (who may be considered as a gate in the city of knowledge, and a gate to which the aspirants after certainty should particularly resort — blessings and peace be with him!) that the Almighty had given to angels reason without desire and anger; to brutes desire and anger without reason; and to mankind gave both: so that if a man make desire and anger subject and obedient to reason, so as to reconcile them with reasoning perfection, he will rank above the angels: for into their perfection no inclination enters — nay, no choice; while men40 attain to it in spite of difficulties, and at the expense of labour and exertion. But if he allows his reason to be vanquished by desire and anger, he degrades himself beneath the brutes: for these in their failings are excused by the absence of an intellect to restrain them; which excuse men have not.
That contradiction which philosophers have acknowledged in the preference of men to angels, the author of Súfy41 idioms has shown us how to remove by adopting a middle course in this wise. Eminence differs from perfection; being determined by proximity on the chain of being to the common source — by the prevalence of spirituality and the purity attending it; whereas perfection depends on mastery. Although, therefore, being less subject to interpositions and more governed by severalty, the angel may be the more eminent being, man, by reason of his mastery and comprehensiveness, is the more excellent and perfect one. Thus, on bringing together the opinions on both sides, opposition is turned into harmony, and difference removed; Grace is from the Most High.
Now for men to realize this vice-regency, two things are necessary. 1. Mature wisdom, which is a term for perfection in knowledge. 2. Eminent ability, which is a term for perfection in practice. This position, however, is good only in case of their defining wisdom to be simply acquaintance with the condition of things; the nature of action taking it out of the class of things wherewith wisdom is concerned. In case of their defining it to be the arrival of the soul at the utmost perfection attainable by it in the direction both of knowledge and practice, there would be no occasion for the last term. The vice-regence would then be accomplished by wisdom only,42 inasmuch as practice is included in it; which second definition is indeed the preferable one, because more agreeable to the original meaning: for wisdom, in its philological sense, would reside in the use of right language and right acts. That text likewise, Whoso gaineth wisdom, verily he gaineth great things, is more consonant to this latter explanation. Then, under the first definition, such expressions as, Verily thou art the knower and the wise, would belong to the class of largesse in consecutive terms: now surely it were better to take the collocation for an expansion rather than a repetition of the sense. That eulogy, too, which ancient philosophers used in respect of philosophy, that, as far as might be, it was an imitation of God,43 comes likewise under the second meaning: for a complete imitation can only be effected by adopting all the properties of the divine nature; whereas it is clear that man by mere knowledge without practice44 reaches not the height of that perfection: indeed we are told as much by that prophetical tradition, Knowledge without practice is a burden, and practice without knowledge a mischief. His holiness, the refuge of revelation,45 prays God to save him from knowledge without practice when he says, Deliver me, O God, from knowledge that availeth not. Moreover, the meaning of that knowledge referred to in this interpretation of wisdom, is not the mastery of universal and received propositions, but an ascertainment of the ends of wisdom; whether acquired by experience and demonstration, as with the observative school, whom we call men of science, or by means of purifying and perfecting self, as practised by the school of self-denial,46 whom we call men of attainment and merit. Both these classes are equally entitled to the appellation of wise; or rather the latter is the most eminent and exalted class; inasmuch as their advance on the steps of perfection is entirely due to divine favour — a graduation in that highest of schools, We made him learned, in learning from ourself, that approaches nearest to the inheritance of the Prophets, who embody the purity of all creation. In the latter path the thorns of doubt and the pitfalls of suspicion are less plentifully scattered; yet do both reunite in the termination at which they arrive, neither can any discrepance prevail between the professors of the two.
Thus we are told that when Abú Saäíd Abulkhair47 and Abú Aly Seenā, (one the most accomplished mystic of his age, and the other the greatest of modern philosophers,) were thrown into each other’s society, after separating, one said, “All that he sees I know,” — and the other said, “All that he knows I see.” The merits of this school, indeed, have never been questioned by any philosopher, but affirmed of all. Thus Aristotle says:48 “These universal assertions are as it were the ladder leading to a desired height; whoso wishes to master them (by demonstration) must first acquire another nature.” The divine Plato,49 too, declared that he held a thousand propositions which he could not prove. Shaikh Abú Seenā says, in his Makāmāt ool Ârifína50 (words to the wise), “He that wishes to know them must first graduate for entrance into the school of perception without presence — the school that arrives at the fountain head without being directed to its traces.” That sage divine Shahāb odín Maktúl,51 who revived the canons of the old philosophers, tells us in his Tulwíhāt (inscriptions) — “In the vacancy of delight (for so in the idiom of that school they name abstraction52 ) I beheld Aristotle, and proposed to him several niceties in the investigation of perception, which is among the most abstruse questions of philosophy. After which he fell to extolling his master Plato, and went great lengths in his praise: I inquired whether any of us moderns had reached as high a rank. He answered, No, nor to a seventy thousandth part of his excellence.53 Thereupon I cited sundry philosophers of Islām, to none of whom he paid any attention, till I came to notice some of the school who look beneath the veil,54 such as Janíd of Baghdad,55 Abú Jazíd Bistāmi, and Sahal bin Abdalla Tústery. These, he said, are entitled to the name of philosophers, it is true — yet is this a course beset with sundry dangers and difficulties innumerable. Exposed to all the chances of infatuation, and the abysms of passion, the wayfarer is led astray, by nugatory inquiries and false suppositions, over all the wilderness of investigation; and worst of all, when at some slight showing, like the mirage of the sandy desert which the thirsty man takes for water, he wanders from his path,56 nor ever gives up pursuit, till, when he has gone he finds not any thing, and, when acquainted with its emptiness, disappointment and dejection are all he obtains:
Many a guide will enter the desert in noon-day heat, but few are they who can ensure arrival; and then a preceptor of this school (by which we are to understand one possessed of perfection and willing to impart it) is rarely to be met with; and the recognition of such a one (supposing him to exist) matter of debate and difficulty; for the human perfections are only to be recognised by one who is himself possessed of them, just as the value of jewels is known only to a dealer in them.
The generality of men, led astray by fictitious form and unsubstantial exterior,
At times, too, it will happen that one is deceived at the very outset by some specious but spurious object, and wastes his life in the service of what is worthless with the idea of its perfection, to the utter ruin of his character and fortune: God deliver us from inadvertence and delusion! Hence it was a practice with the early theorists to hold disputations with followers of the experimental road — a course essential in the pursuit of self-purification; for, if entirely denuded of regular knowledge, the votary can never be secure from the opposite pitfalls of excess and deficiency, and can hardly avoid offences against reason and religion. In his ignorance, perchance, of the limits of equipoise, he may undertake too rigid an austerity, and so occasion the ruin of his constitution and the defeat of his capacity. Hence that declaration of his highness the director of both worlds58 along the path of rectitude, — Never would God take the ignorant59 for his servant; and again, There are two that I cannot support — the fool in his devotions, and the intelligent in his impieties.
Since it appears, then, that the accomplishment of the vice-regence (which is the end of man’s creation) is connected and bound up with knowledge and practice, that science which proposes to ascertain the rules of conduct whereby this grand advantage is to be attained, may be considered the most important and most beneficial of any. Now this is practical wisdom, which philosophers have termed therapeutics of the mind;60 because, by the knowledge this gives us, we are able to maintain the equipoise in man’s perfected mind; which answers to the maintenance of health in his body. And similarly, we are able to restore reasonable souls to their equipoise, in analogy with the removal of disease from their bodies. For bad qualities are diseases of the mind.
On this topic the particulars to be adduced are these. The eminence of any science lies either in the dignity of its subject, or in the importance of its object and the advantages derivable therefrom, or in closeness of demonstration and argument: in all three of which reasons this science is distinguished by peculiar properties. Its subject is no other than the reasonable soul of man — seeing that it is from this (under the guidance of reflection and will) that actions do entirely originate, whether good and praiseworthy, or vicious and culpable. Now, the eminence of man is clear from the tenour of the foregoing observations. Its end is to perfect this pearl of high order. And for advantage, what can be greater than that by means of which we elevate the human mind from the position of brute beasts, or lower than they, to a rank higher than the angels? Hence certain of the eminent61 have termed it the philosopher’s stone; for the vilest of existent things, as a bad man is, may by these means reach a station more exalted than any other conceivable production: on which account it was that the ancient sages, whose wisdom had borrowed its lustre from the loop-hole of prophecy, directed the aspirant after excellence to commence with the science of moral culture;62 to proceed next to logic;63 next to mathematics; next to physics; and lastly, to theology. Hakím Abú Aly Mashkovi,64 however, would place mathematics before logic, which seems the preferable course; for by practising itself in the former, the mind becomes stored with distinctions; the faculties of constancy and firmness are established; and its rule is always to distinguish between cavilling and investigation — between close reasoning and cross reasoning; for the contrary of all which habits those are for the most part noted who apply themselves to logic without studying in some department of mathematics; taking noise and wrangling for proficiency, and thinking refutation accomplished by the instancing of a doubt. This will explain the inscription placed by Plato over the door of his house: “whoso knows not the khuitarāt65 (geometry), let him not enter here.” On the precedence of moral culture, however, to all the other sciences, the acknowledgment is general and the agreement entire.
It was a saying with the physician Hippocrates — “An unsound body, the more you nourish it, the more it increases in ailment:” which may be significative of a similar predicament in the mind; which, when not purified from vicious dispositions, experiences an augmentation of depravity by acquiring the truths of science; for it finds itself therein supplied with the material of pride and haughtiness, and empowered to carp at the good, and call the highest authorities in question. — Whereas the reason of so many students stopping short at the various stages of recusancy, secession, depravity, and ruin, is entirely this, that they do not act upon the proverb, — Enter the house by the doors thereof: — they do not exert themselves in the outset on the culture of the morals; but, having heard that knowledge delivers men from the bond of conformity, and exalts them to the dignity of investigation, and not knowing the proper meaning of the assertion, they entertain the absurd notion, that knowledge is to release them from the bonds of the institute, and absolve them from the established canons of the church. With this, not rising to any deliberate estimate, but actuated entirely by the calls of passion and propensities of nature, they divest themselves of the shackles of the institute, which, to the sincere wayfarers of improvement, are ornaments rather than bonds — turn like brute beasts with unblushing cheek to drink and pasture — and, like the ravenous ones, bite with tongues more sharp than teeth at the reputation of their coevals, and the honor of their masters and predecessors — men who are no less than the parents of their minds, and whose exertions must ever be gratefully acknowledged by the feelings of all genuine aspirants after perfection. Their next step is to renounce their belief in the miracles,66 which is itself (as we are informed by the text — Stupidity is closer to deliverance, than intellect which innovates,) one method of salvation; and not having arrived at any certain conclusion, like him whom demons have deluded, they remain in perplexity upon the earth, fluctuating in the midst of it, and belonging neither to these nor those. Of them it comes (among other ill consequences) that wisdom — the wine of paradise — the well-spring of the waters of life — held up as it is in so many passages of Scripture, and Sunnah, as entitled to our reverence and our gratitude — is exposed, through the vile nature of these triflers, (who may be described as bringing all honor into dishonor,) to the reprobation67 of its contemporaries: God deliver us and all the faithful from recusancy, and all other lapses in thought, word, and act: Power is not, nor strength, but in God; nor victory, except favour is displayed from God.
A certain difficulty there is which may chance to overspread the mental vision, and prevent us from discerning the Húri-like loveliness and angelic character of truths like these. This difficulty then it seems proper to examine, and endeavour its removal. It may thus be stated: the benefits of this art are then only to be realized when dispositions can be changed or altered — an hypothesis which is far from self-evident; its contrary being indeed more open to supposition; and from some expressions in the vehicles68 of truth (as where the Prophet says — If ye hear that a mountain has changed its place, believe it: but if ye hear that a man has changed his disposition, believe it not; and again — He shall assuredly return to that for which he was created) — it follows by extension of the sense that change of disposition is altogether impossible. According, too to the principles of science, disposition follows temperament, and temperament we know is incapable of alteration; or if any one taking the opposite side should assert alteration of temperament on account of the contrariety of temperament observable in a single individual during every year, nay, every instant, it may be replied, every one has a latitude of temperament intermediary between a determinate point of excess and a determinate point of deficiency; and that in every one of the four humours.69 Now if a disposition enters into all the degrees of temperamental latitude, so that its cessation would necessitate that of the person’s identity, (without which existence would be impossible,70) such a disposition undoubtedly it were wrong to attempt altering.
“No washing can whiten the Æthiop’s skin.”71 Thus, among the sayings of the Prophet, we find the following: Men have their metal like the metal of gold and silver:72 those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as they embrace it. Hence we are to conclude that the root of virtue is purity of substance and excellence of physical material; and that to endeavour after perfection, in spite of a coarse and mean original of nature, were like seeking to furbish glass into a ruby or emerald, or to polish iron into silver or gold, which of course is absurd.
Such is the statement of the difficulty in its fullest aspect. To remove it, we must premise that a disposition is a mental attribute, occasioning facility in some certain act, without necessity for thought or reflection. An attribute is a quality that is rooted in the mind: as we know in inductive science a condition, if quick to alter, is called state; if slow to alter, attribute. Now the cause of this disposition existing in the mind may be either of two: 1. Character74 — where, from original make, a person’s temperament is such that the aptitude for a particular quality is greater than for others; so that he is possessed by that quality on the slightest occasion, — as in the dry-hot for anger,75 — in the moist-hot for desire, — in the moist-cold for forgetfulness, — in the dry-cold for stupidity, and so on, as explained in treatises of philosophy and medicine. — 2. Habit: when in the outset having willed to accomplish any act, it repeat and practise the same till it is worn and used to the operation; so that the act is performed with ease in the absence of reflection, and, in short, becomes a disposition.76
Some think that all the dispositions are characteristic, that is, are constituents of character, and incapable of change; as we have explained in stating the difficulty. Others are of opinion, that some dispositions are constituent of character, and incapable of change; and others, adscititious and changeable. Others again think that no disposition is either characteristic or contrary to character, but that the mind has absolute power over its own constitution, and that, in both the opposite directions; whether with ease, which is when it is agreeable to temperament; or with difficulty, which is when it controverts temperament. Others again hold that in their original constitution men are linked with good; acquiring evil qualities and becoming wicked only by the gratification of their desires and the prosecution of gain. This opinion also was reversed by that of an ancient school,77 who maintained that men, in their original constitution, were formed of an imperfect character — the soul in its own essence being of light mixed with darkness; so that evil is implanted in its elementary material, and good it only admits by the intervention of instruction and discipline; and this, provided the evil portion be not in excess, and the dark prevail not over the light element. Galen’s opinion is, that some by character are good men, and some by character bad men, and some capable of both; which opinion of his own he thus demonstrates. If all human individuals were physically good, and evil be only an accident, still, that evil which is in them they must necessarily derive either from themselves or from others. In the first case, there must be in them some power necessitating evil; that is, they are not good in original character; for this would be contradictory: or if there were in them both a power to good and a power to evil predominating over it, the same repugnance follows to the proposition. In the second case, that of evil being derived from others, the same contradiction follows; for those others must be physically bad: man therefore cannot be entirely good. Precisely the same argument he applies to disprove the proposition of their being all bad; and after mastering these two points, he goes on to say — With ocular demonstration, I can perceive that the character of some men compels them to good, nor can they in any way depart therefrom; and these are few; and the character of others compels them to evil, neither can they in any way admit the good; and these are many: the remainder are intermediaries; good in the society of the good, and bad in the company of the bad. Such is the demonstration of Galen, as adduced in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry78 — the subtlety of which, however, will not escape an intelligent mind. For, according to the principles of his philosophy,79 no determinate origin can be assigned to human individuals: in which case the incidence of evil in every individual instance might be from others, and so on, till its primary origin is never fixed upon any individual who is to be considered bad in his own nature: for the connexion of causes is maintained unbroken; and this not supposititious, but actually in operation. And so of the second division, where the incidence of good might be accounted for in the same manner.
It has been suggested as probable by Shaikh Abú Seenā in his Shafā,80 that in consequence of elementary convulsions81 occurring at the great cycles,82 or of collapse, or something approaching to collapse, of the zones,83 (supposing it to occur), or of intersubstitution of the heights and depths, &c. &c.,84 those parts of the earth which admit of being populated and inhabited by living creatures (that is, the parts contiguous to the equator,)85 may remain till a determinate juncture overwhelmed by sea, and the earth consist only of parts so swallowed, and an expanse unfit for habitation by reason of excessive obliquity;86 and in such case animals and vegetables may be destroyed, and may afterwards originate by spontaneous production,87 and not by generation. For there is nothing to discredit the possibility of these species being spontaneously produced; since in many other species it is matter of ocular demonstration, that they do originate as well spontaneously as by generation; as certain worms that are producible from human hair88 — scorpions from exhalations — field-mice and sundry herbs from mould — frogs from rain, &c. Neither does it follow that because of others the spontaneous production does not take place during long intervals, that it should not take place at all; for it may depend upon a determinate juncture occurring only after such intervals. The probability is, indeed, that universal epochs of this nature do occur to the world, and that the great resurrection is such an one. Nay, as succession and generation are dependent on voluntary acts, such as coition, and not on irresistible tendencies, man must necessarily be provided with a capacity for spontaneous production to prevent the possibility of interruption to the species; for it is not absolutely certain that every individual will leave issue, nor therefore that any will. He then goes on to say, if any one will reflect on the principles of arts and sciences, he will perceive that they are all innovations ascribable to the reflection of a particular person; the proof of their novelty being in this, that they are all in daily process of improvement; which quality of theirs he urges in proof of the human race recommencing after succession by generation has been interrupted. For many of the sciences are of such sort as could only be originated by peculiarly favoured persons, or by divine suggestion, exceeding the established bounds. The person that invented them, therefore, must clearly have been independent of them in his own behoof, and must have originated such inventions for the sake of others his fellow-creatures.89 So far our Shaikh; — and in this view, the argument of Galen is deserving of consideration; though, after all, signs of contradiction may be found in it, and ample scope for differing remains.
The modern school of philosophers incline to the opinion, that no disposition is either characteristic or contrary to character; because, as there is no disposition but admits of alteration, and no disposition admitting of alteration can be characteristic, it follows that there can be no characteristic disposition.90 A minor proof is that we see by ocular demonstration, that men acquire virtues or vices according as they keep company with good or bad: as in forming the behaviour of children, particularly such as may be kidnapped and carried from place to place, it is clear that discipline has immense influence on them; and that, with greater or less ease, according to their ability, they take up the dispositions of those about them. Indeed, were dispositions incapable of change, the faculty of discrimination and reflection would be utterly useless; discipline and punishment would be criminal, and the laws of institute and ceremonial void. And then Aristotle’s opinion was,91 that the bad, by instruction and discipline, may be rendered good. That nothing really characteristic admits of change is clear; for it cannot be questioned that nothing can alter the character of fluid, so that on the removal of obstacles it tend not downwards; nor the character of fire from the opposite of this. The assertion is indeed absurd, and these illustrations are adduced to show its tendency.
Such and so put is the argument in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry, which, likewise, as any proficient in observative philosophy will perceive, is open to controversy. For as to that association which he cites, in congenial instances however certain it may be, from ocular evidence, that dispositions are altered, it is equally so that certain dispositions in other persons are entirely unalterable, and particularly in regard to the perfections of the observative faculty; such as induction, retention, facility of comprehension, and the like. We may see that some persons, however much they may labour after them, effect nothing whatever; which is the case with most students in our own time.92 On the strength then of this argument only, how can we affirm that no disposition is characteristic, and all dispositions are capable of change? In short, to admit it invariably is out of the question; and to admit it partially would be of little use; and then what they allege as to the absurdity of the opposite inference, and the adduction of instances to show it — with respect to the discriminative faculty being contravened and suspended, discipline and castigation being abandoned, and their nullification following the notion that no disposition admits of change, — all this is on a par with asserting that the science of medicine is nugatory, if every ailment admit not of cure: that the assertion is nugatory, there can be no doubt.
On the whole we may conclude, as Aristotle long ago affirmed, that the bad may become good by discipline and correction: and although this influence be not a paramount one, yet by repetition of the means some effect must follow on the object; and if the evil in them be not altogether extinguished, it will at least be diminished. We find then, that in order to establish the advantages of this science, it is not necessary to assert that all dispositions are capable of change; it is sufficient if there be any yielding of disposition generally among mankind: just as in the science of medicine, any refusal to yield, if it occur, must be in rare dispositions and rare instances. And similarly the benefit of this science to mankind in general is evident from its tendency to diminish the amount of evil. In no wise then does it involve any supercession of the penalties and restraints of the institute; because the inutility of remedy to one ailment or one person is no opprobrium to the science of medicine at large. If they say that on this showing there is no ground for troubling every person for the alteration of every culpable disposition, since possibly the particular disposition in the particular person may be incapable of change, I answer that, till the refusal to admit alteration be ascertained, it is the dictate of reason and religion to endeavour its alteration. In fact, we are told as much in the words, symbolic of truth, of the Prince of Men,93 when he says, — Strive ye; for every one may attain to that for which he was constituted.94
That the reasoning of most writers in this science has been grounded on an assumption,95 must have been apparent in the course of this discussion. In another place this will be more clearly stated,96 together with an apology for the practice of such assumptions — always under reference to the will of Almighty God,97 with whom rests all protection and all grace!
WE must state, as has been established from the researches of wisdom into the psychological branch of physics, that the reasonable2 mind has two powers,3 the power of perceiving and the power of impelling,4 and each of these powers has two divisions: in the percipient power, 1st, An observative intellect, which is the source of impression from the celestial sources,5 by the reception of those ideas which are the materials of knowledge; 2nd, An active intellect, which, through thought and reflection, is the remote source of motion to the body in its separate actions.6 Combined with the appetent and vindictive powers,7 this division originates the occurrence of many states productive of action or impact, as shame, laughing, crying: in its operation on imagination and supposition, it leads to the accession of ideas and arts in the partial state; and in its relation with the observative sense and the connexion maintained between them, it is the means of originating general ideas relating to actions, as the beauty of truth, the odiousness of falsehood, and the like. The impelling power has likewise two divisions; 1. The vindictive power, which is the source of forcibly repelling what is disagreeable; 2. The appetent power, which is the source of acquiring what is agreeable.
Now the first of these two leading powers ought to have dominion over all the powers of the body, so as to be itself entirely unaffected by them: or rather they ought to remain vanquished and subdued under its influence, betaking themselves each to the employment it may assign. In fact, in their prostration and subjection before the authority of this faculty, consists the proper government of man’s internal kingdom: no one bodily power having license to enter upon any undertaking without its orders, or general disturbance must ensue. When each several power thus betakes itself to its own peculiar function in the manner which the judgment prescribes, then from the culture of the observative intellect (the first branch of the percipient power) is obtained wisdom; from the culture of the active intellect (the second branch of the same) equity;8 from the culture of the vindictive power, courage; and from the culture of the appetent power, temperance.
Under this distribution equity would be the perfection of the active faculty. Some however have derived it differently; holding that the reasonable spirit has three distinct powers,9 by the operation of which its various influences emanate agreeably to volition; and when one of these powers prevails over other, such other is subdued or restricted. 1. The reasonable power, which they call the paramount or imperturbed spirit; being the source of thought and judgment, and the desire to spy into the minutiæ of things. 2. The vindictive power, which they call the brutal and passionate spirit; being the source of anger and bravery, the entrance into dangers and the craving for predominance and elevation of rank. 3. The appetent power, which they call the bestial or urgent spirit; being the source of lust, hunger, and the desires of sensual delight in eating, drinking, and sexual connexion. The number of the virtues then will correspond with the number of these powers; for when the action of the reasonable spirit is maintained in equipoise, and the desire of acquiring knowledge becomes established, from such its action knowledge is obtained, and, by consequence, wisdom; and when the action of the brutal spirit is at equilibrium, and, in subjection to the ruling spirit, it contents itself with what the judgment apportions to it, from such its action the virtue of coolness is obtained,10 and, by consequence, courage; and when the action of the bestial spirit is at equilibrium, and, in obedience to the intellect, it limits itself to what is assigned to it by the decree of judgment, from such its action the virtue of temperance is obtained, and, by consequence, liberality. Then when these three sorts of virtue have been realized, they become connected and blended together, and from the mixture of the three a condition results analogous to each, but presenting them in their highest perfection and completeness; and this they call the virtue of equity.
This exposition is from the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry,11 where the previous one is likewise given in brief.12 The wary and intelligent reader, however, will quickly perceive that in the first exposition equity is a simple quality; while under the second there is ground for predicating of it either way, as simple or compound. The simple, however, is nearer to the word; the obvious sense of equity being an equipoise of the nature analogous to that equipoise of the temperament which results from the harmonious combination of the diverse-natured elements composing it. Now it is agreed among the radices of science that the temperament is a simple quality: and from the language of philosophers on the present subject, it would seem on the whole that they understood equity as simple; although in other passages they appear to explain it as a compound one. Again, in the first exposition equity is the perfection of the active power;13 while in the second it is not confined to that, but is what they call the exercise of every one of the powers: such exercise belonging more to the observative power, yet having a connexion with the active one. So too under the second exposition the attributes are parts of equity, or equivalent to parts, like as the qualities of the elements are parts of the temperament, wherein likewise there is ground for predicating either way; philosophers, however, inclining to the simple. But in the first exposition the three-fold attributes are substrata to equity; because the perfection of the active power lies in the subservience to it of every other power, so that each may be employed in course of equipoise. Now equity itself is only a term for this: for the attribute of so employing the entire powers, on their appropriate occasions, in course of equipoise, according to reflection and expedience, can only subsist by that attribute which makes one power actuate another.14
According then to the prevailing acceptation, namely, that when the three-fold attributes have been secured the active intellect will necessarily possess a power of prevalence over the bodily powers, so that the entire powers are under its rule and guidance, itself remaining unaffected by them, (or, as the defender of the faith15 has laid it down, and explained it in his Ihyā Ikhtiyār, “equity is a state and power of the spirit by which this baffles resentment and desire; guiding them by the dictates of wisdom, and confining them in exertion and restraint to a conformity with expedience,”) — equity would be a thing simply implying the possession of the three-fold attributes; and constituting the perfection of the active intellect. Nevertheless, in its other aspect this same attribute is the head of the observative power, and the collective powers are its servitors: for in this power it is that the highest point of elevation is placed in that intuition into the essences of things which constitutes the supremest of felicities. And if we are to apply equity to the essence of the three qualities, it is composite, and there is no need to count it among the number of the virtues; for the whole of parts is not a separate part; a well-known corollary to the inherence of part in unity. Then too the separate vices (distinguishable only by their contrariety to it and its parts) are not easy to be assigned; because by these premises its species are merely the collective species of its parts, and its opposites are only the opposites of these; for any assignable peculiarity empowering it to make up a distinct genus out of the three coexistent qualities, we cannot discover in it. Hence it is that the first of Shaikhs, in his treatise on Morals, after taking up equity as pervading the collective powers, has paid no attention to its species and opposites, but has limited himself to treating of the species of the three qualities and their opposites: and all that others have brought forward as species of equity he has mostly included under the head of wisdom. — The realities of things are known only to God; but the Ihyā above quoted teaches us to question the position assumed by most books of this science, that namely of equity being the essence of the three attributes, and its species being nevertheless possessed of integral qualities.16
Some again have pointed it out as an involution of the argument,17 that they first divide wisdom into observative and active, one of which is identical with the science of morals, which comprises four virtues, of which the aforesaid wisdom is one; so that wisdom would here be a division of itself. Now this involution may be easily got rid of. For the wisdom so divided is acquaintance with the conditions of all things. In such a science it may itself be well the subject of disquisition, and yet no contradiction be incurred. Nay, the same holds good of the first philosophy which treats of all things,18 and the science, being one of them, may itself be the subject of one among its own propositions. Neither does it at all follow upon this that a thing may be part of itself: for science may mean either the proofs or the propositions. Now it is itself the subject of a proposition as regards the hypotheses, and not as regards the proofs. Assuredly it would be contradictory to say that either the propositions or the proofs (regarding them alone) constituted the science of wisdom: neither does the discrepance at all follow from the statement. This is giving the true and perspicuous answer which admits of no rebuttal. But they have likewise given a second, which is this: The meaning of wisdom in this place is the proper exercise of the active intellect, which is likewise styled active wisdom: and so the discrepance in distribution is obviated by the discrepance in meaning. It follows from this answer, that equity is not the collective of all the virtues; and yet they enunciate it the other way. The truth is, that in fair play, they have grounded their statement on an assumption; not choosing to embarrass the incipient moralist by defining his pursuit in an abstruse manner, but contenting themselves with what should engraft certainty on the channels of action, and be the means of delivering the inquirer after rectitude from the destructive wilds of vice. For it is at the outset of his studies that they direct him to this science, when, to embarrass him by certifying its intents secundum artem, would only serve to perplex and baffle his endeavours: certainty of this sort being only attainable in other branches of science which are beyond a tyro’s depth.19
In this summary way the generality of writers have explained the difficulty. The first of Shaikhs,20 in his treatise on Morals, has likewise noticed it, saying, in many parts of Shafā, that the perfection of intellect (active) consists in the elaboration of complete ideas upon the virtues and vices, as built upon the popular notions, which, after all, are agreeable to proof: but the adjustment of the proofs has to do with the perfection of the observative intellect. Agreement is the Lord’s, and in his hands are the reins of certainty.
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.
SINCE man requires food for his personal preservation, and this food must be elaborated by artificial expedients, such as sowing and reaping, grinding and sifting, kneading and baking — arrangements only attainable by mutual co-operation and co-parceny — (unlike the food of other animals, which is taken in its natural state, without the slightest interposition of art;2) and since the daily preparation of food in the measure of its daily consumption is out of the question, it follows that he must accumulate the necessaries of life, and secure them from others of his kind. And since such security is not to be accomplished without a place for depositing his provender, where the hand of violence cannot reach it, it follows that he requires a home.3
Again, since he is compelled to attend to the artificial expedients necessary to procuring food, he as certainly requires a partner who, in his absence from home upon needful occasions, may remain there in his place, and attend in turn to the safeguard of food and provender. This however regards only the individual state: as regards the social state, there is no dispensing with a wife, from whose embraces the maintenance of lineage and generation is to be effected. Divine Wisdom has accordingly ordained, that in marriage the interests of domiciliation and procreation should be provided for together.4
As soon as children are produced, another urgent consideration arises — that of rearing them in a proper manner. In the collective form of husband, wife, and family, their united interests cannot well be attended to without a coadjutor. It then follows therefore that he requires helps and attendants.
Of these constituents, then, the well-being of life is composed: father, mother, children, servants, food.5 Now since of any plurality the regulation depends on unity by coalition, the regulation of home may be said to consist in such artificial arrangement as will produce a coalescent combination of the individuals enumerated. The father being first in order of arrangement, to him the principality and management of family and home is properly consigned; and his duty as principal is to conduct this management by all the salutary expedients of encouragement and intimidation, of promises and threats, of severity tempered with tenderness, mildness, and suavity; by these means conducting all that are under his guidance to their appropriate perfection, and preserving them untainted from their incident ills.
Now the intent of home, in this point of view, is not a house of brick, or clay, or stone, or wood, but that particular coalition which takes place between husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, proprietor and property, whether they abide in a dwelling of wood and stone, or in tent and shed, or in tree-shade and cavern: and the science of domestic management is the knowledge whereby the conditions of any such collection may be so governed as to preserve them all from detriment.6
The need of this incorporation extending to all mankind, all are bound to acquire this science; the main principle of which lies in the rulers watching over the state of the above constituents, maintaining them in their proper positions, and repairing any injury that either may sustain. And like as the physician holds it right, nay obligatory, to amputate one limb for the benefit of a nobler, so in the domestic body we should be prepared to sacrifice the meaner to the higher constituent.
Albeit in this art, as we have said, no peculiarity of residence is contemplated, the wise have yet adverted to the construction of that noblest class of residences which we term edifices. To be good, they say, a dwelling must be strong, its roof verging to elevation, its entrances ample; rooms adapted for every time and season should be prepared in it, and the requisite care taken to provide against flood and fire, burglary, theft, and nuisance from reptiles.7 We have it among the dicta, that a house ought not to be higher than six yards; and when a greater elevation is attempted, there is an angel who cries, How much higher, thou wantonnest of wrongdoers!
Attention must likewise be given to the state of the neighbourhood. For it is allowed both in law and reason, that a bad neighbour is a great evil: on the other hand, when Plato took a house in a street of gold-workers, and was asked on what principle he did it, he said, it was in order to be awoke by their piercing clamour the moment that sleep overpowered and interrupted him in his studies and meditations.8
As it appears that stores of food and provisions are requisite to man, it is but prudent to let them consist of various descriptions, so that some at least may escape, though others chance to spoil.
Again, in the pressure of his transactions he requires money, which is the guardian of equity and the minor arbitrator of life:2 for by reason of its costliness and rarity, and the weight and compactness of its composition, a little of this is equivalent to a great deal of commodities; and hence it is that we are exempted from the necessity of transporting goods to a distance from place to place: whereas, if there were no such thing as money, we should be obliged to take commodities to market, however far removed.3
Next, as to property, it may be considered either with respect to income, or with respect to keeping, or with respect to expenditure.
I. Income is of two kinds — one proceeding from means which depend on the control of the individual, as professions; the other, from means beyond the reach of will, as inheritances and gifts.4 Of the first, which is termed profit, the sources are three, as many dignitaries of the faith have laid it down — farming, trade, and profession. Shāfei5 holds trade to be the best of the three. Bāürdy gives the preference to farming; whereupon the later writers have mostly remarked, that since in this age property is generally questionable,6 and falsehood prevails among mankind, trade is far from being a safe choice, and farming may easily be better; but in the previous age, lawful property was more abundant, and honesty and piety more general; and therefore it was that they then decided for the superiority of trade.7 Further, the wise have said that no dependence is to be placed on trade; for it presupposes capital, and capital is liable to decline.
Now there are three things to be avoided in profit: 1. Iniquity, as when any thing is gained by imposition, or change of weight and measure. 2. Infamy, as wine-dealing,8 buffoonery, jesting, and all that tends to debase. 3 Vileness, as filth-clearing, hide-tanning, and all that involves exclusion from the higher professions.
Professions are either necessary, (as agriculture,) or unnecessary, (as gold-working,) and may all be reduced to three heads — noble, mean, and indifferent.9 The noble are those which have to do with the intellectual power; being the professions of the well-born and well-bred.10 Of these the principal are of three kinds: 1. Those which depend on the quality of mind; as with statesmen. 2. Those which depend on attainment and merit; as book-making, rhetoric, astronomy, conveyancing, and surveyancing. 3. Those which exercise the strength and courage; as riding, tactics, strategy, &c. The mean professions are likewise of three sorts: 1. Those which are repugnant to the general interest; as magic, witchcraft, engrossing;11 and these are the professions of the worst classes. 2. Those which are incompatible with mental excellence; as wine-selling, dance-playing, dice-playing;12 and these are the professions of the volatile classes. 3. Such as produce physical loathsomeness; as polling, tanning, filth-clearing, &c. which last class indeed, in the eye of reason, are not repulsive; nay, it is indispensable to the regulation of worldly affairs that there should be a class so employed; — contrary to the two first, which are repulsive to reason.13
When settled in any profession, we ought to aim at its distinctions and perfections, and not rest content with labouring for any trivial purpose. For we may be assured that no station in the world is better than affluence, and that the best method of obtaining it consists in such a profession as comprehends equity, and is not far removed from temperance and refinement. Also, that all property which comes to hand by means of violence, or intimidation, or infamy, or baseness, however large it may be, is tainted and unblest: from such, both in law and reason, we are bound to turn aside. On the other hand, whatever is obtained by honest profit, small though it may be, brings a blessing with it.
II. In giving away property there is a moderation to be observed; and all ostentation, or assumption, or display of expenditure, should be avoided altogether. The outlay should invariably be less than the income; and strict regard should be paid to times of pressure, as droughts, scourges, pestilences, &c. And here it is advisable to have part of our property in money and specie, and part in lands, establishments, and stock, in order that if any thing occur to unsettle one kind, it may be made up in another.14
III. Expenses are of three sorts: 1. Such as we are bound to make in obedience to God and the ordinances of his law; as alms, oblations, vows,15 &c. 2. Such as we are pleased to make in token of our munificence, our favour, or our respect; as presents, appanages, &c. 3. Such as we are compelled to make in order to procure advantage or avert injury; as, under the first, gifts offered to the prince for the attainment of our purposes and the success of our undertakings,16 and likewise all disbursements for purposes of food and clothing for the family; under the second, the sacrifice of portions of property to oppressive and ignorant persons, for the safeguard of fortune and honor.
In the first sort, four things are to be observed: 1. That whatever we give be given in the fulness of zeal and good-will, and never the least regretted either in word or thought. For it would be the height of folly, when God, from the treasury of his bounty, has given a fortune to one of his servants, subject to the expenditure in a particular manner of an insignificant fraction, for him to consider the condition as burdensome to discharge. 2. That he spend it simply to the eye of God, and do not mix up the act with any meaner motive, lest thereby it be rendered null and void. 3. That he bestow the bulk of it on such as make a secret of their poverty; like those described in Scripture, From their extreme abstinence the ignorant man would declare them to be rich. 4. That, as far as in him lies, he give his alms in secret: for the ostentation of repute is folly, and appears to arrogate a return; whereby, perhaps, disappointment is the only one laid up even for him who would else be entitled to a better. We find it among the dicta, “Charity that is concealed appeaseth the wrath of God.” And again, “The best of alms is that which the right hand giveth and the left knows not of.” From the refuge of revelation we also have it, that when the just and holy God created the ground, it trembled and could not rest; whereupon he created the mountains to keep it still. At this the angels marvelled, and inquired whether any created thing were stronger than a mountain? He told them, Yes, fire. Again they asked whether any thing were stronger than fire? He told them, Yes, water. Any thing stronger than water? Yes, wind. Any thing stronger than wind? Yes, alms concealed, which the son of Adam giveth, so that the right hand gives and the left knows it not. Of this the influence is greatest of any; for it averteth the scourge that is ready to fall.17
In the second description, five things are also to be observed: 1. Expedition; for if long looked for, perchance the gratification may only balance, or even not balance, the pain of delay. 2. Secrecy; that he may be safe from the ruinous results of discovery.18 3. That he count it for trifling, even though it be much; for such is the feeling of the well-informed and high-minded. 4. That the gift be immediate and without postponement; for the length of a promise is its oblivion, and the waste of preceding presents. 5. That it be conferred on a proper object; otherwise it is sowing the sea-shore: and the proverb tells us,
In the third description, three19 things are to be observed: Moderation; — although in what may be meant as a safeguard from injury, the advisable course is to incline to excess; in as far as it may give greater security for life, property, and honor.20 For the generality of natures have retained no trace of propriety or justice, but are overrun with cupidity, covetousness, envy, and malice. And therefore we shall be more in the way of preserving honor by squaring our expenses to the opinions of the many, than to the dispositions of the few: and it cannot be questioned but munificence is in favour with the many.
OF matrimony it should be the original design and entire object to preserve the soul from falling into sin, to procure issue, and to preserve property; not to gratify corrupt desires, whether of lechery or of any other sort.2
The best of wives would be such an one as is graced with intellect, honor, chastity, good sense, modesty, tenderness of heart, good manners, submission to her husband, and gravity of demeanour. Barren she should not be, but prolific;3 a circumstance discoverable, if she be a maid, by the fact of other females being so in the family to which she belongs: if a femme couverte, by the fact of her having had children already. A free woman is preferable to a bond woman,4 inasmuch as this supposes the accession of new friends and connexions, the pacification of enemies, and the furtherance of temporal interests.5 Low birth is likewise objectionable, on the same account. A maiden is preferable to a woman, because she may be expected to attend more readily to her husband’s guidance and injunctions; and if she be further graced with the three qualities of family, property, and beauty, she would be the acmè of perfection.6
To these three qualities, however, sundry dangers may attach; and of these we should accordingly beware. For family engenders conceit;7 and whereas women are noted for weakness of mind, she will probably be all the slower to submit to the husband’s control; nay, at times she will view him in the light of a servant,8 which needs must prove a perversion of interest, an inversion of relation, and an injury in this world and the next. As to property and beauty, they are liable to the same inconvenience; while in beauty there is this further and peculiar evil, that a beauty is coveted of many; and since women possess less of that judgment which restrains from crime, it may thus lead to mischiefs without end.9
In the management of a wife there are three things to be maintained, and three things to be avoided.
I. Of the three things to be maintained, the 1st is dignity. He is constantly to preserve a dignified bearing before her, that she may forbear to slight his commands and prohibitions. This is the primary means of government, and it may be effected by the display of his merits and the concealment of his defects. 2. Complaisance. He is to comply with his wife so far as to assure her of his affection and confidence; otherwise, in the idea of having lost it, she will proceed to set herself in opposition to his will. And this withal, he is to be particular in veiling and secluding10 her from all persons not of the harem, in conversing with her in conciliatory terms, and consulting her at the outset of matters, in such sort as to ensure her consent. 3. Towards her friends and connexions he is to follow the course of deference, politeness, cordiality, and fair-dealing; and never, except on proof of her depravity, to take any wife besides her, however superior in family, property, and person. For that jealousy and acrimony which, as well as weakness of judgment, is implanted in the nature of women, incites them to misconduct and vice. Excepting indeed the case of kings, who marry to multiply offspring, and towards whom the wife has no alternative but obedience, plurality of wives is not defensible. Even in their case it were better to be cautious; for husband and wife are like heart and body, and like as one heart cannot supply life to two bodies, one man can hardly provide for the management of two homes.11
The wife should be empowered to dispose of provisions as occasion may require, and to prescribe to the domestics the duties they are to perform. In order that idleness may not lead her into wrong, her mind should be kept constantly engaged in the transaction of domestic affairs, and the superintendence of family concerns and interests. For idleness is what the human mind cannot support: when unengaged with what is necessary, she needs must engage in what is unnecessary; she goes forth and beholds the men; her husband grows insignificant in her eyes; she loses her dread of wrong-doing; she is courted by libertines, and ends in ruin.12
II. As to the three things to be avoided, the 1st is excess of affection, for this gives her the predominance, and leads to a state of perversion. When the power is overpowered, and the commander commanded, all regularity must infallibly be destroyed. If troubled with redundance of affection, let him at least conceal it from her; and if it becomes overpowering, let it be resisted by the treatment already prescribed for the purpose.13 2. Let him not consult her on matters of paramount importance; let him not make her acquainted with his secrets, nor let her know the amount of his property, or the stores he possesses, beyond those in present consumption; or their weakness of judgment will infallibly set them wrong.
We are told in history, that Hajāj14 had a chamberlain,15 with whom, having been long acquainted, he was on very familiar terms. In the course of conversation, he happened one day to remark, that no secrets should be communicated and no confidence given to a woman. The chamberlain observed, that he had a very prudent and affectionate wife, on whom he placed the utmost confidence; because, by repeated experiment, he had assured himself of her conduct, and now considered her the treasurer of all his fortunes. “The thing is repugnant to reason,” said Hajāj, “and I will show you that it is.” On this he bade them bring him a thousand dinārs16 in a bag, which he sealed up with his own signet, and delivered to the chamberlain; telling him the money was his, but he was to keep it under seal, take it home, and tell his wife he had stolen it for her from the royal treasury. Soon afterwards Hajāj made him a further present of a hand-maiden,17 whom he likewise brought home with him. “Pray oblige me,” said his wife, “by selling this hand-maiden.” The chamberlain asked how it was possible for him to sell what the king had given. At this the wife grew angry, and, coming in the middle of the night to the door of the palace where Hajāj resided, desired it might be told him that the wife of chamberlain such-an-one requested an audience. On obtaining access to the king, and after going through the preliminary compliments and protestations, she represented, that long as her husband had been attached to the royal household — bondsman as he was to his majesty’s favour, he had yet been perfidious enough to peculate upon the privy purse; an offence which her own sense of gratitude would not allow her to conceal. With this she produced the money-bag, saying it was the same her husband had stolen, and there was the prince’s seal to prove it. The chamberlain was summoned, and soon made his appearance. “This prudent affectionate wife of yours,” said Hajāj, “has brought me your hidden deposit; and were I not privy to the fact, your head would fly from your shoulders, for the boys to play with, and the horses to trample under foot.”
3. Let him allow his wife no musical instruments, no visiting out of doors, no listening to men’s stories, nor any intercourse with women noted for such practices; especially where any previous suspicion has been raised. We have it among the Prophet’s dicta, that women should be forbidden to read or listen to the history of Joseph, lest it lead to their swerving from the rule of chastity.18
The particulars which wives should abide by are five: 1. To adhere to chastity. 2. To wear a contented demeanour. 3. To consider their husbands’ dignity, and treat them with respect. 4. To submit to their directions, and beware of being refractory. 5. To humour them in their moments of merriment, and not disturb them by captious remarks.19
The refuge of revelation declared that if the worship of one created thing could be permitted to another, he would have enjoined wives to worship husbands. Philosophers have said, A good wife is as a mother for affection and tenderness; as a hand-maiden for content and attention; and as a friend for concord and sincerity: while a bad wife is as a rebel for unruliness and contumacy; as a foe for contemptuousness and reproach; and as a thief for treacherous designs upon her husband’s purse.20
When a person is afflicted with an unsuitable wife, there is no cure for it like mutual separation,21 provided other considerations (as the loss of children, &c.) do not militate against it. If this is not to be contrived, there is no alternative but to soothe and humour her with money and the like. The best of all expedients next to this is to commit her to the care of some person who can restrain her from wrong-doing, and then to take a long journey, and remain a long time in the taking it. It may be that the gladdener of sorrow will vouchsafe to give thee joy, in the shape of some soft message from her side.
The Arab philosophers say there are five sorts of wives to be avoided: yearners, favourers, deplorers, back-biters, and toad-stools. The yearner is one who has had a child by a former husband, and who indulges him out of the property of her present one. The favourer is a woman of property, who makes a favour of bestowing it upon her husband.22 The deplorer is one who has had a husband better, as she avers, than her present one; at whose conduct, accordingly, she is incessantly exclaiming and complaining. The back-biter is one un-invested with the robe of continence, and who, ever and anon, in her husband’s absence, brands his blind side by speaking of his faults. The toad-stool is an unprincipled beauty, whom they mean to liken to vegetation springing from corruption: the same idea, indeed, we find among the dicta of the Prince of Prophets.
Now any one who cannot or does not attend to the management of his wife had better continue in celibacy.
THE first requisite is to employ a proper nurse of a well-balanced temperament; for the qualities both temperamental and spiritual of the nurse are communicated to the infant. Next, since we are recommended by the Institute to give the name on the seventh day2 (after birth), the precept had better be conformed to. In delaying it, however, there is this advantage, that time is given for a deliberate selection of an appropriate name. For if we give the child an ill-assorted one, his whole life is embittered in consequence. Hence caution in determining the name is one of the parent’s obligations towards his offspring.3
If we would prevent the child’s acquiring culpable habits, we must apply ourselves to educate him as soon as weaned. For though men have a capacity for perfection, the tendency to vice, as was before explained,4 is naturally implanted in the soul. Accommodating then the moral culture, in the manner before prescribed,5 to suit the disposition, we should lose no time in applying it. Shame, as we have remarked, being the first indication of the discerning power, the prevalence of this feeling is a proof of superiority and merit; and the sooner it is perceived, the greater pains should be taken to educate him properly.6
The first requisite is to restrain him absolutely from all acquaintance with those excesses which are characterized as vice. For the mind of children is like a clear tablet, equally open to all and any inscription.7 Next to that, he should be taught the institutes of religion and rules of propriety; and, according as his power and capacity may admit, confined to their practice, and reprehended and restrained from their neglect. Thus, at the age of seven, we are told by the Institute to enjoin him merely to say his prayers; at the age of ten, if he omits them, to admonish him by blows. By praising the good and censuring the bad, we should render him emulous of right and apprehensive of wrong. We should commend him when he performs a creditable action, and intimidate him when he commits a reprehensible one; and yet we should avoid, if possible, subjecting him to positive censure; imputing it rather to oversight, lest he grow audacious. If he keep his fault a secret, we are not to rend away the disguise; but if he do so repeatedly, we must rebuke him severely in private, aggravating the heinousness of such a practice, and intimidating him from its repetition. We must beware, however, of too much frequency of detection and reproof, for fear of his growing used to censure, and contracting a habit of recklessness; and thus, according to the proverb, “Men grow eager for that which is withheld, ” feeling a tendency to repeat the offence. For these reasons we should prefer to work by enhancing the attractions of virtue.
On meat, drink, and fine clothing, he must be taught to look with contempt, and deeply impressed with the conviction that it is the practice of women only to prize the colouring and figuring of dress;8 that men ought to hold themselves above it; and similarly of food and drink, that to make them the object of regard is the conduct of a brute. The proprieties of meal-taking, as presently given, are those in which he should be earliest instructed, as far as he can acquire them. He should be made to understand that the proper end of eating is health, and not gratification; that food and drink are a sort of medicine for the cure of hunger and thirst; and, just as medicines are only to be taken in the measure of need, according as sickness may require their influence, food and drink are only to be used in quantity sufficient to satisfy hunger and remove thirst.9 He should be forbidden to vary his diet, and taught to prefer limiting himself to a single dish. His appetite should also be checked, that he may be satisfied with meals at the stated hours. Let him not be a lover of delicacies; he should now and then be kept on dry bread only, in order that in time of need he may be able to subsist on that. Habits like these are better than riches. Let his principal meal be made in the evening, rather than the morning, or he will be overpowered by drowsiness and lassitude during the day: flesh let him have sparingly, or he will grow heavy and dull. Sweetmeats and other such aperient food should be forbidden him; as likewise all liquid at the time of meals. Incumbent as it is on all men to eschew strong drinks, there are obvious reasons why it is superlatively so on boys, — impairing them both in mind and body, and leading to anger, rashness, audacity, and levity; qualities which such a practice is sure to confirm. Parties of this nature he should not be allowed unnecessarily to frequent, nor to listen to reprehensible conversation.10 His food should not be given to him till he has despatched his tasks, unless suffering from positive exhaustion. He must be forbidden to conceal any of his actions, lest he grow bold in impropriety; for, manifestly, the motive to concealment can be no other than an idea that they are culpable. Sleeping in the day and sleeping overmuch at night should be prohibited. Soft clothing and all the uses of luxury, such as evaporative retreats in the hot season,11 fires and fur in the cold, he should be taught to abstain from: he should be inured to exercise, foot-walking, horse-riding, and all other appropriate accomplishments.
Next, let him learn the proprieties of conversation and behaviour, as presently explained. Let him not be tricked out with trimmings of the hair and womanly attention to dress, nor be presented with rings till the proper time for wearing them. Let him be forbidden to boast to his companions of his ancestry or worldly advantages. Let him be restrained from speaking untruth,12 or from swearing in any case, whether to true or false: for an oath is wrongful in any one, and repugnant to the letter of the Institute, saving when required by the interest of the public;13 and even though oaths may be requisite to men, to boys they never can be so. Let him be trained to silence, to speaking only when addressed, to listening in the presence of his elders, and expressing himself correctly, — observances essential in all, but most of all in the sons of noblemen.
For instructor he should have a man of principle and intelligence, well acquainted with the discipline of morals, fond of cleanliness, noted for stateliness, dignity, and humanity;14 well acquainted with the dispositions of kings, with the etiquette of dining in their company, and with the terms of intercourse with all classes of mankind.
It is desirable that others of his kind, and especially sons of noblemen, whose manners have always a distinguished elegance, should be at school with him; so that in their society he may escape lassitude, catch demeanour, and exert himself with emulation in his studies. If the instructor correct him with blows, he must be forbidden to make outcries; for that is the practice of slaves and imbeciles.15 On the other hand, the instructor must be careful not to resort to blows, except he is witness of an offence openly committed. When compelled to inflict them, it is desirable in the outset to make them small in number and great in pain; otherwise the warning is not so efficacious, and he may grow audacious enough to repeat the offence.
Let him be encouraged to liberality, and taught to look with contempt on the perishable things of this world; for more ill comes from the love of money than from the simoom of the desert or the serpent of the field. Imām Ghazāly, in commenting on the text, Preserve me and them from idol-worship, says, that by idols is here meant gold and silver; and Abraham’s prayer (peace be on him!) is, that he and his descendants may be kept far removed from the worship of gold and silver, and from fixing their affections on them; because the love of these was the root of all evil.16
In his leisure hours he may be allowed to play, provided it does not lead to excess of fatigue or the commission of any thing wrong. Such are the proprieties which in all men are becoming, and most of all in young ones.
When the discerning power begins to preponderate, it should be explained to him that the original object of worldly possessions is the maintenance of health; so that the body may be made to last the period requisite to the spirit’s qualifying itself for the life eternal. Then, if he is to belong to the scientific classes, let him be instructed in the sciences, according to the system already stated; if to the artistical, let him be employed (as soon as disengaged from studying the essentials of the Institute) in acquiring the arts. The best course is to ascertain, by examination of the youth’s character, for what science or art he is best qualified, and to employ him accordingly; for, agreeably to the proverb, “All facilities are not created to the same person,”17 every one is not qualified for every profession, but each for a particular one. This indeed is the expression of a principle by which the fortunes of man and of the world are regulated. With the old philosophers it was a practice to inspect the horoscope of nativity, and to devote the child to that profession which appeared from the planetary positions to be suitable to his nature.18 When a person is adapted to a profession, he can acquire it with little pains; and when unadapted, the utmost he can take do but waste his time and defer his establishment in life. When a profession bears this incongruity with his nature, and means and appliances are unpropitious, we should not urge him to pursue it, but exchange it for some other,19 provided that there is no hope at all of succeeding with the first; otherwise it may lead to his perplexity. In the prosecution of every profession, let him adopt a system which will call into play the ardour of his nature, assist him in preserving health, and prevent obtusity and lassitude.
As soon as he is perfect in a profession, let him be required to gain his livelihood thereby; in order that, from an experience of its advantages, he may strive to master it completely, and make full progress in the minutiæ of its principles. And for this livelihood he must be trained to look to that honorable emolument which characterizes the well-connected. He must not depend on the provision afforded by his father. For it generally happens, when the sons of the wealthy, by the pride of their parents’ opulence, are debarred from acquiring a profession, that they sink by the vicissitudes of fortune into utter insignificance.20 Therefore, when he has so far mastered his profession as to make a livelihood, it is expedient to provide him with a consort, and let him depend on his separate earnings.
The kings of Fārs, forbearing to bring their sons up surrounded by domestics and retinue, threw them off to a distance, in order to habituate them to a life of hardship.21 The Dilemite chiefs had the same practice. A person bred up on the opposite principle can hardly be brought to good, especially if at all advanced in years; like hard wood, which is with difficulty straightened.22 And this was the answer Socrates gave, when asked why his intimacies lay chiefly among the young.
In training daughters to that which befits them — domestic ministration, rigid seclusion, chastity, modesty, and the other qualities already appropriated to women — no care can be too great. They should be made emulous of acquiring the virtues of their sex, but must be altogether forbidden to read and write. When they reach the marriageable age, no time should be lost in marrying them to proper mates.23
Such is the method of educating children; and since we have had occasion to promise an exposition of certain so-called proprieties of behaviour, we are bound to compress them in the present place; not that those proprieties are here given as solely incumbent on the young, but because the young are to be supposed more capable of acquiring them.
He should not talk much, for it is a sign of levity in feeling and weakness in judgment, and tends to lower him in point of consideration and position. We are told that his eminence the Sanctified used to observe the strictest medium in his language; so much so, that in the most protracted interviews, you might have counted the words he uttered. Abuzarj Mihr used to say, “When you see a person talking much without occasion, be sure he is out of his senses.”24
Let him not give vent to expressions till he has determined in his own mind what he is going to say. It is a saying with the wise, Think often before you speak. Neither let him repeat his words without occasion; but if such occasion arise, let no discrepance be observable in the repetition.
When any one is relating a story, however well known to the listener, the latter is not to intimate his acquaintance with it till the narrative is concluded. A question put to others he must not himself reply to; if put to a body of which he is a member, let him not prevent the others; and if another is engaged in answering what himself could answer better, let him keep silence till the other’s statement is completed, and then give his own; but in such sort as not to annoy the former speaker. Let him not commence his reply till the querist’s sentence is concluded. Conversations and discussions which do not concern him, although held in his presence, he is not to interfere in; and if people conceal what they are saying, he must not attempt furtively to overhear.
To his elders he should speak with judgment; pitching his voice at a medium between high and low. Should any abstruse topic present itself, he should give it perspicuity by comparison. Prolixity he should never aim at, when not absolutely required; on the contrary, let it be his endeavour to compress all he has to say.25 Neither should he employ unusual terms or far-fetched figures. He should beware of obscenity and bad language; or if he must needs refer to an indecent subject, let him be content with allusion by metaphor. Of all things, let him keep clear of a taste for indelicacy, which tends to lower his breeding, degrade his respectability, and bring him into general disagreement and dislike. Let his language upon every occasion correspond with the exigency of his position; and, if accompanied by gesticulation of the hand or eye or eyebrow, let it be only of that graceful sort which his situation calls for. Let him never, for right or for wrong, engage in disputes with others of the company; least of all with the elders26 or the triflers of it: and when embarked in such dispute, let him be rigidly observant of the rules of candour. Let him not deal in profound observation beyond the intellect of those he is addressing, but adapt his discourse to the judgment of his hearers. Thus even his reverence the refuge of revelation has declared — “We of the prophetic order are enjoined to address men in the measure of their understandings:” and Eesa (blessed be he!) said, “Use not wisdom with the unwise to their annoyance.”27 In all his conversation let him adhere to the ways of courtesy. Never let him mimic any one’s gestures, actions, or words,28 nor give utterance to the language of menace.
When addressing a great person, let him begin with something ominous of good, as the permanence of his fortune, felicity, and so forth.29
From all back-biting, carping, slander, and falsehood, whether heard or spoken, let him hold it essential to keep clear; nay, even from any partnership with those addicted to such practices. Let him listen more than he speaks. It was the answer of a wise man to those who asked him why he did so, “Because,” said he, “God has given me two ears and only one tongue;” which was as much as to say, “Hear twice as much as you speak.”30
He should not hurry as he walks, for that is a sign of levity; neither should he be unreasonably tardy, for that is a token of dulness.31 Let him neither stalk like the overbearing, nor agitate himself in the way of women and eunuchs; but constantly observe the middle course. Let him avoid going often backwards and forwards, for that betokens bewilderment; and holding his head downwards, for that indicates a mind overcome by sorrow and anxiety. In riding, no less, the same medium is to be observed.
When he sits, let him not extend his feet, nor put one upon another.32 He must never kneel except in deference to his king, his preceptor,33 and his father, or other such person. Let him not rest his head on his knee or his hand, for that is a mark of dejection and indolence. Neither let him hold his neck awry, nor indulge in foolish tricks, such as playing with his fingers or other joints. Let him avoid twisting round or stretching himself. In spitting and blowing his nose, let him be careful that no one sees or hears him;34 that he blow it not towards the kiblah, nor upon his hand, his skirt, or sleeve-lappet.
When he enters an assembly, let him sit neither lower nor higher than his proper station. If he be himself the head of the party, he can sit as he likes, for his place must be the highest, where-ever it may be. If he has inadvertently taken a wrong place, let him exchange it for his own as soon as he discovers his mistake: should his own be occupied, he must return without disturbing others or annoying himself.
In the presence of his male or female domestics, let him never bare any thing but his hands and face: the parts from his knee to his navel let him never expose at all; neither in public nor private, except on occasions of necessity for ablution and the like.35
He must not sleep in the presence of other persons, or lie on his back, particularly as the habit of snoring is thereby encouraged. Should sleep overpower him in the midst of a party, let him get up, if possible, or else dispel the drowsiness by relating some story, entering on some debate, and the like. But if he is with a set of persons who sleep themselves, let him either bear them company or leave them.
The upshot of the whole is this: Let him so behave as not to incommode or disgust others; and should any of these observances appear troublesome, let him reflect, that to be formed to their contraries would be still more odious and still more unpleasant than any pains which their acquirement may cost him.
First of all, he should wash his hands, mouth, and nose.36 Before beginning, he should say In the name of God, and after ending he must say Glory to God.37 He is not to be in a hurry to begin, unless he is the master of the feast;38 he must not dirty his hands, or clothes, or the table-linen; he must not eat with more than three fingers,39 nor open his mouth wide, nor take large mouthfuls, nor swallow them hastily, nor yet keep them too long unswallowed. He must not suck his fingers in the course of eating; but after he has eaten, he may, or rather ought, as there is scripture warrant for it.
Let him not look from dish to dish, nor smell the food, nor pick and choose it. If there should be one dish better than the rest, let him not be greedy on his own account, but let him offer it to others. He must not spill the grease upon his fingers, or so as to wet his bread and salt. He must not eye his comrades in the midst of his mouthfuls. Let him eat from what is next him, unless of fruit, which it is allowable to eat from every quarter.40 What he has once put into his mouth (such as bones, &c.) he must not replace upon his bread, nor on the table-cloth: if a bone has found its way there, let him remove it unseen. Let him beware of revolting gestures, and of letting any thing drop from his mouth into the cup. Let him so behave, that if any one should wish to eat the relics of his repast, there may be nothing to revolt him.
Where he is a guest, he must stay his hand sooner than the master of the feast; and whenever the rest discontinue eating, he must act in concert with them,41 except he be in his own house, or some other where he constitutes part of the family. Where he is himself the host, he must not continue eating when the rest have stayed their hands, so that something may be left for any one who chances to fancy it.
If he has occasion to drink in the course of his meal, let him do it softly, that no noise in his throat or mouth may be audible to others. He must not pick his teeth in the view of the company, nor swallow what his tongue may extract from between them; and so of what may be extracted by the tooth-pick, let him throw it aside so as to disgust no one. When the time comes for washing his hands, let him be exceedingly careful in cleaning his nails and fingers. Similar must be his particularity in washing his lips, mouth, and nostrils. He must not void his rheum into the basin: even the water in which his mouth has been rinsed, let him cover with his hand as he throws it away. Neither must he take the turn from others in washing his hands; saving when he is master of the entertainment, and then he should be the first to wash.42
GRATITUDE to our benefactors is a duty both of reason and revelation, and, next to the bounty of Providence, there is none so great as that accorded by parents to their children.2 The father is formal cause3 of their existence. Medium of their maintenance he continues to be, by supplying them with food, clothing, and other necessaries conducive to life prolonged and maturity completed: medium, likewise, of their arriving at mental perfection, the proprieties, the merits, and the arts of life: by his own great and manifold exertions on their account acquiring and amassing valuables which he lavishes upon their wants in preference to his own.
The mother, besides being coefficient with the father in causation of life, hath endured all the fatigue of gestation, the peril of parturition, the pain of labour. From the blood of her body was their earliest food secreted and their tenderest life preserved: long hath she watched over them — restrained and instructed them — in the height of her affection sacrificed herself for them.
Thus it is, seeing the affection of parents for their child is an instinctive one of nature, and that there is no need of urging them to an observance of his rights, while with children the case is otherwise,4 — thus it is, that in the institutory injunctions children are much oftener told to be good to their parents than the converse. It is clear then, in all justice, that after duty to our Creator, we are bound to be dutiful to our parents.5
But further, since the all-sufficiency of the divine kingdom is of too elevated a sort for us poor outcasts of want’s narrow lane, in return for bounty without end, to enter upon any the least discharge of gratitude or compensation, (the utmost progress of the pilgrims of devotion being limited to acknowledging their own inability and incompetence,) whereas with our parents the case is far otherwise, their need of us being most manifest on infinite occasions; in some sort their claims upon us may be said to stand first of all. Indeed, by the principles of the Institute, no less, the rights of men may be insisted on precedently to those of God. Holy, righteous, and supreme, he doth nothing but bestow. Verily worlds upon worlds can add nothing unto him.
The accurate discharge of parental rights may be accomplished by three things: 1. In the heart sincere affection, in the tongue and members complete veneration; with conformity in the utmost of our power to all they enjoin or prohibit; — always provided no criminality or breach of duty be involved. Yet should it involve either or both, still is our opposition to be conducted with suavity, not in censoriousness, saving where the Institute demands. Ghazāly gives it as the prevailing opinion of the Fathers, that even in doubtful points we are to obey our parents; how much more in indifferent ones! 2. To afford them the assistance which their circumstances require (as long as it involves nothing impracticable) without application, acknowledgment, or requital. 3. To take every occasion, whether secret or open, of demonstrating our regard; and to observe their every injunction, as well after as before their decease.
And whereas the rights of the father are mainly in behalf of intellectual, and those of the mother in behalf of corporeal benefits, (for which reason it is that gratitude and affection for the former is posterior to the power of judgment, while the claims of the latter are recognised from the first; the attachment of children being stronger for the mother;6) for this reason, our obligations to a father we should discharge by instances in which the intellectual preponderates, such as deference, prayer, and praise; and our obligations to a mother, by instances in which the corporeal preponderates, such as presents of money and supplies of necessaries.
Disobedience, being that vice which is the opposite of this virtue, hath likewise three species correspondent to the above.
Now persons holding the place of parents, such as grand-parents, uncles on either side, elder brothers, and faithful friends, are their representatives, and should be treated, as far as possible, with analogous regard. There is a genuine dictum purporting that to pay regard to a father’s friends is the best of good actions. According, too, to what was previously explained touching the force of spiritual affinity, a similar or rather a stricter course must be pursued towards a preceptor, who is father to the soul.7
IN the eye of reason, servants are a sort of supernumerary hands, feet, eyes, and other members. For they are engaged in occupations which, but for them, we must attend to ourselves; and in which, in that case, some one of our own members must be employed. If no such class existed, rest would be banished from the world; and, in the pressure of urgent transactions and avocations, no progress could be made in art or excellence. And this withal a loss of dignity and weight must follow, with every variety of fatigue, and this to every individual. We should regard them, therefore, as loans from the Almighty, and loans for which we are bound to be grateful. In our proceedings towards them, we should be guided by kindness and benignity; never setting them to work beyond the equitable limit, and appointing them their periods of repose. For they, no less than ourselves, are necessarily subject to weariness, heaviness, and exhaustion; and in their nature, as in ours, the calls of nature are ineradicably fixed: nay, we should regard them as partners in the same essential conformation with ourselves; and if God has favoured us by placing them under our control, the least we can do in return for the obligation is to abstain from oppressing them. In regard to food and clothing, the Prophet has himself enjoined us to place our servants on a par with ourselves.2
Before engaging a person in our service, we should first take an attentive survey of his qualifications; ascertaining them physiognomically and conjecturally, where we cannot by experiment. Deformity of shape and uncouthness of feature we had better avoid. For nature mostly follows formation — the contrary is an exception. The sages of Fārs used to say, “God’s best attribute is his beauty.” And there is a dictum, “Go for your necessities to the well-favoured.” And again, “When you despatch an emissary, let him be engaging both in name and appearance; for beauty of exterior is the first favour we bestow on others.”3 And again, it is said, that all the prophets have had fine shapes and sweet voices. As to persons diseased, the one-eyed, the halt, the scabby, the leprous, and the like, of course we must shun them altogether.
If we perceive acuteness to prevail in a servant’s character, we should beware of him, for in most instances deceit and treachery go along with it. On this point ever-so-much bashfulness with ever-so-little sense, is better than ever-so-much sense, if attended with impudence;4 for shame is the best of feelings. The work on which we employ a servant should be that for which we see in him signs of aptitude, that for the implements of which he displays a dexterity, and the uses of which are agreeable to his feelings. For every one has an aptitude for some one employment. We should never think of setting our horse to keep watch for us, nor our cow to win a race; and similarly we ought not to require from any person any thing but that for which he is qualified.
When we have engaged a servant in any duty, we ought not to discharge him from it on the showing of every slight offence: for this is the practice of the severe and unreflecting. Besides, when he is discharged, some other must have his place, and how know we whether the successor will be better or worse than the other? To impress upon the servant’s mind indeed that there is no severance between his interests and ours, is not only more agreeable to benignity and fair-dealing, but the surest means of giving him an eagerness to exert his feelings and faculties in our behalf. For if he supposes the connexion between himself and his master to be a permanent one, he will consider himself interested in that master’s property and possessions, and count the family fortune and influence to be in some measure his own. But if he perceives the connexion to be insecure, and liable to determine on the slightest occasion, he will consider his service as temporary; and instead of discharging the duties of partnership, he will be laying up a store against the day of separation.
In service the great point is, that it be dictated by affection rather than by necessity, so as to be performed of love, not of obligation; or, if not, then by hope rather than by fear; so as to be performed, if not of love, at least of obligation rather than of force. For when a person is constrained to an undertaking, he can have no inward liking for it, and will proceed in it no further than for the prevention of injury he needs must do. The interests of our servants we should prefer to our own, and so contrive that they may perform the tasks assigned them in the spirit of cheerfulness, not in the guise of weariness and disgust.
In the adjustment of their circumstances, regard must be paid to their respective positions. They are to be encouraged by bounty, as well as intimidated by vigour. If any of them repeat an offence which he has already engaged to abandon, he must be corrected with appropriate chastisement. Neither are we therefore at once to despair of his amendment. But as soon as by repeated trial we are convinced that he is irreclaimable, he must be discharged most promptly, lest the others be corrupted by intercourse with him.
For service a slave is preferable to a freeman, inasmuch as he must be more disposed to submit to, obey, and adopt his patron’s habits and pursuits, and can have less expectation that their connexion will be dissolved.5 As to the classification of servants, for spiritual attendance the choice should be determined by sense, expression, modesty, and ingenuousness; for purposes of lucre, by continence, exactitude, and acquisitiveness; for employment in house-building, by strength and patience under hard labour; and for keeping watch, by wakefulness and loudness of voice.
Again, the species of servants are three: 1st, The free by nature; 2nd, The menial by nature; 3rd, The menial by incontinence. Of these the first are to be treated like children, the second like cattle and beasts,6 and the third to be encaged for our pleasures, and employed as occasion requires.7 As to their species, considered nationally, Arab servants are noted for language, eloquence, and acuteness; but stigmatized for their troublesome dispositions and strong passions. Of these, again, the Abyssinians8 possess acknowledged integrity and steadiness of behaviour; but their haughtiness and intolerance of indignity is equally certain. Those of Middle Asia have great good sense, conduct, good-humour, and discrimination; but as much trickery, knavery, and pretence. Romish ones are esteemed for integrity, probity, and exactness; but disapproved for parsimony and sordid feeling. Hindus are recommended by aptness of conjecture, and induction; but censured for spitefulness, conceit, and fraud. Turkish ones are remarkable for bravery, generosity, usefulness, and dashing exterior; but notorious for perfidy, hardness of heart, and unconcern for their employer’s safety.9
IT is a well-known principle of science, that as regards the perfection of things, they are of two classes; those whose perfection is simultaneous with their existence, like the heavenly bodies;2 and those whose perfection is subsequent to their existence, like the compound organizations in which we find a natural progress from incompleteness to perfection. Now this progress cannot take place without the co-operation of means: which means are either themselves perfections, like the forms attached by divine bounty to the action of the seminal juices3 and destined themselves for the perfection of the human nature; or else they are preparations giving to such material forms their ability to act, like the supply of food to the body, whereby the latter attains to the perfection of developement.
This co-operation acts altogether in three ways: 1. With the matter, when it co-operates with the particles of the thing supposed, as food with the animal frame; 2. to the organs, when it co-operates with the thing in its instruments of action, as water with the power of nutriment; 3. by ministration, when it assists the thing in an act conducive to its perfection: which last again is of two sorts: (1.) ministration by nature, when the thing’s perfection is the end of the act; (2.) ministration by contingence, when the act has something else for its end, and the perfection ensues in consequence. An example of the first sort, according to the second of philosophers, Abú Nasar Fāryāby,4 we have in the serpent tribe, who minister by nature to the elements;5 since, from that action upon other animals which occasions the destruction of their frames and the resolution of them into the primary elements, they derive no gratification to themselves: an example of the second in wild beasts, who make the meaner animals their prey in pursuit only of such gratification; and the resolution of these into the primary elements follows as a consequence.
Now the minister by nature being meaner than that to which it ministers, man, who is the noblest of created things, ought not to minister to any unless by contingence; while they, on the contrary, should all co-operate with him, as well materially as organically, as well constitutionally as contingently. Thus the elements are the particles of which his body is compounded, and vegetables and animals the material of his food; which is co-operation by matter. Again, of each of the elements he makes a tool for his actions, both of nature and of choice; as of fire and water in cooking his food, with the condiments thereof, and in cooling or warming his person; of air in respiration, which is the reviver of life; of earth in raising the material of his food, in building his habitation, and the like. So likewise of plants and animals — some he makes his food, some his medicament, and some his labourers. Nay, the very stars of heaven doth he make his ministers; for the divisions which their motions afford, he, by correct observation, makes instruments in his own transactions, both for agriculture and the disposition of life.6 Thus we are told in Scripture, But for you, I had not made the heavens; and in the Touriat it is written, “O son of Adam, I have created thee for myself, and all besides I have created for thee.”7 On this passage if an intelligent mind would ponder, the mystery of the angels falling down before mankind would be penetrated; and the secret of the inversion observable in the shape of plants and animals, — plants being made in the structure to bend, and animals in the shape to kneel to him, — would be speedily revealed to the eyes of discernment.8
Individuals of the human species may co-operate each with each by ministration, but not implementally; still less in the form of matter. Materially indeed they never can co-operate by the very terms of their nature, which is an indivisible essence. But in like manner as man is dependent on the co-operation of the elements and their products, he depends likewise on that of his fellow creatures for preservation both of person and of species; and ought undoubtedly, in the way of ministration, to co-operate with them.
Other animals are no less dependent on the elements and their products; but as to dependence on their own kind, they differ according as they may or may not be spontaneously engendered. Most of the aquatic tribe have no need of their kind, either for the existence of the individual or the perpetuity of the species; while those that are engendered by procreation, as the graminivorous and other tribes, appearing to co-operate as well in preserving their species as in producing the individual, and bringing it to maturity, are so far dependent on their species. With the attainment of maturity, however, the dependence ceases; so that at the period of coition, and for the time of their offspring’s growth, they are obliged to associate; after that, each may subsist in solitude. In others, again, as bees, ants, and certain species of birds, a continued co-operation is required to preserve both individual and species.9
Now man’s dependence on his kind for individual preservation lies in this, — that if every one had food, clothing, and lodging,10 arms, implements, and methods, to prepare for himself, and had consequently to furnish himself with the instruments of the carpenter and the smith, and so on of the other requisite crafts, and had further to employ himself for himself upon each as a preliminary to obtaining food, clothing, and lodging, — then obviously for all the period in which he was occupied in preparing these implements, with their precursory craftships, he must remain without food, clothing, and lodging, and must perish in consequence: nay, if he devoted his time entirely to one of these crafts, the whole would be insufficient for its attainment. But when men congregate together, and co-operate with each other, and each for other perseveres in one employment, and threads the way of justice in reciprocal co-operation and interchange, the necessaries of life are amassed, the situation of individuals secured, and the perpetuity of the species provided for.11 An allusion to this hypothesis we have in that tradition which tells us, that when Adam (blessed be he!) came down into this world, he had to pursue a thousand occupations before his bread was baked; and cooling it afterwards was the thousand and first. Philosophers have a saying, that there are a thousand things to be done before any one can put a morsel of bread into his mouth.
Since then the regulation of human affairs depends on co-operation, supreme wisdom has ordained that individuals should differ in aim and character, so that each may affect a different profession, and study to perfect himself therein.12 If all men were unanimous in their aims, they would all incline to one profession, others remaining unexercised; and ruin would be the consequence. So too if all were equal in want and wealth, no one could anticipate advantage from serving others; or if all were rich, being thereby independent, they would no longer minister each to each.13 Now, however, that our aims are differently ordered, each selects his own profession, and masters it by practice. And since by the constitution of things each is in some degree dependent upon other, each should apply himself to some pursuit in behalf of other, and by their reciprocal co-operation the condition of all (as actually befalls) may thus be made secure.
It is clear then that men are under the necessity of congregating with their fellow creatures in the manner designated by the term civilization, which is derived from civitas, a city,14 and signifies congregating in a city. By the word city, however, in this instance, is not meant buildings of stone or brick, but only, in analogy with the explanation before given15 of home, such a public aggregation as occasions the proper regulation of affairs. And this is the meaning of philosophers in calling men citizens by nature;16 they are naturally impelled to that peculiar congregating which we call civilization.
Now since different natures have different wants, and all agree in following their own advantage, men must not be left to their own natures, or their mutual co-operation could not be effected; for each, in pursuing his own advantage, would be injuring the rest: this must lead to dissension, till they fell to hurting and destroying one another. Some provision, therefore, must evidently be made for rendering each content with his rightful portion, and restraining the hands of violence from reciprocal injury. Now this provision is termed supreme government.17 To this end, as has been explained in the Section on Equity, there must be a law, an executive, and a currency.
The law-giver is a person honored with divine inspiration and direction for the establishment of ritual ordinances and practical rules, according to that course which may best conduce to utility in this world and the next.18 This person the philosophers call law-giver, and his directions the law; while the moderns term him delegate and institutor, and his directions the Institute. Of these Plato has said, “They are possessed of vast and transcendent powers;”19 that is, they are distinguished from the rest by their capacities for knowledge and practice, through divine instinct being acquainted with the minutiæ of things hidden, and empowered to occupy this whole world of existence and decay. Aristotle says of them, “these are they to whom God hath given most.”
Next, as to the executive, he is a person20 honored with the divine support, in order to his carrying on the amelioration and providing for the interests of individual men. The philosophers designate him the absolute sovereign, and his directions the sovereign function; and the moderns call him Pontiff [Imām] and his proceedings Pontificate [Imāmat21]. Plato calls him, “the controller of the world;” and Aristotle, “the man of the city;”22 that is, the man who keeps the affairs of the city in their due course. And when the interests of the age are guided by a prince of distinguished worth, prosperity and blessings of every kind never fail to result to all parts of his dominions, and to every subject in them.
* * * * * * * *
The first object of this controller of the world should be to maintain the injunctions of the Institute. Yet in the details of matters he has a discretion to consult the exigencies of the juncture, in such manner as may be most consonant with universal principles. Such a person is indeed the shadow of God — the divine vice-regent — the vicar of the Prophet. And like as the experienced physician preserves the equilibrium of the human temperament, should the prince watch over the health of the world’s temperament (which some have called the equipoise), re-adjusting it from every deviation it may experience. In truth, then, he is the world’s physician,23 and his science that of therapeutics to the universe. Even as the members of the human body depend in their maintenance on the heart for animal spirit and vital power, and the heart depends on the liver for constitutional spirit and the nourishment of the rest, and both depend on the brain for intellectual spirit and the power of sense, and the brain depends in turn on both of them for life and nourishment, so too do the members of mankind depend for maintenance upon each other; the perfection and completeness of every one being obtained from many.24 For this reason intercourse with our fellow creatures in the way of co-operation is incumbent on us all; or else we deviate from the first principle of justice, and fall into the path of iniquity: like that class of persons who betake themselves to a savage retirement from mankind, and remain altogether aloof from co-operation with their fellow men, loading them, however, with the burden of their support; and this they call seclusion and consider meritorious, whereas in fact it is altogether a state of iniquity. For their food and clothing they derive from their fellow creatures, giving them no benefit in return, and leaving the price of it unpaid. The materials of vice being wanting, nothing vicious is of course to be observed in their conduct; whereupon the vulgar hold them to be men of virtue: but most erroneously. For temperance is not the abandonment of desire, but the exercise of it in the course of equity; and equity it is, not to refrain from oppression where no one can be found to be oppressed, but to keep in view the path of integrity and moderation in the midst of our transactions with mankind.25 Abul Hasán Āmiry is of opinion that professional fabulists are even worse than the class we have mentioned; because, although resting on the support of other men, and levying contributions on them, they yield them no advantage in return; deceiving them with lying tales that ruin their capacities.
Lastly, co-operation in the way of equity is only to be realized when we are informed in what equity consists — a knowledge only obtainable by an acquaintance with the principles of this science. In order then to the conduct of their intercourse and their transactions in the course of equity, the study of this science is necessary to all, and especially to princes, who, according to our previous statement, are physicians to the temperament of the world, and controllers in the concerns of all the human race. And again, this science may be said to be a term for all the principles affecting the general welfare of mankind; because it is only by mutual co-operation that any progress can be made in advancing towards absolute perfection.26
As it appears that the perfection of men in the individual depends on association and concord, which can only be realized by affection and unanimity, and as we before explained2 that where the ties of affection subsist all occasion for equity is superseded, affection must be superior to equity. In fact, it is analogous to unity of nature, whereas equity is analogous to unity of art: now, that the natural is preferable to the artificial has already been ascertained.3 Affection suspends the operation of duality, in which view again equity is no longer needful: for equity originally means division into two equal parts; that is, the equitable person divides that on which he determines into equal portions between himself and his friend; — a process plainly derivative from plurality: and where the bond of unity is firmly knit, occasion for such process exists no longer.4
It was held by a class of ancient philosophers, that the consistence of all things lay in affection only, and that nothing could be void of affection, any more than it could be void of existence and unity.5 Thus in the various states of animal bodies as to heat or cold, a repugnance is perceived to the opposite — in the natures of animals and vegetables a resistance may be observed to things hurtful — in the simple elements attractions are discovered to operate on their election of constitutions to organize — nay, in the very heavens themselves an appetent persistance is remarked in circular motion, proceeding from a love of the intellectual essence, and a yearning to resemble it.6 Indeed, it is an established maxim in philosophy, that according as the light of affection is emitted or withheld, the differences of things in the several degrees of perfection or deficiency are determined: affection, which is an effluence of unity, producing permanence and perfection; and violence, which is a derivative of plurality, occasioning weakness and collapse. This class of philosophers are called the school of affection and violence. Other philosophers, too, as before intimated,7 have asserted a circulation of affection throughout the universe.
According to the phraseology of the modern school, however, the term affection is not applied to any state into which the intellectual power does not enter. The attraction of the elements towards their natural well-being, and that of the compound organizations towards each other according to their temperamental relation, as of iron for magnet, or their mutual repulsion according to temperamental interval, like that between mineral and the corrosion of acid and vinegar, and the like, they term not affection and hostility, but attraction and repulsion. The reciprocal agreement and repugnance of brute beasts they call combination and aversion.
Affection, peculiar to the human species, is of two sorts: the first, natural; as that of parents for their children: the second, arbitrary; as that of a pupil for his preceptor. This arbitrary affection is of four kinds:8 1. That which is quick to arise and quick to depart. 2. That which is long in production, and long in continuance. 3. That which is long in production, and quick in departure. 4. That which is quick in production, and long in continuance. For the object of this affection is either pleasure, or interest, or good — or some combination of one or more. Pleasure engenders an affection quick to arise and quick to depart; for mere pleasure is easily accomplished and speedily disturbed. Interest engenders an affection slow to arise and quick to depart;9 for it is difficultly accomplished and speedily destroyed. Good produces an affection quick to arise and slow to depart; — quick to arise, because between good persons a mental harmony and spiritual concord is sure to prevail; — slow to depart, by reason of that real unity which attends on good. A combination of these will in general engender an affection slow to cement and slow to dissolve: for a coalition of interest and good requires no less; though that of pleasure and interest may be intermediate as to its connexion, and positively tardy in its severance.10 The cause of which laws will be evident on an examination of that which results from the ingredients in their simple state; though certainty belongs only to God.
Affection is a more extensive term than friendship, for it may prevail among a numerous body; whereas friendship applies to fewer.11 Love, again, is the most limited of any; for the love of two persons cannot find place within a single heart. The cause of love is excessive eagerness either for pleasure or for good: the first of which species is culpable, and has been designated, in a previous passage,12 by the term animal love: the second species is praiseworthy, and has been designated in a previous passage by the term spiritual love. But it is a maxim with philosophers, that into love interest cannot enter — neither independently nor by participation.
The friendship of the young is generally founded upon pleasure; and this being quick to terminate, their attachment is likewise liable to alter. The friendship of the old, like that of the commercial classes, is caused by interest; and hence their friendship may have some endurance.13 The friendship of the wise is occasioned purely by good; and this being a stable and unalterable thing, the regard of the wise is defended and ensured against change and termination. Again, since the human body is composed of conflicting natures, bodily pleasure, while it agrees with one nature, will be hostile to another: so that it can never be exempt from the invasions of pain.14 The mind, on the contrary, being a simple essence into which no hostile ingredient can enter, the pleasure of which its nature is susceptible is pure and unmixed; and such are the pleasures of wisdom. The affection, therefore, that originates in this species of pleasure is of the most perfect order, and this they call perfect affection and divine love.15
Aristotle quotes a saying of Arklítas [Heraclitus] to the effect that dissimilar things are not susceptible of perfect agreement and conjunction; whereas similar things have a reciprocal attraction. On this he further remarks, that simple essence, being similar and reciprocally attracted, a spiritual conjunction and moral unity may at all times be established between them, to the entire merging of separation. For separation belongs to material objects, in which this degree of coalition cannot subsist. A meeting of these, quoad nature and essence, is not to be imagined; but only quoad limits and surfaces: and such meeting reaches not the pitch of interjunction above described. The simple essence, then, which is no other than the human mind, when purified from the perturbing influences of the body, and after the affection of natural pleasures has been expunged from it, is, by the laws of relation, necessarily attracted towards a purer world, where it gazes with the eyes of intellect upon the beauty of truth,16 merges its own moth-like existence in the absorbing lustre of divine perfection, and gains the stage of unity, which is the highest of all stages. Such is the elevation to which knowledge may aspire: to the attainment of which the incumbrances of the body or the deliverance from it are matters of indifference. For the exercise of his bodily powers can no longer restrain such an one from contemplating the beauty of Truth; and that privilege which with others is hoped in the next world, with him is enjoyed in the present one.
And yet it must be acknowledged that after total separation his pleasure will be purer. For although in this life, by the aid of epithets and attributes, the light of intellect may attain to a certain visual perception of essential unity, this can never be free from that alloy of corporeality18 which must attend a state of confinement in the beholder. Vision, perfect and unexposed to the meteoric warfare of the heavenly out-posts,19 is not to be obtained except in the unclouded observatory into which, on our final emancipation, we shall emerge. Wherefore, in anxious expectation of the hour that is to draw the curtain and remove the veil, let him teach his present condition to be vocal with those well-known words —
Such affection is the extremest degree of love — the absolute perfection — the topmost station of the accomplished — the highest step of the perfected.
Next to this comes the affection of the good for each other; for this, having good for its object, is inaccessible to corruption: unlike other affections, which are subject to the chance of separation on the slightest cause. As indeed we are taught from the following text of Scripture: In one day may friends turn hostile each to each; saving the pious. As to affection with a view to interest or pleasure, it may take place either between good or bad persons; but must always be quick to terminate, as we have before explained. Such affection is frequently owing to a companionship in foreign parts, or in situations of hardship; as on ship-board, on expeditions, and the like. The cause of which peculiarity lies in this, that men have a natural tendency to associate, and hence the name Insān, from Ans, associating. This natural sociality being peculiar to the race, and the perfection of every thing being in the developement of its specific peculiarity, the perfection of man must lie in the developement of this tendency towards his fellow creatures. This, then, is the origin of affection, and affection naturally leads to concord and combination.
But, besides the sanction it obtains from our reason, the sacred Institute has bestowed especial care upon this very point.20 Hence its injunction on men to perform their prayers five times daily in a body, in order that by the sacred influence of so significant a gathering the several wards might be adorned with concord. Again, it enjoined that the people of the entire neighbourhood should assemble in one place, and perform their Friday21 prayers in a body; in order that concord might be established among the inhabitants of every city. These again were to be convened together with the rustics in the open plains, to perform their prayers at the Eed-days;22 that between these parties also, by means of such assembling, combination and concord might prevail. Lastly, it directed the whole body of believers to undertake the pilgrimage once in the course of every life; not confining it, however, to any settled time: for this might have proved detrimental. This it did on the same principle of engendering concord among the collective units of the whole religion, and imparting to them some portion of the same advantage so abundantly provided to the members of wards, townships, and kingdoms. As to the selection for this purpose of a country which was the birth-place of the Institute, it was done in order that the view of those regions might remind them of the Institutor, and increase the affection and reverence which they entertained for him. For every ceremonial observance has its use in stimulating conformity to his precepts. We may be sure, therefore, that it was here the object of the Institutor to realize the bond of unity, and remove the injurious operation of plurality; nay, that throughout the Institute a similar end is kept in view.23 And in like manner as the pretensions to prophet-hood, in respect to theory, lie in the assertion of unity, as respects practice they proceed no less upon the same principle. So, too, as to the efficacy of praying in a body, we are told that it is seven-fold preferable to praying singly. His holiness the Institutor is even said to have declared he once had it in contemplation to direct an ever-burning fire to be kept, for the purpose of firing the house of any person who came not to prayer-meetings. On the same principle rest the promises and denunciations connected with prayers on Friday and at the two Eed-days.
To resume however the subject of affection, it is to be observed, that since the causes of all affection not divine are interest and pleasure, which are always liable to terminate, it may happen that it terminates at the same time on both sides; or it may happen that it terminates on one side and continues on the other. And when the cause of affection is pleasure on one side and interest on the other, this contrariety will lead to much complaint. As in the affection of vocalist and hearer, where the hearer is friendly to the singer on the score of pleasure, and the singer to the hearer on the score of interest; or as in the affection of lover to his mistress, where the lover is friendly to his mistress on the score of pleasure, and the mistress to the lover on that of interest. What gives rise to complaints in this species of affection is this: the votary of pleasure is in haste to obtain it, and the votary of interest defers it till his own object has been secured; so that much agreement is not to be expected between them.24 Hence it is that lovers are so invariably (by their own account) ill and unjustly treated. Whereas in reality it is they who are unjust; being forward to claim the pleasure of interviews and favours, and backward to requite these with their equivalent in interest. This species they call reproachful affection, meaning that reproach goes along with it.
Now the affection subsisting between king and subject, officer and subordinate, rich and poor, master and slave, having likewise a contrariety in the incentive on both sides, is never devoid of complaint: for they severally seek at the hands of the other party for something which in most cases subsists no longer. And then the loss of this object invariably leads to indifference, which is matter of complaint; and without equity, whose attribute it is to ensure contentment with the exact measure of right, there is no palliating this evil.25
Far different is the affection of the virtuous. Arising from spiritual conjunction and mental unity, not from the contingencies of interest and pleasure, and having for its object that perfect good which is inaccessible to change, it is exempt from dissension, altercation, indifference, complaint, and all perturbing influences. This is the meaning of a saying with the wise, “Let your friend be one who is yourself in reality, and another only in form, and you have found the philosopher’s stone.” Shaikh Abù Aly Seenā, in his treatise the Tair, is enthusiastic upon the favour it is to meet with this species of friendship. Inasmuch as the generality of men, he says, have no acquaintance with the essence of good; founding their affection upon pleasure and interest; and whatever is founded on contingencies, with contingencies will pass away.
The affection of kings for their subjects is mostly on the score of their being patrons and benefactors towards them;26 and we know the patron is sure to have a regard for the patronized. The affection of a father for his children, in regard of his possessing rights over them, is likewise of the same class. But in another regard, his love for his son is part of his being, considering him as another self,27 and his person as a copy taken from his own characteristics — the resemblance left by his life upon the tablet of creation. And in truth the feeling is a correct one; the father being formal cause of the son’s existence, the material of his body, a portion of him in disposition, and that disposition most answering to his own. Hence it is, that every accomplishment he desires in himself he desires also in his son; nay, he wishes his son may be yet more excellent than he, and is rejoiced at being surpassed by him; counting his son’s superiority to himself of the same sort as if we told him he had gone beyond himself; that is, beyond what he used to be. At such a compliment he would be delighted, and is similarly pleased at the pre-eminence of his son. But besides this source of the parent’s affection towards his children, there is another likewise in operation; which is the feeling themselves their patrons and benefactors, as we said in the case of king and subjects; and the greater pains he takes with their education, the stronger this affection becomes. Yet a third cause is his hope of attaining certain ends by their means, and possessing a species of second life after the termination of his own. These principles, to the generality of parents unknown in their details, are yet summarily apprehended by all; like outlines of a figure shadowed from behind a curtain: which species of knowledge, in the case of affection and other such feelings, is always sufficient for their production.
The affection of son for father is less than that of father for son; for his existence, as resulting from the father’s, is subsequent to it, and it is only after some years that he becomes aware of the fact; and therefore, supposing him not to see his father, nor be advantaged for any long period by his company, he would never arrive at any affection for him. Hence it is, that in the Institute the injunctions on children to love and honor their parents are expressed without the converse.
Between brothers the affection will be still less; for they are partners in the same rank and reason of existence, and partnership necessitates a certain species and degree of dissension. Certain philosophers, when questioned which was best, a brother or a friend, replied, “A brother is of no use till he is a friend.28
A monarch’s affection for his subjects ought to be of a fatherly sort; he should behave in a tender and considerate way towards them. While the subjects, in obedience, submission, fidelity, and regard, ought to follow the example of discreet sons; never, either privily or openly, attempting any thing that may unbeseem his dignity, and deeming it a duty to serve him to the utmost of their power. There is a saying of the wise, that to a just king all men must be soldiers, if they would not be rebels. Even if he receives no personal attendance from them, they should aid him with their prayers and good wishes, and so increase virtually the amount of his soldiery. To him likewise they owe it to lead a life of brotherly affection with each other, and look for rank and property in strict accordance with their desert. Then will the light of equity illuminate the empire and the age, and the world be one wide bower for the blessings of concord and tenderness to blossom in. But if they do otherwise, the kingdom’s temperament will depart from its equipoise, and the adjustment of its interests be speedily broken up; — which God avert.29
Affection then is of several orders; first, affection for Almighty God, the source of good and the mine of perfection — a feeling only attainable to the proficient divine, who, as far as man may be so, is acquainted with the beauty of his attributes and the glory of his nature. For affection cannot subsist without acquaintance. He who, without acquaintance, and scientific acquaintance, should lay claim to affection for God, would be an ignorant pretender; and the purport of that saying of the beloved of God, Never hath he taken the ignorant for his servant, will give him the lie. This affection must necessarily be the highest of any, for to associate any other with it is mere polytheism.
The second order is affection for parents, the formal causes of our existence. This ranks next to the first, no other order approaching to it except it be that of scholar for his instructor; which ought indeed to be a closer affection even than this. For if the father is cause of all the affinities of life and of bodily nurture, the instructor is cause of his attainments — of spiritual nurture — the dispenser of the form of humanity — so as to be, in fact, the father of his soul. In proportion then as the soul is superior to the body, the instructor is superior to the father; and affection for him, though of lower order than that for the single-natured, is above that for a parent.30 When Alexander was asked for which he felt most regard, his father or his preceptor, he answered, for his preceptor. Because his father was cause of his mortal life, and his master cause of his immortal one.
There is a dictum of the Prophet, “Fathers you have three. He that begot you, he that instructed you, and he that gave you a wife: and the instructor is the best among them.” And another of Aly the accepted, “Whoso teaches me a letter renders me his slave.” The affection for a teacher being of so high an order of stringency, affection for the Institutor, who is the veracious director and highest of perfections, must be the closest of any, after that for God himself. And hence the declaration of God’s beloved, “None of ye believeth in me, until I become dearer to him than life, wife, or child.” Next to our affection for the Institutor may come that for the holy Caliphs and Pontiffs of the faith; — those lamps of inspiration and high roads of direction; — as we have it among the dicta, “Whoso loveth my followers, them shall my love follow; and whoso hateth my followers, them shall my hatred follow.” Again, “He that loveth the learned loveth me;” and again, “He that honoreth the learned honoreth me.”
The third order is the affection of subjects for their king, and of king for his subjects; which some have considered more binding than that for a parent. And, in fact, the assertion has reason on its side. For without the king’s superintendence, little advantage can be expected from the father, to whom this superintendence is as necessary as the father’s to his child.31
The fourth in order is the affection of acquaintances and companions.32 Now all the objects in the respective orders are to be entertained in their relative position. The several degrees of affection must not be confounded; for to pervert the observance of rights due to different orders, is a breach of equity and an element of ruin. Perfidy in feeling is worse than perfidy in property; inasmuch as it falls upon the qualities of the soul, which are superior to the richest jewels of the person.
The love of the object beloved, however, as Aristotle remarks, is soon withdrawn; just as of spurious gold the alloy is soon discovered. Our best course, therefore, is to follow the path of equity, both towards Creator and his creatures; and to entertain for every one the love that is his due: by this rule, practising towards the Creator the obedience incumbent for the attainment of his further favour, towards the Prophet and dignitaries of the faith conformity with their precepts and observance of all deference and veneration, towards kings honor and obedience, towards parents reverence and devotedness, towards individual men kindness and reciprocal good faith.
Now philosophers aver,33 that the affection of the patron for the patronized is above that in the converse relation; because a creditor or benefactor feels regard for a debtor or well-wisher, and makes it an object to prolong their lives. Here however the creditor, as he tenders the well-being of the debtor with a view only to the recovery of his dues, in reality feels regard only for his own money; unlike the benefactor, who feels regard to the benefited without any view to interest, simply because he is a fit object for the influence of good: whereas the benefited has no such affection for the benefactor. The benefits are what he likes in se; the benefactor only by contingence. Again, the benefactor employs trouble and exertion in advancing the interest of the benefited, and so far resembles a person who has amassed property by anxiety and toil. Such a one invariably feels regard for it, and is careful to lay it out to advantage: unlike one whose property has reached him without toil, who is ignorant of its value, and neglects caution in its expenditure. For this reason a child is dearer to its mother than to its father; she having endured more toil and trouble in rearing it. Of the same class is the fact of a poet always preferring his own poetry, and admiring it more than others do. But as to the party benefited, he is a recipient, and in receiving has no trouble to undergo; and therefore his affection for the benefactor cannot possibly be of the like order. On these grounds the affection of benefactor for the benefited may be taken to be greater than in the converse relation: an additional instance of the inferiority of all the species of affection to that which arises from a love for goodness and real perfection. For this is a delight of the intellect, and has to do, not with contingencies, but with the essence of the soul; and therefore it is that the foundations of this love are exempt and delivered from the inroads of dissolution, nor can slander itself find a path to its domains: unlike the other sorts, which cease with the cessation of their cause; as intimated in the text, In a single day may friends turn hostile each to each; saving the pious.
Now this enjoyment is really to be attained only after we have accomplished our pursuit of the nobler virtues, and actually nourish them in our inmost souls; after the veil that separates us from the world of thought is drawn aside, and we are admitted to the contemplation of abstract unity, perfect truth, eternal beauty, and all the privileges of the everlasting mysteries.
This is the highest elevation of the perfections, and has indeed by some philosophers been held to be beyond the height of felicity accessible to man. For till our being is cleared from the defilement of physical and mental organization, as well as from the incrustations of material affinities, it can be no glass to reflect the beauty of that rare perfection: till the wayfarer has left selfishness and self behind him, (and what point so distant, what stage so remote?) he cannot hope to touch on the confines of reunion.34
Aristotle avers, that when the Almighty regards any one as a friend, he confederates with him, just as ordinary friends confederate for mutual advantage;36 upon which the Akhlak-i-Nāsiry observes, that such expressions are not used in our phraseology. This, however, is by no means clear, for similar ones are many both in Scripture and Sunnah: The Almighty hath said it, he that befriends the righteous. We have reckoned upon God, and he is the best of patrons; — and among the dicta, stronger still, as when he says, “When thou lovest him, thou art as his ears and eyes,” — and so on to the end of the declaration: and again, “Him that loveth me I accept; him that I accept I owe for, and to him that I owe for I owe myself.”37 Aristotle likewise says, it does not follow that every man is to be social, although man’s good is placed in society; any more than that every animal is to be content with death, because death is their destination. Rather is he to devote his entire powers to a life in the divinity, and then, although in years a child, in purpose he is magnanimous, and in intellect he is noble. Intellect, indeed, is of all created things the noblest, being that essence which, by divine command, predominates over all things.38 As the prophet says, —
To make this good, we have only to aver, as concluded alike by the followers of observation and demonstration — admitted equally by the masters of perception and conception, — that the first principle, which, at the mandate, Be — and it was,40 issued, by the instrumentality of the ineffable power and will,41 from the chaotic ocean of inexistence, to anchor on the shores of perceptibility, was a simple and luminous essence, which, in the language of philosophy, is termed the primary intellect; — (though, in some accounts, it is termed the supreme intelligence; and the greatest fathers of mysticism and investigation call it the Muhammedan spirit;42) — which luminous essence comprehended itself and all that it possessed, and all that by means of that could be devised, of actual entities, as they were, are, and will be; all principles and all phenomena being comprised and combined in its essence by a species of moral complication, just as the seed in a manner contains branches, leaves, and fruit.43 According to the successive order of their inherence in which essence, all things are brought, in their prefigured materials,44 from the stores of negative possibility to the arena of action, and from void inexistence to the expanse of manifestation. God expunges what he will, or ratifies, and with him is the original of Scripture.45 And when, in the plenitude of divine mercy, the series of causation had reached the point of entities as now perpetuated, that is, of this material world — a home and dwelling-house for shift and change — a theatre46 for displaying the varieties of the divine glories and perfection unlimited — the supreme wisdom placed the conduct of this world in charge of a sphere, fixed in its nature, but changeable in its properties, —
that is, the heavens; in order that, by its revolving motion, the fresh positions inherent in its construction might be realized in act;47 at every position, that determinate event coming forth which is tied and bound up therewith; and, at every moment, a fresh form in the chain of existence being mirrored on the surface of elementary matter by the proximate cause of these events, which we call the active intellect, or highest of the single forms of intellect.48 Lastly, the terms of production being limited to three parturitions,49 the will of the wise intelligence, whose power is as vast as his wisdom is penetrating, was pleased to ordain, that by the union and intermixture in human nature (the noblest of the animal species) of the collective perfections of the previous [animal] stages, the virtues of the celestial intellect, which was the source of production, might, in this glorious species, appear in the shape of progressive intellect; that, when the soul of man had been transfigured into this station, it might arrive at that which, for intellect, is the proper one, — the world above us:50 completion thus coalescing with commencement, and the great round of being accomplishing itself in opposite circuits of descent and rise.
Celestial intellect, then, is prologue to the work of being, and human intellect is epilogue, just like a seed, which, after expanding into the forms of branches, twigs, and leaves, and passing through all the stages of increment and degrees of ramification, comes forth in the end in its original form of concentration, an emblem of the operations of unity.51
The secret principle of circuitous process, maintained through all degrees of all things, spiritual or corporeal, above us or below, appears in the heavens, which are the bond of regularity to the material world, in the form of movement in position; in incrementary bodies, in the proportional movement of growth and decrepitude; in the reasonable soul, in the connexion of the stream of thought; — all which are, in fact, shadows of the motion52 vital in se, which, in the language of the high priests of ecstasy and intuition, is called the procession of his essence unto his essence.53
PHILOSOPHERS hold that there are two classes of civilization: one proceeding from objects of the genus good; and that is the righteous state: the other, from objects of the genus bad; and that we call the unrighteous state.2
The righteous state is a single species and no more; for right is beyond the taint of multiplicity, and into the order of things good variety enters not. The unrighteous state has three species: 1. Where the coalition is occasioned by something other than the reasoning faculty, as the faculty of resentment or desire; and that we call the ignorant state. 2. Such as is not without all use of the reasoning power, but where this is subservient to the other powers, and this is the circumstance which produced coalition; and that we call the wicked state. 3. That in which coalition proceeds from unanimity in false combinations; and that we call the heretical state.
The conditions and relations of the unrighteous being discoverable from those of the righteous state, as implying their opposites,3 our attention may be better devoted to the particulars of the latter only, and that is the state whose coalition is entirely founded on the principle of attaining felicity and resisting evil. Such persons must necessarily participate in right opinions and good acts; and whatever diversity may exist among individual members, or whatever distinctions in the circumstances of their respective methods, all must correspond in the path they take, and the one end to which they are directed. Yet since, on the principle previously explained,4 human minds differ in degrees of the reasoning and discerning faculty, the highest order (which we call the celestial mind5) bordering upon the intellectual world, and the lowest order (or opposite of elevation) being tethered on the confines of the brutes, it follows, that the perception of the whole mass on the subject of origin and return, which is the pinnacle of mystery in science and religion, cannot be of the same order. So that the agreement which is above asserted to prevail in their principles of combination will take place in this wise, that all participate in the matter by universals, although none but the adepts in investigation can be acquainted with its particulars. The explanation of which is as follows.
That paramount class who are strengthened by divine support, and freed from the defilements of their physical incumbrances, apprehend real essence in all its glorious attributes and traits of beauty, perceive the chain of entities to proceed from their first source in the exact arrangement that actually prevails, and conceive the soul’s return to be effected in the manner agreeable to the precise fact. The soul, in its present instititious state, being endued with diverse powers, (such as common sense, conjecture, and fancy,) by means of which it carries on the perception of ideas6 and bodily intellectuals [retroverted] — (powers existing in different temperaments to different degrees of purity or dilution, yet never for a moment, whether sleeping or waking, altogether in abeyance7) — on the instant of their souls being inspired with the ideas of these realities, an ideal image corresponding to those mental ones is retroverted on the sensorium of those powers, (for in the soul’s institutious state, the perception of latent intellectuals without a stamp of sensitive or imaginative idea is exceeding rare,) the ratio of which ideas to which realities is the same as that of images and recollections to their archetypes; and these are the best and noblest images conceivable in corporeal organs. Now the persons of whom we are speaking, in the splendour of their own intellect continue to perceive this reality that lies beyond ideas as imagined and convictions as conceived; and these are the leading saints and the masters of philosophy.8
Near to this class comes that of those who are unequal to pure comprehension, and whose progress is limited to convictions by conjecture; knowing, however, that realities in their own nature are exempt from any such restrictions, and acknowledging as well their own inadequacy as the mental superiority of class the first. These are the professors of Islām.
Next to this class comes that of those who are unequal to idealizing by conjecture even, and whose progress towards an acquaintance with the soul’s origin and return goes no farther than idea by fancy; and these too are free to acknowledge the superiority of the former class, and their own deficiencies. These are the embracers of Islām.
Next comes the class of those short-sighted mortals who cannot idealize at all beyond the order of things sensibly manifest, and who stop short at remote ideas and images; and these we term imbeciles.9
Of these none is to be stigmatized with falling short or turning his gaze from the goal10 of reality, as long as he exhausts his efforts in the degree of his capacity, and attains to the limit of his own abilities. And since the blessed Institutor was sent to all parties, it was indispensably necessary, (according to the text, We order thee to address men in the measure of their understandings,) that his expressions throughout should be of such sort that each, in the calibre of his capacity, might receive from them a satisfactory portion — a portion that is sufficient for perfecting their feeble spirits, according to their respective orders. Thus, at the open resort of our universal Institute, that all who thirst after the well-spring of perfection may have their cravings satisfied in the exact measure of their respective draughts and appetites.
For this reason it is that the miraculous verses of the Kurān and didactic expressions of the last of Prophets are sometimes literal, and sometimes figurative: the realities intended being sometimes unveiled to the celestial intellect (that arbitrator in the dealings of abstraction) in the precision of precept and interdiction, and at other times being brought within the scope of direct sensation in the dress of imaginative ideas and typical representation.
So too with the Sages. Sometimes, for the entertainment of their comrades in the feast of investigation, they brim the bowl of induction with concentrated reality and limpid intelligence; sometimes, for the palate of aspiring neophytes, they fill the glass of scientific reverie with sweet information; and sometimes limit themselves merely to retailing or expounding the substitutes for both: thus supplying every one with instruction in the measure of his ability.
Among these several classes, whatever difference may subsist as to the nature of the ideas embodying their respective persuasions, still, by reason of their participating in the general result, and submitting in common to the same distinguished director, no animosity or repugnance prevails; but all, under their director’s guidance, do inter-co-operate in advancing towards that perfection of which they are respectively susceptible.
Constituents12 in the righteous state are of five orders: 1. Masters; the body on which the conduct of the state depends; that is to say, the proficients in the active science, and the adepts in entire wisdom, — persons invariably distinguished above their fellow creatures by power of intellect: and their science is a knowledge of real essence in all existing things. 2. Men of the tongue; those who invite the public to the perfection of human nature, dissuade them from vice by exhortation and counsel, and provide by dissertations, controversial, admonitory, and poetical, against deviations from the summary principles of union. The study of these is rhetoric, oratory, divinity, poetry, and such like. 3. Dispensers; those who watch over the balance of equity between members of the state, and to whose judgment it is committed to determine the measures of things. Their science is computation, debenture, mathematics, medicine, astronomy. 4. Watchers; those who preserve the state from the molestation of enemies and marauders, and by whose sufficiency the defence of passes, forts, and routes is effected. Their science is soldiery and horsemanship. 5. Monied men; a body by whom the food and clothing of the other classes is provided for; whether by means of commerce and craftship, or in the shape of fiscal payments. Their science comprises sundry occupations and callings manifold.13
Now what equity demands is this — that each class, nay, each member in each class, be kept in his appropriate position. One person is never to be employed in different occupations,14 for that perplexes the bent; nor is it possible that any one should be brought to multifarious perfection, because to every art there is a certain time and attention essential for its attainment; and when this time and attention is distributed among all, all remain in a state of incompleteness. Hence the proverb, “Who seeks all loses all.” When a person is acquainted with several pursuits, the best course is to employ him upon the most important and eminent one; or rather, upon that into which he has deepest insight; to the abandonment of all the rest. For if he exercises one in concert with another, some prejudice will infallibly accrue to his interests.
Classes other than these there are in the righteous state, but not among the constituents. Of these some serve for instruments and tools to the higher classes, and, if capable of virtue, perhaps, under the conduct of the good, a certain sort of perfection may be attained by them; else, they are to be disciplined to such occupations as may redound to the interest of the state.
Others again resemble the weeds that spring up in fields and gardens, and hence it is they are called Pests; these are of five sorts: 1. Hypocrites; men who conform to the conduct and professions of the good, and trick themselves out in the apparel of the great, seeking by such false colours to arrive at corrupt ends in religion and stale purposes in the world. 2. Mar-texts; men who are possessed by zeal and liking for the vices, and are therefore desirous, by artifices of explication, to fashion the church after the longings of their own nature. 3. Rebels; men who bow not the neck to the orders of the equitable Prince, submission and obedience to whose yoke is incumbent upon all mankind, but incline to some other sovereign. Against these it is by law and reason incumbent on all men to take up arms. 4. Schismatics; men who, from defect of understanding, not arriving at the intent of church institutions or the purposes of science, take them in other senses, and secede from the path of rectitude. Should the aberration be not deeply rooted, and be free from contumacy and vain-glory, there may be hopes of setting them right. 5. Impostors; men who, not attaining to realities, betake themselves to false pretences in pursuit of wealth and station, and by specious blunders expose themselves to sale in the market of delusion; displaying themselves to the people in the semblance of wise men, when in fact they are themselves in the deepest perplexity. Such are the most noted species of the Pests.
IT must first be premised, that the rank of sovereignty is one of the grandest gifts of God that was ever conferred, out of the inexhaustible stores of divine bounty, upon any, the most eminent, of his individual servants. It is indeed no less than this, that the holy Lord of hosts establishes one of his chosen servants upon the throne of vice-royalty, ennobles him with a ray of that majesty which belongs essentially to none but himself, and devolves upon him the apportionment of dignities and rights to all his fellow creatures according to his discretion and command; so as for all, in their various conditions, to turn for aid in their necessities to the Sanctuary of his court, the representative of Heaven. We are told among the dicta, that the sovereign is the shadow of God upon earth, to whose refuge we are to fly when oppressed by injury from the unforeseen occurrences of life. His proper return for this magnificent appointment is the observance of equity towards God’s creatures and his own subjects. This we may understand from the text, We have made thee, O David, our vice-regent upon earth: therefore decide between mankind with justice.2
After premising this preliminary, we have to state, in analogy with our previous distribution of the community into righteous and unrighteous, that government hath likewise its two divisions:3 1. The righteous government, which they call Pontificate [Imāmat]; and this is the regulation of the subjects’ interests in this world and the next in such sort that every one may arrive at that perfection proper to his nature; upon which the real felicity never fails to wait. The conductor of this government is peculiarly the vice-regent and shadow of God, in method and administration taking pattern from the Institutor, so as to diffuse over every region the blessed influence and bright example of that inimitable Saint.
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2. The false government, which they call force; the object of those conducting which it is, to subjugate God’s servants and assault his land. Such, however, can have no endurance; and the time must shortly come when they will be overtaken by calamity in this world, and eternal misery in the next. For an unrighteous principality is like one of those lofty edifices which they build upon the ice: its foundations must infallibly be dissolved, and the fabric overturned, by the sunshine of divine equity. It is well known to the elders who are conversant with remote results, that the exhausted treasury can never be replenished by paltry shreds taken from old women’s herbage; that the table of Solomon cannot be provided by snatching the locust’s foot from the hands of the little ant. The organ which is constructed from bits of wood taken in tax from the property of the oppressed and starving, can be of use only to express wailing; and the cup of wine drawn from the heart-blood of the helpless — its effervescence can be nothing but sanguinary tears, its spirit only the inebriety of ailment and disease. The armour of David is not to be fabricated from jackets plundered from the poor, nor the pillows of royalty made up from old cloaks robbed from the indigent.4
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He who conducts the righteous government, in his rigid adherence to the rule of equity, considers his subjects as his children and his friends; placing all covetousness and love of money under the control of judgment. He that conducts the unrighteous government adheres to the principles of force; treats his subjects like beasts of burden, considers them as slaves, and is himself the slave of avarice and passion.
We are told in holy writ, “Men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors;” and, “Men are of the same religion as their princes.” Hence, when the age’s guidance is in the hands of a just king every one directs his course towards equity and the attainment of virtue; if the contrary, the people likewise incline to falsehood, covetousness, and vice of every description. For this cause it is that we are taught in the dicta of the Sanctified, that if the prince be equitable, he shares in every merit emanating from the subject; and if he be iniquitous, he is an accomplice in every sin they may commit.5
Philosophers predicate five qualities as desirable in a prince. 1. Elevation of purpose, which is obtainable by moral culture. 2. Precision of judgment and design, which is brought to bear by excellence of original conformation, conjoined with long experience. 3. Resolution, which results from right reason and the faculty of constancy. This is applied both to kings and private persons, and is the root of all success in good and virtuous undertakings. We are told that Māmoon had a habit of eating clay,6 in consequence of which his health was seriously impaired. All the medicinal remedies which the most expert physicians laboured to apply for the remedy of it were unattended with success. One day, while all the assembled doctors were debating the matter, with their books before them, one of the select parasites,7 who happened to enter and observe what was going forward, asked the commander of the faithful where was his share of kingly resolution. “I require no remedy,” exclaimed Māmoon, “this thing I never more will practise.” 4. Endurance of hardships; for patience is the key to success and security. There is a dictum, “He that knocks at the door and scolds is sure to enter.” 5. That he be not much troubled with covetousness for other men’s goods. 6. A sufficient army. 7. Lineage, which invariably attracts regard, and confers majesty and awe. This however is not an indispensable but a desirable circumstance; and as to multitude of soldiery, it may be obtained through the medium of the four first qualities, elevation of purpose, patience, judgment, and resolution. These, then, are the fundamental requisites. Lastly, as we have premised that the king is the world’s physician, and a physician must needs be acquainted with the causes of disease and course of cure, it is indispensably incumbent on the king to know the ailments of his dominions, and the way to remedy them.
Now society being a term for complete coalition between its various classes, as long as every single class retains its proper place, stops at the employment assigned to it, and receives the portion which is due to it of provision and honor, (that is, property and rank,) so long, assuredly, the temperament of the state is in the course of equipoise, and its affairs bear the stamp of regularity. But no sooner do they depart from this rule than disturbances result, tending to dissolve the bond of union, and introduce corruption and ruin. For it is admitted that the initiative of every state is correspondence in the opinions of the aggregate.8 These, in point of co-operation, should stand in place of members to the individual;9 and then the case would be, as if a person were brought into the world, possessing the powers of all who are in it. Assuredly no single person could oppose him, nor could any number of persons prevail against him, unless unity were effected among them to the same degree; so as to render them equivalent to a single person, surpassing, of course, the power of the entire aggregate while holding different opinions. Since, then, the management of multitudes cannot be carried on without a consorting unity, which is the unity of equity (as before explained), as long as the prince walks by the rule of equity, keeping all classes of men in their respective stations, and prohibiting them from oppression and violence (which is claiming more than their due), assuredly his kingdom will be well regulated. But if otherwise, every class will be engrossed in the allurements of self-interest, and will rise up in injury of each other, till, in course of excess and deficiency, the bond of union is entirely dissolved. We know from experience, that all states have always thriven according as their constituents harmonized with each other, that is, walked in the way of equity; and have all declined, according to the prevalence of iniquity and discord. Men of the world, as previously observed, are guided by its governors. No sooner do the prince or prince’s attendants pique themselves upon iniquity, than the secret incitement of sin, which is to be found in every nature, comes into play, and grows predominant. And since unity (as we have stated) cannot co-exist with oppression, ruin to the world’s temperament must be the infallible consequence. There is a saying, “Government will co-endure with unbelief, but not with injustice.”10
Hence it is laid down that a state may be preserved by two principles: 1. Concord and unity among friends; 2. Contest and dissension among enemies. Because, as long as enemies are engaged with each other, they have no leisure for attempts upon others.11 For this reason, when Alexander had conquered the kingdom of Darius, and found the armies of Ajam to be in great force,12 he apprehended, that in case of his disbanding them, they might re-assemble and set him at defiance; on the other hand, to exterminate them altogether would have been utterly repugnant to the principles of religion and humanity. Consulting Aristotle on the subject, he was advised by that great politician to disperse them, and attach to each the governance and management of a particular province: thus they might be taken up with each other, to the safeguard of the prince from their disaffection. Upon this Alexander established the sets of kings, and from that time till the dynasty of Ardshír Bābak unanimity was never sufficiently restored to enable us to take the lead.13
In order to preserve this political equipoise, there is a correspondence to be maintained between the various classes. Like as the equipoise of bodily temperament is effected by intermixture and correspondence of four elements, the equipoise of the political temperament is to be sought for in the correspondence of four classes. 1. Men of the pen; such as lawyers, divines, judges, bookmen, statisticians, geometricians, astronomers, physicians, poets. In these and their exertions in the use of their delightful pens, the subsistence of the faith and of the world itself is vested and bound up. They occupy the place in politics that water does among the elements. Indeed, to persons of ready understanding, the similarity of knowledge and water is as clear as water itself, and as evident as the sun that makes it so. 2. Men of the sword; such as soldiers, fighting zealots, guards of forts and passes, &c. without whose exercise of the impetuous and vindictive sword, no arrangement of the age’s interests could be effected; without the havoc of whose tempest-like energies, the materials of corruption, in the shape of rebellious and disaffected persons, could never be dissolved and dissipated. These then occupy the place of fire, their resemblance to it is too plain to require demonstration; no rational person need call in the aid of fire to discover it. 3. Men of business; such as merchants, capitalists, artisans, and craftsmen, by whom the means of emolument and all other interests are adjusted; and through whom the remotest extremes enjoy the advantage and safeguard of each other’s most peculiar commodities. The resemblance of these to air — the auxiliary of growth and increase in vegetables — the reviver of spirit in animal life — the medium by the undulation and movement of which all sorts of rare and precious things traverse the hearing to arrive at the head-quarters of human nature — is exceedingly manifest. 4. Husbandmen; such as seedsmen, bailiffs,14 and agriculturists — the superintendents of vegetation and preparers of provender; without whose exertions the continuance of the human kind must be cut short. These are, in fact, the only producers of what had no previous existence; the other classes adding nothing whatever to subsisting products, but only transferring what subsists already from person to person, from place to place, and from form to form.15 How close these come to the soil and surface of the earth — the point to which all the heavenly circles refer — the scope to which all the luminaries of the purer world direct their rays — the stage on which wonders are displayed — the limit to which mysteries are confined — must be universally apparent. In like manner then as in the composite organizations the passing of any element beyond its proper measure occasions the loss of equipoise, and is followed by dissolution and ruin, in political coalition, no less, the prevalence of any one class over the other three overturns the adjustment and dissolves the junction.16 Next to the maintenance of correspondence between the four classes, attention is to be directed to the condition of the individuals composing them, and the place of every one determined according to his right.
Viewed in another light, the classes of men are five.17
1. Those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence upon others; such as professors of the Institute, elders of the faith, and adepts in the spirit. This class is the aim of creation, the choicest of God’s servants; on them rests the bounty of the Eternal, and to them is turned the countenance of goodness without end. In fact, the other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following in the train of these:
This class the wise declare a prince should hold the nearest to himself, and place in authority above the other classes. Nay, the very employment of these wise and able individuals about the person of a king, they hold for a sure sign that his power and prosperity are on the rise.
We are told that Hasán the Bowide, who in his day possessed the sovereignty of Herāt, and was conspicuous above all the princes of his age for attachment to men of learning and wisdom, undertook a holy war with the Roman empire. In the outset of the contest victory sided with the army of the faith, and the infidels were completely defeated. On this the Romans raised a levée en masse, and, concentrating their forces from all the outposts, again offered battle to the army of the faith. These were then obliged to give way, and some of them were so unfortunate as to be made prisoners. When the king took his seat to examine the captives, there proved to be one among them from Herāt, named Abú Nasar. On ascertaining this, the king said he would entrust him with a message which he was to carry to his emperor. Abú Nasar answered that he would do his bidding. “Then tell Hasán the Bowide,” said the king, “that I left Constantinople with the purpose of devastating Irāk. Now, however, that I have inquired concerning his character and situation, it is clear to me that the star of his prosperity has yet to reach the zenith of its completeness, and is still in the ascendant of its fortunes. For one whose star was sinking in the void of extinction, and the twilight of supineness and evanition, would never have about his person men of such high attainments and noted excellence as Ibn Abíd, Abú Jaafar, the treasurer Aly bin Kāsim, and Abú Aly Yashāghy. The assemblage of such a galaxy in attendance on his court is sufficient proof of the firmness of his fortunes and the farther improvement of his position and renown. For this reason I leave his dominions unmolested.”18
2. Those who are by nature good, but whose goodness has no influence on others. The rank of these is below that of the first, in whom beauty of character receives its last tint from the faculty of instructing and improving others, and is invested with the highest of all distinctions in this sort of resemblance to the divine nature. Whereas these, though adorned with perfection of their own, come short of the honor of perfecting others. Yet are they to be treated with a certain distinction, and provision to be made for their interests and honor.
3. Those who by nature are neither good nor bad. Upon this class the shadow of protection is to be thrown, and the wings of condescension to be lowered, in order that their capacities may be preserved from perversion, and, as far as in them lies, they may attain to their appropriate perfection.
4. Those who are bad, but whose badness has no influence on others; such as neglecters of prayer, indulgers in interest and wine, and, generally, all who do not restrict themselves to the principles of the Institute. This class is to be treated with disrespect and depreciation, and deterred from their abominable courses by admonitory rebukes and salutary disappointments.
5. Those whose natural depravity, besides subsisting in themselves, has an influence upon others. This class is the vilest of creation, and the opposite of the first class. Those of them whose reformation is hopeless may be borne with at discretion, provided their abandonment is not entire; but, when assuming an entire character, such wickedness it is a duty both of law and reason to repress in the best and easiest way.19
Of the means of prevention there is, 1. Imprisonment, which is inhibition of intercourse with other members of the state. 2. Fettering, which is inhibition of bodily exertion. 3. Banishment, which is inhibition of entrance into the state. If not prevented by these means, authorities differ as to the right of capital punishment; going mostly no further than as it is limited to the amputation of the limb instrumental in such wickedness, such as the hand, foot, or tongue; or to the privation of some one of the senses. On this point the truth is that we ought to adhere rigorously to the Institute; applying to our own situation the limitations there set to amputation and execution, and abstaining from any thing beyond them. For we are told, He that overpasses the limitations set by God, verily he injureth his own soul. We are not to be eager to execute: neither, when, according to the Institute, a person is deserving of death, are we to show him any mercy. No compassion shall possess you in the religion of God. For in like manner as a physician holds it justifiable, nay, obligatory, to sacrifice one member for the safety of all, the king also, who is physician to the world, is occasionally bound, under the highest of all authorities, whose majesty is supreme, to commit execution on an individual for the benefit of the public.20
When the mutual correspondence of these classes has been cared for, and their proportions determined, a further adjustment is to be effected between them in the distribution of benefits. Now these are of three sorts: security, possessions, and honors. Of these every individual is entitled to a certain portion, to diminish which is injustice to him, and to augment which is injustice to other citizens. For to elevate any one above his equals without pre-eminent desert is to be unjust to them. It may too happen that the defalcation is no less an injustice to the many, because, when a person entitled to a certain rank is degraded from such his right, it breaks the spirit of other persons having a similar title, and relaxes the organization of the whole state.
When benefits have been thus distributed in the measure of men’s respective claims, the next thing is to maintain them; not suffering that which is the rightful portion of any man to depart from him, or else, on its departure, supplying him with a substitute for the distinction or the right, in such sort as not to involve any injury to the citizens at large.
As to oppression, it should be prevented by punishing those addicted to it; and for every specific act an appropriate infliction should be assigned. If in return for small oppression the punishment be great, it is injustice towards the offender; if in requital for great oppression small punishment be inflicted, it is injustice to the citizens.
By many authorities it is held that wrong offered to any one of the individuals is wrong towards the whole body of citizens.21 Hence it follows, that punishment is not barred by the pardon of that person on whom the wrong was practised; the prince who governs and regulates the whole having legal power to punish him. Others, again, dispute this position. Now, if the controversy proceeds upon the directions of the Prince of men (which are decisive upon justice), it must be determined in this wise. That which belongs to the class of divine jurisdiction, such as theft, adultery, highway robbery, is not barred by pardon; the prince being bound to insist on punishment. That which belongs to the class of human right is barred by pardon of the claimant, as in cases of mere abuse and defamation; but if of a violent nature, as in the case of battery, injury, or contumely, many writers of the sect of Shāfei hold that the prince may still chastise the offender, for the sake of public discipline; the ruling principle of the regulations being in fact this: — Some criminality is of such a nature that its injurious tendency extends to all the members of the state, such as adultery, theft, and the like. In these instances, indulgence would lead to disorganization, and therefore pardon does not affect the proceedings. Some, again, is confined to a single individual, and reaches not the rest, such as defamation; and here all necessarily depends upon the individual’s pardon. Some again there are where [in some sort] both presumptions may be entertained; that of its extending to others, and the contrary. Here it may depend on the judgment and discretion of the prince to put in practice whatever he finds most opportune and advisable.22 Hence it is, that where there is no proper heir of a murdered man, but the right of inheritance is vested in the Fisque, it rests entirely with the prince to direct taliation, or to pardon, as he likes.23
The maintenance of equity is to be methodically conducted only when the prince himself inquires into his subjects’ circumstances, and conducts each of them to his due share of provision and dignity. And this object can only be realized when subjects and complainants have access to their prince in time of need. If this is not at all times to be effected, they should appoint a day for giving audience to all who may require it, that they may state without interposition, in their sovereign’s presence, the necessities devolving on them in the progress of events. The kings of Ajam actually had such an appointed time, at which there was public audience to all classes of men. His Sanctity, the refuge of revelation, used to pray as follows: “O Lord God! the officer who is benevolent to my followers in the exercise of authority committed to him, be thou benevolent to him: and the officer who is severe with my followers in the exercise of the authority committed to him, with him be thou severe.” Omar Ibn-ul-khitāb, on appointing any one to office, used to exhort him not to keep himself secluded from necessitous parties; not to shut the door in their faces; or else there was the Prophet’s authority [as above] for saying, that the Almighty would shut him out from mercy when want and necessity befell him.24
We are told in the sacred traditions25 that Pharaoh, with all his daring unbelief, retained two good qualities: one, that he was easy of access, and all who had occasion might expect to see him without difficulty; the other, that he was noted for a graceful generosity and munificence, and supplied all classes of mankind from the open table of his general bounty. Such, they relate, was his excess of generosity, that when a woman of the children of Israel was in labour, and the food proper to her situation was not ready in his kitchen, no sooner was he apprised of the circumstance than his anger blazed high, insomuch that, furnace-like, it made the kitchen-servants victims of its devouring fury. From that time forward, he directed that they should daily keep in readiness all manner of food adapted for all classes of persons, well or ill, and should supply every one with that which his state required. But when the tempest of God’s wrath began to gather over him, and the determination, formed before time began, drew on his ruin and destruction, then indeed, according to the text, God changes not the upright but by changing that which is within them, for these two qualities the contraries were substituted. His estrangement arrived at that pitch, that he was as constant to retirement in the light of day, as in the darkest night; and, like the phœnix of the west, he made his dwelling entirely in the twilight of seclusion and concealment; or rather, it may be said, like the skulking bat, in the den of aversion and repugnance, where none but Eblis and his attendant demons could obtain an interview. Thus when his Sanctity Moses (on whom be peace!) became honored with the privilege of talking with God, at that same night, according to the divine direction, he arrived at the gate of the royal palace, and remained there for a whole year, without obtaining an interview;26 till a day when one of the mirth-makers of the king’s banquet informed him, for matter of derision, how strange a thing had happened, in the arrival at his gates of a person of such and such a seeming, charged, according to his own account, with a message from God. On this, Pharaoh ordered him to be summoned, that they might turn him into ridicule and mockery. Upon this followed the recrimination recorded in the words symbolic of truth. However much his snowy hand27 might exercise the powerful detergent which his miracles contained, he failed to free the royal heart from the adhesions of idolatry. Like the vipers that brood over buried treasures, the Prophet’s serpent gave manifest evidence to the riches of his faith, yet Pharaoh followed not on its traces;28 but imitated rather that snake itself, in obstinate adherence to its poisonous retreat; till his fortunes drew to a result that could not be obviated, and terminated in the saddest of conclusions. Then it was that his niggardice reached such a pitch, that none but the inspired scribes were privy to his meals, and flies were the only guests who ever sat down to his table. Insomuch that, according to accounts recorded by the elders of the Jewish tribes, on what day Moses, (peace be with him!) by the mighty aid of God, marched out of Egypt, and Pharaoh hurried in pursuit, there was nothing killed in all his offices but one mangy kid, on the liver of which he breakfasted, reserving the flesh for the imperial banquet of which he was to partake with his nobles on his return; and that he himself, autocrat as he was, assigned the rations both for himself and for his submissive and servile soldiery.
There are three things which the authorities declare a king is particularly bound to observe. 1. The flourishing state of his treasury and kingdom. 2. Kindness and compassion to his subjects. 3. The rule of not devolving great charges upon petty men. Certain of the race of Sāssān, when asked what had led to the downfall of the dynasty of 4000 years,29 replied — It was making over to low and petty persons great employments, proper only to intellect and talent. They likewise declare, that the fabric of equipoise may be securely reared upon ten moral bases: 1. That in every affair that comes before him he should suppose himself to be the subject and another the prince; and whatever he would hold impossible towards himself, he should hold inadmissible towards his people. 2. That he should allow no procrastination with necessitous parties, and be on his guard against the dangers therefrom resulting. It was the advice of Aristotle to Alexander, that if he wished for the Almighty’s support he should be quick to consider the cases of those who clamoured for justice. 3. That he should not waste his time in licentiousness and sensual gratification, this same being the most powerful cause of a kingdom’s ruin: rather let him take a portion from the period of repose and amusement to devote to the conduct of his dominions and the interests of his subjects. A wise man’s counsel to a king was this — “Slumber not in supineness, or those who are ruined by your administration will wake to carry their complaints to the courts of the Most High. Neither sleep to such a degree as to curtail your [active] life. For life and prosperity resemble the sunshine; on one wall at day-break, and on another at dusk. Let it be your aim to feast upon the world, rather than to let it feast on you.” 4. That he should lay the foundation of all his undertakings in courtesy and kindness, not in violence and anger. 5. That in satisfying the world his object should be to satisfy God. 6. That he should not attempt to satisfy the world in opposition to God. 7. That when men come to him for a decision, he should consult justice; and when they come to him for mercy, he should consult indulgence. For to show mercy to God’s creatures is the way to obtain mercy from God. We have it for a genuine saying, — “Those who are merciful God will have mercy upon.” “Show mercy to those who are on earth, and you will obtain mercy from him who is in heaven.” 8. That he incline to the society of the righteous, and flinch not from their counsel and exhortations. 9. That he maintain every one in the portion of his deserts. 10. That he hold it not sufficient himself to refrain from wrong, but so govern his kingdom that neither officers, soldiers, nor subjects may find means to wrong each other. For, according to the text, Each of you governs, and each shall be questioned concerning his subjects, whatever occurs in his dominions owing to defective administration, he will be examined thereupon at the day of resurrection. We are told that the commander of the faithful, Omar bin Abd Ulaziz,30 who was noted for the perfection of equity and an extravagance of piety and purity of heart, insomuch that he was called the fifth Caliph, appeared to some one in a dream, and declared, when questioned what had been his lot, that he had been kept a year in purgatory,31 because a goat had been hurt by putting its foot into a hole that had been accidentally left in a bridge. For this he was censured, and asked how he could justify such negligence in the maintenance and regulation of affairs, seeing that the interests of mankind were entrusted to the responsibility of his exertions.
The subjects, then, are to be urged to abide by the rules of equity, and to exert themselves in the acquisition of virtue. For even as the body stands by the nature, and the nature by the soul, and the soul by the understanding, does the city stand by the territory, the territory by the government, and the government by wisdom: which is the archetype of the Institute. As long as public affairs are in the course of the Institute, regularity is sure to prevail; but when it deviates from that sure guidance, the joy and prosperity of the kingdom is at an end. Plato says, “Maintain the law, and the law will maintain you.”
When it has become superfluous to insist any further on the interests of equity, the monarch may rein in his inflexible career, and incline to the side of bounty and benefaction.32 For no quality is nobler than an inclination for these, as has been shown in its particulars elsewhere. Yet, even in his benefactions, observance must be paid to the measure of desert. For benefactions are the snare of dignity and pomp, often proving a sacrifice of majesty only to promote wantonness and increase cupidity in the subject; till the revenue of the whole kingdom, if lavished on one person, would prove insufficient to content him. Aristotle’s advice to Alexander was that he could not give the needy too little awe of him, or the soldiery and extortioners too much: the first, that they might be encouraged to make complaints; the second, that they might be deterred from occasioning them. His eminence the Prince of Prophets maintained his majesty at such a height, that when Abú Safiān, before his conversion to the faith, had occasion to visit him for purposes of treaty, he declared on his return that though he had seen many kings and many potentates, he never experienced from any of them so heartfelt an apprehension and awe.33 His courtesy was likewise so remarkable, that on one occasion, when a woman who had approached him with the intention of stating some of her necessities, found herself overcome by the terrors of his presence, he condescended to relieve her apprehension, by saying, that he too was the son of an Arab woman who fed upon an Arab’s food.34 Haughtiness towards the haughty, and affability towards the lowly and dependent, are among the characteristic traits of generosity.35
Another of kingly observances it is, to keep their secrets concealed;36 that they may be free to follow the dictates of thought and observation, and may secure themselves against the machinations of their enemies. His holiness the Sanctified, undefiled as he was in any department of his glorious nature by untruth, as soon as he had resolved on one of his holy expeditions, used to lead men to suppose that he was going somewhere else. His practice was even to inquire the route of a different place from that on which he had determined, and to ascertain all its particulars, until men fell into the supposition that his purpose was really in that direction. The authorities aver that the way to reconcile secrecy with the advantages of consultation is to debate matters with men of intellect and ability, and to cover them from men of weak understandings; and, even when the purpose is formed, to proceed in its execution by such actions as, to all appearance, are opposite to any such design. Neither is this course to be carried to excess, lest it engender suspicion, but to be blended with actions really essential to the real purpose.
In inquiring into the affairs of enemies no kind of inattention should have place. Spies and informers should be employed to ascertain their proceedings, and their hidden circumstances should be deduced from their apparent ones. In gaining information as to their designs, it is an important principle mainly to direct inquiry to be made from such among their attendants as are noted for defect of sense. The best of all roads, indeed, is general conversation with every body. For there is no one who has not some confidential friend to whom his secrets are communicated, and of whom, as of all other men, the mental reservations are sure to transpire in the course of conversation.
As soon as enmity is found to prevail in any quarter, all practicable effort should be made to remove it by concessions, before it arrives at hostility and war; or, if this is not to be effected by concession, as long as by expedient and artifice it may be averted, arms should never be resorted to. Written artifice or falsehood, for the purpose of disconcerting enemies, is not considered culpable; but to give utterance to falsehood and treachery is inexcusable under any circumstances.37
If compelled to hostilities, the case must be one of two. Either he is the incipient, or the opposing party. If the incipient, his object should be unmixed good. For the interests of religion, undoubtedly, or the enforcement of reprisals, or for some right clearly existing on his side, let his arms be taken up; not for conquest or for aggrandizement.38 For the probability is, that the incipient will be worsted,39 unless he fights for religion or for a rightful claim. Neither let him give battle until his army are unanimous in their sentiments: for to be between two adversaries is exceeding hazardous. While it is practicable, the king should not carry on the war in person, for then, if defeated, the loss is irreparable; and if victorious, he can hardly fail to display some extravagance unbeseeming a prince’s majesty and weight.40 If he is acting on the defensive, and strong enough to engage, let him attack the enemy by ambush or surprise: for those kings who are fought withal in their own territories are generally worsted.41 If not strong enough to engage, he should be careful to prepare forts and entrenchments, without, however, placing entire reliance on these: for it is a maxim with the authorities, that “Every fort has been taken.” Rather let him exert himself for overtures of peace by the sacrifice of his treasures and a persevering urgency for alliance.
The person he selects to conduct the affairs of his army should possess three qualities: 1. A celebrity for bravery; 2. Good management and ability; 3. Experience and familiarity with war; the most important essential in this last being vigilance and care in ascertaining the enemy’s situation by means of expert spies, with attention to their zeal and emoluments while so employed. For to lead his troops and materiel into the chance of destruction and ruin, without a prospect of some evident advantage, is repugnant to sense.
Authorities likewise say he should not shut himself up in forts and entrenchments, except in the last resort; for such steps are imputed to weakness, and give confidence to the enemy. When any one has distinguished himself by bravery in battle, he should go great lengths in loading that person with riches and honors; considering the richest gifts and fairest commendations to be only the due requital of such deeds. He is not to despise a lowly enemy; for, How many a scanty troop, by God’s leave, hath vanquished a numerous one!
Neither is conduct to stop short at victory. As long as it is practicable to take prisoners alive, they should not be killed. For many are the advantages which may redound from capture — servitude, pardon, ransom, all which tend at the same time to soften the hearts of the enemy, as the text of the Kurān declares. After victory, however, it is not even lawful to kill them, unless there is no other security against their machinations but killing. After conquest, enmity and resentment ought to have no place in their feelings; for, this being once completed, the enemies become vassals and subjects, to injure whom is manifestly opposed to the first principles of equity.42 We are told, among other instances adduced by the wise, that when Alexander put to the sword the inhabitants of a city which he had taken, Aristotle wrote him a long letter, saying, that however excusable it might be to kill enemies before victory, he could have had none for putting them to death after it; that the exercise of clemency was peculiarly the virtue of the greatest kings; giving lightness to the rivets of authority, and firmness to the foundations of their power. In fact, the more complete their ascendancy may be, the more their clemency becomes it.
The Caliph Māmoon, who adorned the shackles of the empire43 as much as he consolidated its system, used to say that if men were aware of the delight it gave him to pardon, they would bring him their crimes for the choicest of offerings. In fact, human perfection lies in adopting the divine attributes; and, according to the text, Such is their nature also,44 the original object of creating the world and man was the manifestation of the true and only real entity, in that divine compassion and clemency which demands the full scope of human weakness and imperfection for the display of its own excellence.45 Insomuch, that we are told in one of the dicta, that if we were not to commit sin, the Almighty would create another race who would, in order that his uncalled for mercy might still find its glory reflected on the surface of unfathomable forgiveness. Man’s imitation of the principle of being and source of all good may be said, therefore, in some sort to have been accomplished, when he has won and worn the decorations of clemency.
* * * * * * *
THE course to be observed by men in general in their intercourse with kings and persons in authority is this. They should entertain for them in the heart, affection, — on the tongue, eulogy and praise; they should attend upon the ministers of such persons with obsequious service; and as long as the orders they receive from them are not at variance with those of God, they must exert themselves as far as possible to carry these into effect; whether as to do or to leave undone. The fiscal dues of tribute and the like they should discharge with cheerfulness, never even in thought desiring to withhold such; never admitting the minutest neglect, apparent or concealed,2 of that reverence which is their due, and being prepared, in case of exigence, to sacrifice life and property for their sakes; seeing that on their sublime destinies the maintenance of religion and the prosperity of family and home is staked.3
Persons not actually numbered among their attendants ought never to allow themselves to aim at a closer proximity. For the companionship of princes has been compared to entering into a conflagration, or associating with a tiger. In truth, it is an arduous matter to observe the proprieties of attendance upon kings; neither has every one the power to discipline himself thereto. Certain elders of the faith have declared that none could walk the way of religion who had not lived in attendance upon, and in connexion with, earthly potentates: since, agreeably to the saying “The Sultan is the shadow of God,”4 to observe the duties of a presence-chamber will form a man’s spirit to observe those of religion.
For him who is already advanced in their regard, let him occupy himself in the business entrusted to him, and not officiously press into other departments. In his attendance he should be persevering, in such wise that whenever summoned he may be ready to proceed to the presence; and yet he must beware of urging his services, for that engenders distaste. Whatever they do he must be ready to commend, and this with sincerity, not in adulation. For nothing passes but has some bright side: this he is to bring forward and make the ground of his eulogy.
For him who has risen to the dignity of advising, he should make his remarks in the most general and polite form. For even according to the Institute, individuals have no title to use reproach or vehemence towards kings, whether in urging them to right or restraining them from wrong:5 their office extending no farther than to general advice and exhortation of a courteous sort. Thus, in his book of Miracles, the Almighty says to Moses and Aaron with regard to Pharaoh, “Speak to him in soft phrases: perchance he may remember, or perchance he may apprehend!”
If he is a vizier or minister, and any proceeding of theirs occur repugnant to expedience, in the first instance let him go along with it, and concur in it, and afterwards let him get it out of their inclinations by some humorous remark. Writers observe that kings and potentates are like a torrent flowing from a mountain’s brow. He perishes who seeks to turn it aside in an instant. But he who lets it alone in its outbreak, and gradually encroaches on one of its margins, may turn it easily enough with a little earth and rubbish. Their secrets he should on no account allow himself to divulge:6 the method of preventing which is to conceal their outward particulars, forasmuch as may be reconciled with attention to their orders, and then, this habit being well established, the concealment of their secrets will become easy. For inward matters may be deduced from outward ones, by reason of that connexion and complication which universally prevails in all human affairs. He must always bear in mind that the feelings of kings are very lofty, and therefore that all other orders ought to remain in submission towards them.7 Faults or omissions he must never impute to them in any affair, or to any degree, how near so ever the place they may have raised him to. And whenever an uncertainty prevails whether an error attaches to them or to him, he must take it solely on himself; preserving their dignity unsullied by the least blemish or imperfection. That done, he may afterwards take occasion to exonerate his proceedings in their esteem. His endeavour to please them cannot be too great. He must put his own interests entirely out of sight: For in clientelage no progress can be made till the interest of self is entirely disregarded; and in pursuance of this principle, on all occasions which involve either his interests or theirs, let theirs be all he aims at, and then along with theirs he will be promoting his own likewise.
For the purpose of obtaining any object he may have in view, he should approach them with agreeable devices, and not by importunity and super-solicitation. Of all things he must eschew covetousness, and strive after content. For the world turns to him that looks another way, and to him who wooes its countenance it only shows its back. Or as we have it among the dicta, “Abandon the world, and it will be eager to come to you;” and in the Touriat we are told the Almighty gave his world these directions: “O world, be servant unto him that is servant unto me, not unto him that is servant unto you.” The sources of emolument and wealth he is to reserve for his masters, and through them only to acquire any for himself. Let him have no designs upon their private property, as he would live secure from the degradation of being called to account, as he would amplify his own profit, as he would stand in their esteem and approbation. His bearing towards them should show as if, at their slightest signal, he were ready to sacrifice all his treasures and possessions. For if he evince reluctance, according to the saying “Men are eager after that which is withheld,” he does but provoke their covetings. It is a maxim with the wise, “The interdicted is the coveted, and the freely given is the soon abandoned.”8 Rank and riches he should desire for their aggrandizement, and not for his own; and of all things he must avoid participating in any particular of dress or equipage which is appropriated to their use; or else the breach of etiquette may lead to his being deprived both of privilege and life. In no matter, however trifling, must he arrogate an independent seeming. Be the circumstances what they may, to acquiesce in his superior’s orders must be the symbol of his conduct.9 It is written in the book of Solomon, (peace be with him!) that he addressed his soul as follows: “O my soul, despise not kings, but submit to all their sayings, and in no case be urged to utter in their presence aught involving censure either of thyself or others. For if it regard thyself, thou art brought within the scope of the temporal king’s displeasure; and if it regard others, thou becomest food for the displeasure of the King Eternal.”10 Ibn Mukanna says, in his work on Manners, “If the king call thee brother, call thou him my Lord; and the closer thy familiarity becomes, the greater the reverence thou must pay him.11 Yet when thy intimacy is well established, thou must not overload thy speech with terms of flattery and obsequiousness; for that betokens fear and alienation. Neither say to him in any case, Such is my right or the due of my previous service; rather will he hold thy previous service to carry forward his existing claims: so that the past lives only by the present. That right whose end is broken from its beginning, kings, and indeed all men, are ready to forget.”
There is no more dangerous undertaking than the viziership of kings. The vizier’s only safeguard is in his integrity. He that is marked for this high office must not be hurt at vituperation or abuse, nor allow it to press for a moment on his mind. If he finds his detractors busy with their intrigues, he must not be disturbed at it, nor show them any marks of antipathy and malice; for that would infallibly confirm their machinations. If the matter comes to verbal recrimination, let him not overpass the outworks of his stateliness; let his answers be always cool, for “With the cool is victory.”
Among other etiquette of royal and noble society one point is this, never to dispute in their presence; and when they put a question to another, never to prevent his answer by our own. This, in fact, is to prove at once the folly of the speaker, and his gross disregard both of questioner and questioned. Supposing the questioner to say, “It is not of you I ask,” he has no answer to make, but must bear the shame of his own inconsiderateness. If their question be addressed to the company at large, he is not to be emulously hasty in reply; for, besides being disagreeable to all, they are likely to find fault with the opinion. If he waits till others answer, and the merits of the subject are ascertained, and, after that, should the discussion be prolonged, gives his own opinion, he will show his breeding and his wit together.12
Over those who are more nearly favoured than himself he must never seek to be preferred; nor hold his feelings hurt at finding another and less deserving person surpass him in rank and favour. For the most elevated individual may have a natural affinity towards another of the lowliest order. This affinity it is which gives rise to all affection,13 and to acquire it [when not created to us] is beyond the range of possibility. It is useless, therefore, to distress himself on any such account. And then, it may chance that such person has prior claims, with which the other is unacquainted; in which case a difference with him would alienate the king’s regard. In a word, he is to pass altogether away from his own liking, and make his wishes conform with those of the king. For, as has already been sufficiently explained,14 until two persons become as one, the bond of affection can never be cemented; but as soon as either of the two ceases to stand upon his claims, discrepance, nay, severance, is removed, and their common interests adjust themselves in the sacred form of unity.
As it has already2 been laid down that to man’s maturity in his appropriate perfection it is necessary for him to seek assistance from his fellow creatures, and the foundations of such a course can only be laid in union and affection, it follows that the more intimates a man may have, the easier the attainment of his perfection will become. Now, friendship being the highest order of affection, it is by means of this that man’s efforts after perfection may be most successfully ordered.3
It happens, however, that genuine friends cannot be numerous; for it is to rare jewels only that value is attached.4 The generality of mankind are in search of mere animal gratification, and the delights of passion, and with these we are only to mingle in the measure of our necessities. This class moralists have compared to condiments, which we are to employ in our dishes just as they are needed, and of which the too sparing or the too abundant use leads alike to disorder.
Aristotle says men have need of friends in all circumstances: in opulence, to enjoy themselves in their society and intimacy; in hardships, to benefit by their succour and assistance. And, in truth, princes, who are the most independent of mankind, have as much occasion for persons having claims on their regard, — nay, for poor and destitute ones, of all mankind the most necessitous, — as these have for the rich and bounteous.5 Ifsikar Atlias6 says, “Were a man to have possession and management of the universe, and be debarred from friendship, his life would be a burden, or rather its continuance impossible. Yet if any one holds this relation easy of attainment, his opinion is erroneous. A genuine friendship, that will stand the test of trial, is one of the richest gems the world affords. When calamity arrives, or some advantage fails us, store or treasure, nay, the whole world and all that it contains, avail us nothing in comparison with friendship for lightening the burden, or aiding us to recover our lost composure. Thrice fortunate he, though having nothing else, who holds a full portion of this surpassing blessing.” And yet more fortunate he who can combine this happiness with the elevation of a throne: for a king must be familiar with all things, both summary and minute, the concerns of his dominions and the interests of all classes among his subjects. For such multifarious purposes a single eye, a single heart, and a single tongue, are insufficient; but when, in virtue of friendship, he obtains management of the eyes, ears, hearts, and tongues of others, seeing with the eyes of all, hearing with the ears of all, and speaking with the tongues of all, then indeed the interests of his dominions may be easily attended to.
It is said that when desirous of selecting an object for our friendship, our first inquiry concerning him should be into his behaviour towards his parents during his youthful state; and if noted for contravention of their claims, he is not to be trusted or taken for a friend: for good can never come of him who requites the claims of his parents with disobedience. Next to that, the manner of his intercourse and behaviour with his intimates should be ascertained. Next to that, we must inform ourselves how he is affected towards his benefactors; if disposed to ingratitude, no advance should be desired in his acquaintance. For of all vile qualities, none is more culpable than ingratitude; as, among good ones, there is no virtue more laudable than thankfulness. The intent of gratitude is not merely requital, (for this it may happen from poverty that a person is unable to effect,) but that in his heart he entertain for him affection, and by his tongue express towards him eulogy and praise. As long as he does this, such person is guilty of no omission. Next, we are to notice how he is affected towards enjoyments, and the treasuring up of properties and effects. If ruled by covetousness, he is unfit for friendship. Next, we should examine his inclination for aggrandizement and predominance. If he exceeds here, he must likewise be rejected: for to this predominance equity will be sacrificed. He will seek more than his due, and the refusal to concede it will terminate his regard. Another subject of consideration it should be made, whether a passion for amusement and diversion — the listening to music and intimacy of musicians — interferes with his feeling for a genuine friend; and if so, no wish should be entertained for his attachment. When he has passed through the analytic process of these several tests, and come forth at the end in standard purity, he should be hailed for the truly genuine and eminently attached friend, and his affection locked away with the soul’s choicest valuables in the treasure-chambers of the heart.7 “For there is no glory like a faithful friend.” It has even been said by the wise, “How do I envy him who is in trouble, and hath a devoted friend!”
Such a person, however, is rarer than the philosopher’s stone. Onē true friend, if he can be met with, is as much as we ought to look for; it being hardly conceivable that we could satisfy the expectations of many. In all probability the dictates of their several circumstances will be adverse each to each. For instance, to harmonize with one we must appear open and joyous; to harmonize with another, reserved and dejected.8 Besides, as enmity generally proceeds from previous intimacy and acquaintance, (for with a person previously unknown hostility seems out of the question,) and enmity is always more injurious when preceded by extreme familiarity and consequent knowledge of our minutest affairs, we ought to proceed very cautiously in establishing such intimate acquaintance, and content ourselves with the measure of our need for it.9
When we have met with a friend we should be careful to acknowledge his claims. The troubles that befall him we should rectify. On seeing him we should testify our pleasure, and be easily satisfied with his approval and praise, without being eager for obsequiousness or adulation.10 Neither, on our parts, are we to content ourselves with sincerity of feeling and proofs that lie within us; for on what food our hearts may feed is discoverable only by him who discovers all things. Trifling failings and partial faults, whether relative to friends or foes, we are not to dwell on: it is but fair to wink at them; for from these no mortal can be exempt. A rigid scrutiny on this score would lead to a life of savage solitude and exclusion from the merits of friendship.11 On this point it is of great service to us to contemplate our own imperfections. As we have it in the dicta of the Prophet, “Happy he whose own faults recall his observation from the faults of others.” By the discharge of these obligations not only may attachment be purified and corroborated, but an attraction may be exercised on indifferent parties, and persons previously unknown.
Another of the obligations of friendship it is to make friends participate with us in our affluence and dignity, and to be careful in avoiding the least appearance of exclusiveness in these matters; keeping our attentions unsullied by any affectation of favour; consoling them under the incidence of calamity with our sympathy and our wealth, and bearing them fellowship to the utmost length in all things. Indeed, fellowship in suffering has a greater value and a greater grace than participation in enjoyment.
In paying such attentions to our friends we are not to wait for any application on their part: we must ascertain their feelings by signs and tokens; and if we perceive in a friend symptoms of offence, we are not to treat it negligently, but rather be doubly urgent in our instances and offers. For if he too let the subject drop, the bond of affection would be severed: nay, it might be that the breach widened till it terminated in renunciation and irreparable rupture. The proper course is to state without hesitation, in frank purity of heart, the cause of uneasiness, whatever it may be, in the hope of its yielding to the hallowed influence of truth.13
These observances must also be unintermitting; for if we undertake the management of house, or dress, or beast of burden, and neglect its critical junctures, ruin must supervene. With what reason then can we neglect the management of a relation from which we may look for blessings in this world and the next?14 And then there is great risk that the friendship which terminates may revert to open hostility. The evils of enmity are more intolerable when they follow upon previous affection.15 A quarrelsome habit, though it is always culpable, is still more odious in the case of friends. It leads indeed to discord, and discord leads to repugnance; which is the root of all evil.16
In communicating to a friend any knowledge or accomplishment we may possess, no reserve must be permitted to have place. To compete with friends in the goods of this life, which is a state of competition, is abominable enough; how much more then in knowledge, which by participation is promoted, and by selfishness is decreased!17
When we perceive any fault in a friend, we ought to apprise him of it in some method carrying with it a graceful admonition. Points like these we are not at liberty to treat with indulgence or profession; for this would be no better than treachery.18 The method of such graceful admonition is this: First to apprise him of it by some fable or anecdote of another person;19 if that does not avail, to intimate it by allusion and metaphor, and if it is necessary to be explicit, to perform the unpleasant duty in private; prefacing it by a statement of the circumstances that entitle you to his confidence, and taking care to conceal the matter from all others, even from the friends of both.
Lastly, we are to give no access to tale-bearers. The firmer the foundations of our affection may be, the more will detraction exert itself to perforate and subvert. Moralists have likened the detractor to one who scratches with his nails at a solid wall, till he somewhere finds room for the insertion of his finger-top. Once master of a fissure, he constantly enlarges it, until at last he subverts the structure. In the preservation of affection no caution can be too great; for, as we have repeatedly stated, it is the centre of adjustment in the affairs of life, and of maintenance in the powers of the universe.20
LET any one compare his own situation with that of mankind in general, and theirs must have one of three characters, — superior, equal, or inferior. His intercourse with the first division has been determined in Sect. V. In the second division, intercourse is of three kinds, — with friends, with foes, and with those who are neither.2
I. Friends are of two sorts, — genuine and not genuine. With the genuine the mode of intercourse has just been ascertained: for the other, if peradventure by cultivation and courtesy they may be brought to bear a semblance of the genuine, we should take every opportunity to pay them attention, and make every endeavour to improve their feelings: possibly they may attain to the distinction of genuine friendship. Our secrets, however, our enterprises, our faults, and the measure of our property, we should not let them know. We must not punish them for their faults, nor rebuke them for inattention to our claims. Their projects we should support, as far as we can, with cheerfulness, either real or complimentary; and should the honors of advance to rank or property become theirs, we must not appear to regard them the more or visit them the oftener.
II. Foes are of two sorts, — the far and the near; and each of two kinds, — the hidden and the open. Potential foes are of the open, invidious ones of the hidden, description. A near foe is the most formidable one; being more acquainted with our minute circumstances. Wherever we eat or drink, wheresoever we arrive or set out from, we must be mindful of his vicinity and our own safeguard.3
The main point in the treatment of foes is by courteous and conciliating demeanour to remove, if possible, the blemish from their hearts; and the best of all expedients is to cut off the supply of animosity and hatred. When this project is hopeless, as long as we can behave with exterior civility we should never give openness to our variance. For to overwhelm evil with good is good, and to resist evil by evil is evil. We must pay no regard then to the folly of our enemies, but let our war-cry4 be patience and politeness. Indeed, dissension and animosity cannot be too much avoided; leading as they do to loss of property, ruin of fortune, endless regret, and overwhelming anxiety; — nay, to loss of life as well as property they may lead, and innumerable calamities besides. Life is too precious a jewel to be thrown away upon a spite against our foes.
Among other essential precautions it is one to inquire into an enemy’s concerns, and take the greatest pains to ascertain them; being equally careful, however, to conceal them when ascertained, and not divulge them till the proper time. For to publish an enemy’s fault is to put him upon perceiving it, and avoiding its range; or perchance he may labour in secret to avert the injurious operation, reserving its discovery till the expedient moment; and victory may fall to him in consequence. Part of it, however, we may bring forward as opportunity demands, that, knowing our consciousness of his defects, his spirit may be broken and mortified, and thus grow weary of the contest. On no account are we to disgrace him with imputations of our own: for falsehood will redound to the strength and superiority of the opposite party. Complaints against him we may lay, however, before the chiefs and functionaries, in order to possess them with a right view of our situation; and then, if similar attempts are made on his side, they shall not be believed, but imputed to his further misbehaviour. We ought to make ourselves acquainted with the habit and tendency of his every quality, so as to prepare an appropriate defence for each. All that may lead to his embarrassment and disquiet we ought likewise to ascertain, and make use of upon suitable occasion. Plato says the best way of providing against the practices of our foes is to render ourselves superior to them in those arts which are common to the two: thus at the same time ourselves attaining the honors of perfection, averting the enemies’ molestation, and consigning them to humiliation and embarrassment. To give vent to expressions of abuse, abhorrence, malediction, and censure, is the trait of weak women, and far removed from the practice of men of sense and ability. Not only indeed do we assume thereby the characteristics of the foolish, without detriment to the enemy’s cause, but we incite him to attack our reputation in return.5 We are told that when a person appeared before Abú Muslim, at the instigation of a court parasite, and entered into charges against Nasar Sayār, (the previous governor of Khorāsan on the Marwānite party), Abú Muslim was displeased, and put a stop to the proceeding, saying, that if he for his own purposes should choose to embrue his hands in the blood of that party, it could answer none to attack their reputations.
When an enemy is visited by any calamity from which we are not ourselves secure, we should not exult in it or display any satisfaction; for the calamity having an application to us, we should in fact be exulting over ourselves.
Should an enemy ever turn to us for refuge, or repose on us any reliance, we must beware of deceiving or betraying him. We must discharge all obligations of honor and humanity, and so contrive as to convince every one of our good feeling and integrity, and retort upon him the turpitude of wrong. On this point we ought to proceed by the example of the Prophet, of whom we are told in the most authentic accounts, that when Kaab bin Zohair, who passed among the Arabs for a master in composition, had defiled his tongue (before he was honored by conversion) by satirizing certain servants6 of the Prophetic port, and in consequence the refuge of revelation had put the ban7 upon his life, Kaab, being informed of the fact, and knowing that his only resource lay in an appeal to that unfailing mercy which embraces all in both worlds (We sent thee not but in mercy to the worlds), composed a splendid elegy, all sparkling with rich encomiums on his highness’s excellence, and mounting (as was the Arab custom) on a swift-paced camel, crossed the deserts, and presented himself at that threshold where angels were fain to nestle. Thus safely ensconced, he fell to reciting his elegy, in the course of which he had taken care to introduce the grounds of his apology and deprecation. As soon as his holiness heard it he cancelled the catalogue of Kaab’s offences, and bestowed upon him a tunic drawn from his own pure and spiritual person, as the most sacred pledge of impetrated safety. From that time forward the poet was ranked with the most favoured attendants.8
For averting their malice, there are three courses to follow. 1. To ameliorate their natures, or, if that is impracticable, to ameliorate their regard. 2. To avoid it by choosing a residence at some distance, or undertaking travel. 3. To attack and destroy it. This is the last of expedients, and one which we are only to adopt when the enemy is malicious in se; when we cannot avoid the harm by any other means; when we are of opinion, that in case of the enemy’s prevailing over us, some evil still more serious will result; when we can be sure that no further ill consequences will follow, either in this world or the next. And this, withal, we are still to except against deceit and treachery; and if it be practicable to attack his power by the hand of another foe, that is to be preferred.
As to the invidious, we must harass them by setting forth our advantages, and by displaying our virtues, or other such means of good fortune, internal or external, as may tend to irritate their mental malady, and in time excite other and fresh ones. Their pretexts we must tear aside, that men may be aware of their odious propensities, and prepared to condemn their further displays. There is a proverb —
III. As to intercourse with those who are neither friends nor foes, it will differ with the different classes to which they belong. With the ingenuous, who occupy towards the public a cordial and sincere position, we should affect warmth, and meet them with unaffected cheerfulness. We must not, however, be too hasty in admitting the professions of every one: we must not be deceived by circumstances of appearance. By observation we must acquaint ourselves with peoples’ real intentions, and be guided accordingly. The good (or those engaged in promoting general concord)9 we should treat with reverence and respect. The foolish we should entertain with coolness; not dwelling on their follies nor seeking access to revenge, but trusting to be rid of them by calmness, benignity, and mutual avoidance. With the haughty we should be haughty, that they may be corrected and rebuked by our demeanour: we have it in one of the dicta, “With the haughty it is friendly to be haughty.” For courtesy towards this class only serves to confirm them in their error; while a haughty bearing in return would be likely to awaken them to a sense of it. To men of eminence we should show respect, for a high privilege is theirs. We should bear with the ill-nature of our neighbours and friends. There is a saying, “The mild forbear in body, and the generous forbear in soul.”
With regard to those beneath us, if docile, we should tender them as our own children; searching into their natures and dispositions for the bent of their abilities, and employing them accordingly; holding ourselves bound to assist them to the utmost of our power. The dull we should encourage in whatever may be most adapted to their capacities, and discourage from aiming at scientific attainment. Interrogators, if importunate, we should rebuke and disregard; not however when such importunity proceeds from excess of exigence. We must carefully distinguish between him that wants and him that desires. For the first, we should expedite his want, or even supply it, if without detriment we may; the second we should restrict from pursuing his cupidity any further. To the weak we should extend our hand, and to the oppressed our succour; and, as far as in us lies, endeavour a resemblance to that absolute good, the source of every blessing, the well-spring of every excellence, — the Almighty and All-hallowed, whose mercy and munificence watered — whose heavenly inspirations expanded — the blossoms of celestial perfection now teeming on creation’s favourite plant — mankind: and this without expectation of advantage, or forecast of purpose or design; his exaltation is beyond it. This then is the course which the aspirant after virtue must pursue; making absolute good the ultimate end of all his other acquisitions, — till at length he achieves the elevation of becoming the Vice-regent of God:10
LET it be the object of your constant endeavour to instruct both others and yourself. Ask nothing from the Supreme, the advantage of which is open to the inroads of decay; but let your petition be for the good that endureth. Be ever on the watch; evil hath many causes. That which you ought not to accomplish, forbear even to desire. God’s punishment of his servants is not in course of anger, but in course of discipline and culture. Be content to aspire to the life you suit, lest the duration of that which suits you be contracted: neither consider any life a suitable one, but that which will satisfy the appetite for knowledge. Turn not to repose in sleep till thou hast taken account with thy soul of three things: — 1. whether thou hast that day committed any wrong; 2. whether that day thou hast gained any advantage; 3. whether any previous achievement has perished by neglect. Remember! before thy life what wert thou; and after it, what wilt thou be? Molest none; for the affairs of life lie in the channel of mutation and decay. Make not thy capital of aught external to thyself. Count not any for wise who rejoiceth at earthly pleasure, or is disturbed at earthly misfortune. To the tales of a tale-bearer, who divulges them unasked, thou mayest listen, and be sure, that he who wisheth evil to another hath already in his own soul admitted evil to himself. Think often before thou speakest: having spoken, perform. The need that thou feelest cast not upon to-morrow: how knowest thou to-morrow what may befall? In word only be not wise, but in word and deed likewise. Wisdom in words may endure in this world, wisdom in deed reacheth to the next, and endureth there. If for good thou bearest pain, the pain endureth not, the good endureth: if for ill thou enjoyest pleasure, the pleasure endureth not, the ill endureth. Remember that the day will come when men shall call upon thee, and thou shalt be bereft of organs wherewith to answer or to listen; hearing not, speaking not, unable to remember. Reflect not whilst thou art here upon any for their wants; thou shalt be where master and slave are alike. Know that of all the gifts of God nothing is better than wisdom, and that he only can be wise whose thoughts, words, and actions correspond together. Requite a good act, and let a bad one pass. Weary not at the offices pertaining to the next world, for they are great. Bruise not a single bosom in thy pursuit of excellence. Abandon not permanent for transitory eminence, for in so doing thou turnest from him who is the source of both. Neither be overweening in thy affluence; nor in thy calamities give way to despondence and self-abasement. Be rude to none, be courteous to all, and beware how thou contemnest another for being courteous to thee. What thou excusest in thyself, revile not in thy brother.
When Aristotle, who was minister as well as tutor to Alexander, was compelled by age and infirmity to retire from his service, what time Alexander was conquering the country of Ajam, and this was found to abound with persons of intellect and talent — with men of eminence and bravery — whom it seemed as prejudicial to the safety of his empire to spare, as it was repugnant to the principles of equity to exterminate, the prince became perplexed upon the subject, and wrote Aristotle a letter replete with warm and gracious expressions of his regard and favour, in the course of which he stated, that by reason of the distance that divided him from the advantage of his preceptor’s society, he found his judgment exposed to much agitation upon public affairs in general; upon which account, as well as of the particular difficulty he just then found in seeing his way through the anxieties of his position, unassisted by the bright expedients of the sage’s luminous mind, he was to oblige him by endeavouring, by whatever means he might best accomplish it, to arrange the method of their meeting. Aristotle’s reply was in this sort:
“My glorious pupil and enterprising prince must be well aware that my retirement is occasioned by no want of eagerness to accompany him; but by old age, the debility of my constitution, and the exhaustion of my powers. Our meeting being thus impracticable, I have in this epistle explained to you a system to which you can conform upon all matters of detail, and which will indeed render you independent of my actual presence.2 As to the question of Ajam and its men of eminence, be assured that were you to destroy these, you could never alter the climate that bred them, so that others of the same description will necessarily rise in their place. Endeavour therefore to enslave them by obligations, and you will render them sincere in their adherence, nay, the most submissive of all your vassals.”
He then goes on to say, “Kings are of four classes: the first, liberal to self and subjects both; the second, liberal to self and niggard to subjects; the third, niggard to self and liberal to subjects; the fourth, niggard both to self and subjects. The first by general consent is praiseworthy; the second and fourth by general consent culpable; as to the third, opinions differ, the Hindy school holding it praiseworthy, and the Persian school holding it culpable. Now to be liberal is to supply those entitled to it according to their need; and whoever exceeds this degree deviates pro tanto into profusion. The king who indulges in generosity beyond his resources will infallibly find it productive of ruin to his empire. Often I have told you, Alexander, that of munificence and liberality the main point is, not to covet other men’s possessions, and not to bear in remembrance the favours you have already bestowed. * * * * * * The king that holds religion at his disposal, and slights the law of God, him shall the law of God destroy. * * * * * * The merchants who resort from distant parts to his dominions let him make a point of protecting; and in so doing he will be diffusing his own good name, winning men’s affections, and promoting the resort of traders, and, with it, the prosperity of his dominions. Neither in return for a little indulgence extended to them should he seek to derive inordinate profit. * * *
“O Alexander, often have I enjoined thee, and again I repeat my injunctions, be not over bold to shed blood; for the destruction of things living is peculiarly the right of God. With the truth of circumstances none is acquainted but he who is acquainted with all things. Perchance by reason of some accusation of which he is innocent, or at least excusable as to the committal, thou mayest see fit to put a person to death undeservedly; than which what crime can be more aggravated? It has been told me for a saying of Hermes Trismegistus (who is Esdras), that when one created thing deprives another of its life, the angels3 of heaven bewail in the presence of the Creator, saying, ‘Thy servant such-an-one hath made himself like to thee in destroying another of thy servants.’ If the death be one of retribution, the Lord answers, — ‘By my command he hath killed him in right of retribution.’ But if it be without justice, he replies, — ‘By my splendour and my glory, the blood of the slayer I permit others to shed.’ Upon this the angels, in all their halleluiahs and intercessions, imprecate destruction upon him, till the time of retribution comes. And this is the best that can befall him. If he dies in the course of nature, it is a sign of the Almighty’s anger, which has summoned him to punishment more protracted and severe.
“Incite thy subjects to cultivate science; and him that is eminent in science be careful to distinguish with unusual patronage and favour: by this practice thou wilt be promoting thine own popularity and the kingdom’s good together. * * * Take no food from hands on which thou hast not reason to rely. Be not inattentive to thy safety: and forget not the circumstance of the presents sent thee by the King of Hind; wherein, among other rarities, was a maiden who had been fed on poison from her infancy, till her constitution was become viperish:4 and it was their design by her means to destroy thee, but that I foresaw and warned thee of the danger. * * * The men of Hind have a saying, ‘Better justice in the sovereign than plenty in the season;’ and on certain stones there is an inscription in Syriac —
* * * * * * *
Now that our disquisitions have led us to touch on this
subject, it seems desirable to give a fuller explanation of
its leading points. To do this in a manner befitting the
present occasion we must begin by observing, that a tone
is a sound with an assignable duration. When this is
repeated with the requisite degree of sharpness and
flatness without producing that effect which is the property
of harmony, it does not come within the scope of
the science of music; such scope being limited to tones
of such a character that their interval in regard to sharpness
and flatness, or the interval of the periods recurring
between them in regard to duration, contributes to a
harmonious or discordant relation; the first of which
divisions is termed harmony, and the second of which is
termed melody. Now when two tones are taken which
differ in sharpness and flatness, the difference between
them will necessarily be constituent of a relation either
harmonious or discordant. For if the difference be referable
either to like in fact or like in effect, it is harmony;
and if not, it is discord. The meaning of like in
fact is this, that the measure of the interval is equal to
the less; which may happen when one is double of the
other, like 4 and 2, 6 and 3; and this is termed the
Diapason interval. The meaning of like in effect is this,
that what is not like in fact may by duplication be rendered
so: which is of two sorts; one, where this property
resides in the difference, as with 6 and 4, which differ by
2, which by duplication becomes 4; and this is termed
the Progressional proportion: the other, where this property
resides in one of the differents, as with 6 and 2,
which differ by 4; whereas 2, which is one of the differents,
by duplication becomes 4; and this is termed the
Multiple proportion. Every proportion which proceeds
on these conditions, or is capable of being reduced to
them, is harmony; and every one repugnant to them is
discord. Thus all couples of tones not having a numeral
ratio, that is, tones whose ratio is an involved one with
peculiar properties for which numbers are not to be
found, are discordant; such as the tone produced by the
whole string, and that produced by such part of it as
bears to the whole the ratio of a square’s side to its
diagonal. And even if it be a numeral proportion, but
the smaller number divide not the greater, or the difference
between the two is not by a part having the
power of the greater, and it is not capable of being reduced
to the harmonious proportions by any of the
methods presently explained, it must still be discordant.
For instance, two tones of which one is greater than the
other by
Again, when the difference is by a part which divides the greater number, if that part makes up a half or near to half to one of the numbers, as a half or third, they call it the proportion of middle intervals, which is reducible to the same two; for if the difference is between 4 and 6, the differential part forms half; and if it is between 7 and 5, it makes what is near to half. Of these middle intervals, the first sort is termed the Diapente interval, such as 2 and 3; and the second sort the Diatessara interval, such as 3 and 4. And if the difference is by a part which makes not the number half or near it, it is termed the proportion of Minor intervals, or Hypertessara.
Now these different descriptions of harmony, which are all either the involution of one number in another, or else their differing by a part being a divisor of the greater number, are contemplated only as far as the difference can be perceived, and the human frame possesses the power of putting it forth. If the difference be of such sort that it is not the subject of sensation, or be excessively trifling, or such as the human frame cannot enunciate, it comes not within the limits of this science. For on the supposition of its escaping the perception, or having only an exceedingly minute expression in it, that agreeable sensation which is the object of joining sounds together does not result therefrom; and in the latter case, though it be possible to bring it forth from other instruments, yet being not on a scale with the physical demands of man, that is, with his own organic intonations, the human system finds no attraction in them, neither do they attain the height of being agreeable; whereas the science of music being placed in following out the highest, this is no part of its scope. It appears, then, that a proportion not formed on the scale of man’s organic intonations is no subject for our consideration. The limit of combination in organic tones (as actually effected) in the class of major intervals is that one should be double of the other’s double, as 4 and 1: in the class of minors, that one should be greater than the other by one thirty-sixth part, that is, one being 36 and the other 37: all beyond this is not had in contemplation.
Now to apply this to the present subject, the proportion
of doubles, which they call the like proportion, is
the primary and most pure of all. One instance of its
exceeding purity and closeness to unity is this, that either
side may be substituted for the other without prejudice to
its harmony; that is to say, whether we employ the tone
duplicate or the reverse, the thread of connexion is not
broken, nor the tie of concord dissolved. For instance,
the tone represented by 8 being double that represented
by 4, if we substitute 8 for 4, and place it in union with
the tone represented by 3, a harmonious interval is obtained
from 8 and 3, although there is no primary concord
between them: their harmony being in this wise,
that 4, which is the half of 8, is in harmony with 3; or if,
looking to the 3, we say 3 is half of 6, between which
and 8 there is harmony, the same principle is educed;
and on either supposition it resolves itself into the Diatessara
interval. Or else, combining 5 with 3, a harmony
is obtained which reduces itself to the Minor interval; for
this reason, that by the minor interval there is a harmonious
relation between 5 and 6, and 3 is the representative
of 6. Or we might say it has the relation of
Minor intervals with 2
Another instance of pure and radical properties in the Diapason interval (the compartment of like in fact) is that both the intervals by which it is divided are means as well of arithmetical as of harmonical proportion. Now the meaning of arithmetical mean is that it is intermediary between two numbers, so that its ratio to both extremes, in respect of proximity and distance, is alike; like 4, which is intermediary between 6 and 2. And the meaning of harmonical mean is that it is a number, the ratio of whose excess over the lesser term is to the excess of the greater term over it, as is the ratio of the lesser term to the greater term; such as 4, which is harmonic mean between 3 and 6; for the excess of 4 over 3 is 1, and the excess of 6 over 4 is 2, and the ratio between 1 and 2 is as the ratio between 3 and 6.
The application of the first is this: the ratio of 4 to 2 is the Diapason interval; and when 3, which is the numeral mean, is introduced, two ratios arise; one between 2 and 3, which is the Diapente interval; the other between 3 and 4, which is the Diatessara interval. The application of the second is this: the ratio of 6 to 3 is the Diapason interval, and when 4, which is the harmonic mean, is introduced, two ratios arise, one the ratio of 4 to 3, which is the Diatessara interval, the other that of 4 to 6, which is the Diapente interval. From which particulars it is that we discover the reason of naming the duplicate ratio a Diapason [or all-pervading] interval; and that of naming the other two concordant ratios as above.
From these preliminaries it is clear that all the harmonious intervals come back to the proportion of similar ratios. For in the like in fact the measure of difference is like in reality; and in the like in effect it is like in operation, either through the properties of one of the two differing numbers, or by nature, or by mediary connexion, as has been explained. The element of harmony then is similarity, which is an image of unity.
| Like | ||||||
| In fact | In effect | |||||
| Diapason | Progressional | Multiple | ||||
| 1 : 2 | 4 : 6 | Primary Concordance |
2 : 6 | |||
| Major Intervals | ||||||
| Diapente | ||||||
| 2 : 4 | Take 2 : 3 : 4 | Diatessara | Diapente | |||
| 4 : 3 | Secondary or Representative Concordance |
2 : 3 | ||||
| Diatessara | ||||||
| Diatessara | ||||||
| 3 : 6 | Take 3 : 4 : 6 | |||||
| Diapente | Diatessara | |||||
| 2 : 3 | 2 : 3 | Doubly Representative |
4 : 3 | |||
| Diapente | ||||||
| Middle Intervals | ||||||
Called; Diapason (through all) because the interval is equal in all the terms, or because all the other ratios are involved in this one; Progressional, because the difference the lesser term and the greater term are in Arithmetical progression (2 : 4 : 6); Multiple, because the lesser term is contained in the greater one more than twice (2+2+2=6); Diapente, because a distribution of five (2+3=5); Diatessara, because 4 is the ruling number; Hypertessara, because the interval becomes smaller than can be expressed by a fourth, &c.
IN consequence of the Translator having been obliged to use a system of orthography to which he was unaccustomed, the following inaccuracies have sometimes occurred in the spelling of Eastern names. E has been written for A, as Muhammedan for Muhammadan (passim), Alf Leil for Alf Lail. The long ū has been written oo, as Mansoor for Mansūr, Māmoon for Māmūn; í has been written ee, as Neeshāpor, and a few others.
P. 1, n. 1, add “The usual ejaculation (Bismillah, &c.) is intended to precede the first line, though omitted in both MSS. in the translator’s use.”
P. 6, n. 15. The person here intended is Ugurlú, the elder brother of Khalíl. He died at the same time with his father. (D’Herbelôt in Uzun.) Correct accordingly.
P. 8, n. 17, for “introduced the divisions” read “made constant use of the terms.”
P. 9, n. 19, after the words “physics and logic,” insert “with Euclid in geometry, with Ptolemy in astronomy,” and with, &c.
P. 11, n. 24. There are a few other instances of books similarly entitled, but all the rest are of a secondary class — Luāmi-u-Damshak, Lamaāt-u-Tahirín, Lamaāt-u-Núrāniāt.
P. 13, n. 25, add Ecclesiasticus xxxix. 21, “He hath made all things for their uses.”
Ibid. n. 26, cf. Psalm viii. 6.
P. 14, n. 27, add “In some of their traditions the jins or genii are represented as the civilizers of mankind, and their proceedings for this purpose described much in the same way as those of Prometheus in Æschylus. (Prom. Vinct.) Cf. Akhwān-u-Safā, chapter on the Enmity of Jins and Men.”
P. 15, n. 31, add Plato’s definition of the sun,
P. 23, n. 43, erase the first two lines of this note, and substitute
— “The words of Plato in his Theætetus,
Ib. n. 44, add “cf. p. 232, n. 112. Christians have been supplied with a practicable substitute. Thomas-à-Kempis’ work on Virtue is called ‘The Imitation of Christ.’”
P. 26, line 8, for “vitalized” read “revived.” Ib. 1. 13, note on perception: he alludes to the great question whether qualities originate in the process of sensation, or whether they really exist in the thing perceived.
P. 36, n. 71, add Jerem. xiii. 23, “Can the Æthiopian change his skin,” &c.
P. 37, n. 73, add the lines —
It was only on New Year’s Day, and after the performance of religious rites, that this virtue could be found in it.
P. 42, n. 79, add “Eternity of production is a standard point
in the Peripatetic philosophy — hinted by Aristotle, and affirmed
by Plato before him:
P. 43, n. 84, add “According to Gillie, Analysis c. ii. n. O, the doctrine of detrition and deposit was clearly expounded by Aristotle, Meteor. l. I. c. xiv. Cf. Wisd. of Sol. xix. 18—21.”
P. 44, n. 87, add “Aristotle:
P. 46. Transpose note 90 to the end of the paragraph after n. 91. Quote Grotius De Ver. l. I. c. vii. ad fin. “Præterea, non ab æterno extitisse hominum genus, sed a certo tempore communem stirpi sumsisse originem, evincunt inter alia artium progressus. ” He quotes Lucretius, lib. v.
P. 61, n. 16, l. 3, print specific in italics (other essence not being contemplated). After the word “properly” (l. 10), insert — “the sources and so far” the subject, &c.
P. 67, n. 3, prefix Cic. Off. i. 6. “Virtutis laus omnis in actione consistit.”
P. 72, n. 9, add Job xxxiv. 14, 15. “If he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again into dust.”
P. 73, l. 2, note a reference to p. 276, n. 6.
P. 99, n. 2, add “Aristotle, again, took up the theory only
as a department of the great Pythagorean doctrine, which referred
all being to a contest of contraries:
P. 102, l. 19. To the words, “Hell is a circle,” note Plato’s
description of Hades from the vision of Er, Rep. x. ad fin.; to
which all passages of the Kurān on similar subjects bear great resemblance.
Among other things he describes the souls as wearing
symbols of their sentences:
P. 103, n. 8, add “Dante too begins his allegory as having missed his path.”
P. 118, l. 2, for “as” read “since.”
P. 121, n. 16, add Wisd. of Sol. xix. 18. “For the elements were changed in themselves by a kind of harmony, like as in a psaltery notes change the name of a tune, and yet are always sounds.”
P. 124, n. 21. This law of being may be collected from Locke on Uneasiness, Ess. B. II. c. xxi. ss. 31—40; and Butler on Habits, Anal. Part I. c. v. s. 2.
P. 128, l. 2, note: “In Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry iii. 3. this aphorism is attributed to Ardshír Bābak. Cf. in Conclusion ad fin.”
Ib. n. 26, for “a human assertion,” read “human and more limited assertion. Written and unwritten law are commonly known as law and morals.”
Ib. n. 27, add reference to Herodotus, iii. 8.
P. 136, n. 41, add “see in n. 20, p. 324.”
P. 140, n. 47, add “This was the opinion of the primitive fathers, and particularly of Justin Martyr. Exhort. ad Græc. (Dr. Ad. Clarke’s Succession.)”
P. 141, l. 1, add “See in Introduction, p. 12, &c. Cf. Jer. Taylor, Holy Liv. I. i. 2. ‘God is pleased to esteem it for part of his service, if we eat and drink, so it be done temperately, and as may best preserve our health; that our health may enable our services to him: and there is not one minute of our lives but we are or may be doing the work of God, even then when we most of all serve ourselves.’”
P. 152, n. 11, add “Kurān c. xlii. v. 52.”
P. 156, n. 4, add “Fāriāby in the 4th century, (Hij.) was an accomplished musician; but then he was notoriously indifferent to forms of religion.”
P. 167, n. 21, cf. Proverbs xxvii. 5, 6.
P. 180, n. 19, cf. Proverbs xxvi. 12.
P. 192, n. 33, cf. Proverbs xi. 2. Ecclesiasticus x. 9, et seq.
P. 200, n. 50, cf. Ecclesiastes iii. 11.
P. 201, n. 51, cf. Proverbs xvi. 32.
P. 220, n. 89, cf. Ecclesiasticus xli. 3, 4.
P. 221, l. 9, for “his” read “our.”
P. 229, n. 107, add “For
P. 252, n. 3, “lay at a distance” are the words of Gillie.
P. 253, n. 7, add “Ecclesiasticus xxvi. 29.”
P. 255, n. 11, add “Proverbs xi. 26.”
P. 257, n. 16, add “Cf. Proverbs xviii. 16. xix. 6.”
P. 271, n. 18, cf. Ecclesiasticus xxv. 25.
P. 273, n. 21, before “separation” insert “temporary.”
P. 287, n. 23, cf. Ecclesiasticus xlii. 9, 11.
P. 305, n. 2, cf. Ecclesiasticus xxxiii. 30, 31.
P. 312, n. 2, add, “After Aristotle, Natural. Auscult. l. VIII. c. x. p. 422 — ‘The heavenly bodies appear to perform their motions exempt from the vicissitudes of renovation and decay.’”
P. 361, n. 47, add Nizāmy’s poetical application of this doctrine to the fortunes of Darius:
P. 370, n. 9, add “Plato, Ep. vii.
P. 380, l. 5, note reference to Job vi. 15, 17.
P. 382, n. 6, add Job xxxviii. 14, “It is turned as clay to the seal.”
P. 394, l. 20, insert this note between ns. 19 and 20: “Prevention of wrong is recognised as the proper end of punishment. Among other wrongs, however, they would include private violations of morality and ritual; uniting, if not identifying, the civil and ecclesiastical theories.”
P. 395, l. 4, insert next to the above — “Truncation of the right hand, for instance, is the legal punishment for theft, which a person so punished can commit no more. See an ancient vestige of the idea in Job xxxi. 22. The practice may be combated on its own grounds, as it renders a man useless to the community, and incapable of retrieving his offence. As a bonâ fide substitute for capital punishment, its propriety is only to be questioned on the ground of its influence on society — its tendency to harden and deprave men’s feelings, or prevent their amelioration. On the other hand, among a ferocious and improvident people no salutary impression is to be made except by these appalling means. Hence the barbarity of early punishment, such as stoning among the Hebrews, Arabs, and Greeks — hurling from a precipice at Rome, &c. &c. With the progress of refinement it ought to disappear, for a twofold reason: 1. As the requisite impression may now be produced by milder means. 2. As the feelings are more likely to be injured by such exhibitions.”
P. 396, l. 15, insert the following note: “The foundation of private rights we had at p. 124, (n. 21,) here we have their limitation. — Rights exist before society, but are mutually compressed, as soon as society commences, in order to make room for each other. In return for this privation, others are bestowed of greater value; namely, public and political rights. This is not all the benefit of society; for it immeasurably multiplies the number of recipients. The population of the British isles is now 25,000,000; before they were civilized it could not have been a quarter of a million. Thus 99 out of every 100 persons owe existence itself, as well as the quality of existence, to the social state.”
P. 401, l. 3, note: “It appears from Exodus v. 1, 6, 15, that the communication between Pharaoh and the Hebrews was indeed much more direct and open than the Eastern people of a later age were accustomed to see it, as regarded their own princes; and this may have given rise to the impression as above; though the fact would be owing, not to the disposition of the prince, but the habits of the empire: government then exhibiting more resemblance to its primitive or patriarchal state.”
ABSENCE of mind, 190.
Abstinence, enforced, 224; how to be acquired, ibid.; excessive, to be avoided, 29, 172.
Abuse, condemned, 442; punishable, 397.
Access to princes, its importance, 399; its difficulty, 400, n., 269, n., 401.
Acid, its hostility to minerals, 332.
Action, essential to wisdom, 21, — to virtue, 66. (See Practice.) Rules for, in speaking, 290.
Active, see Power and School.
Adulation, to be avoided — towards princes, 419—424, — towards friends, 433.
Affection, source of creation, 145. (See Love and Mercy.) By some identified with consistence, 330; held to circulate, 331; necessary where unity subsists, 330; not without mind, 331; human, twofold, 332; spontaneous, of four sorts, 333; from natural affinity, 425; supersedes equity, 144, 329; a wider term than friendship, 334, 352; perfect, what, 336; for good, the only permanent, 333, 339, 345, 349, 355; between parties, (see Relation.) May terminate at different times, 343.
Affinity, spiritual, 81, 303; relative, 426; magical, 229; source of spontaneous affection, 426.
Age, respect to, 281.
Agriculture, its importance, 254, 389; a source of income, 252; compared with other sources, 253, n.
Air, its functions, 389.
Alacrity, what, — recommended, 158.
Alms-giving, a part of ritual, 257, n.; its efficacy, 259.
Ambition, its effect on character, 431.
Amputation, metaphorical, 249, 395; literal, 395; considered, Addenda ad fin.
Amulets, their use, how ancient, 230, n.
Ancient (writers), what, 8, n.
Angels, immaterial, 15; compared with man, 19, 234; worship him, 316; outposts of, 338; witness creation, 259; converse with God, ibid., 456.
Anger, (see Power, vindictive.) Seated in the heart, 201, n.; ineradicable, 157, 184, 206; entire suppression of, not desirable, 184, n., 205; defined, described, cured, 181, et seq.; causes and consequences of, 184; most formidable in the gentle, 183; a sort of madness, 185, 201; bars adjudication, 183, et seq.; different degrees of, liability to, 182, — of kings, long-lived, 209.
Animals, how far homogeneous with men, 79, 80, 160; how far heterogeneous, 85, 93, 79, 176; their place in being, 118, 316; their natural perfection, 178; provision for procreation of, 146; gregarious or otherwise, 317; appearance of, why uniform, 85.
Appearance, on what it depends, 85.
Application, in excess, a vice of reason, 171.
Aptitude, innate, 284, 285, n.; how and why determined, ib., 320, n.; to be always consulted, ib., 307, 310, 448.
Art, a derivative of nature, 147; its processes, ib.
Artfulness, what, and whence, 171.
Arts, inventions (under revelation), 45; from what faculty, 54; how to be acquired, 152; all comprised in that of government, 328.
Arrogance, description and cure of, 192.
Assault, a public wrong, 397.
Astrology, practice and rationale of, 285, n., 361.
Astronomy, æras in Muhammedan, 6, 11, n., 219, n.
Attack, public, rules for, see War; private, 445.
Attraction, of cohesion, 233, 234, n.; of affinity, 330, 332, 426; of temperament, 229, 426.
Attributes, divine, 2, 116, 306; human, defined, 38.
Audience, public, 399. See Access.
Authority, (see Prince, Government.) Twin of right, 457; wears out, 196; how to be exercised, 399.
Avarice, 143; destructive to the character, 282.
Balance, a sacred symbol of equity, 128, n.; of powers, see Equipoise.
Ban, of the Arabs, 444.
Banishment, what, and for what purpose, 394.
Barrenness in wives, to be avoided, 263.
Barter, see Interchange.
Battery, a public wrong, 397.
Beauty, on what depending, 117, 122, 232; an advantage, 306; how perishable, 187; in a wife, 264, — dangerous, ib.; of truth, 237, — of the Persians’ God, 306.
Being, its two processes, 363, 364, n.
Benedictions, how and when used, 50, n.
Benefits, political, three species of, 396; limitation to, 408.
Bigotry, a vice of reason, 171.
Birds, Arab fables concerning, 28, n.
Blood, the vehicle of life, 181.
Body, no essential part of being, 212, 2, n., — but of nature, 408. (See Soul.) Composed of discordant elements, 335; how, 216, 315. (See Temperament, Humours, Life.) Influence of on mind, 157, 173, 338; influenced by mind, ib., 207; may be practically discarded, 337. (See Death.) Not entirely, ib.
Boldness, a species of courage, 71.
Bounty, 408. See Charity, Benefaction.
Bridge of good works, 103.
Brotherhood, a species of equity, 81.
Brothers, regard of, precarious, 348.
Cadence, on what depending, 117.
Calamity of enemies, no subject for joy, 443.
Caliphat, properly or loosely, what, 5, n., 378, n.; powers of, how distributed, 136.
Caliphs, four first, 379, n.
Capital, insecure, 253.
Caste, traces of, 37, n., 238, 374, n.
Censure, its use, 248, 277; its danger, 278.
Chamberlain (Hajāb), his office and influence, 134, 269.
Character, unalterable, 38, 46, 48, — how formed, 155, 381, 454.
Charity, (see Alms.) Its relation to equity, 143, — only from our own goods, 144.
Cheerfulness, 158; how placed, 238.
Children, their procreation provided for, 150; value of, 6, 263, n.; when humanized, 151; rules for the education of, 275; often disappoint us, 216; to be early settled, 286; care less for their parents than these for them, 347.
Christianity, unconsciously defended, 23, 144, 232, 357.
Chronology, Asiatic, 404, n.
City, how meant, 321; depends on territory, 408. See State.
Classes, of mankind, 367, et seq. (See State, Pests.) Of the good but one, of the bad infinite, 365.
Clay, habit of eating, 382, n. See Addenda.
Clearness of understanding, a species of wisdom, 69.
Clumsiness, 171.
Collectedness, a species of courage, 70.
Commendable, a term for proper and right, 52, 71, et passim.
Commendation, when and why bestowed, 67, — as an instrument of guidance, 248, 277.
Commerce, its importance, 389.
Companions of Muhammad, 4.
Company, its influence, 155, 381.
Complaisance towards wives, how and why to be observed, 265.
Concealment of offences, not to be calculated on, 211, 278, 280.
Conceit, dangers of, 160; cure of, 186.
Condescension, a species of courage, 72.
Conjecture, the characteristic of secondary intellects, 369; Hindus noted for, 311.
Conscience, 215, n.
Consequences, general — law of, applied, 191, 396, 436, 447, n.; particular, to be well considered, 445.
Contemplation, one of the roads to wisdom, 14, 159. See Absence.
Contemporaries, their influence, 381.
Content, a species of temperance, 74, 238.
Contentiousness, a vice of reason, 171; its misehief, 191, 386. See Disagreement.
Continence, a species of temperance, 73.
Contraries, pass into each other, 17, 116; irreconcilable, 175; how virtues of each other. (See Excess and Deficiency.) How virtues of the vices, 99, 170.
Coolness, a species of courage, 71; its value, 425.
Co-operation, of means, with natural processes, 313, — of three sorts, ib., — of every thing with man, 315, — of men with each other, 318.
Cordiality, a species of equity, 82, 157.
Corporeality, 338. See Body.
Counterfeit virtues, 88, et seq.
Courage, how derived, 55, 57, 151, 164; defined, 65; its species, 69; necessitates liberality, 77; counterfeits of, 93.
Court, its decorum, 134, — etiquette, 270, 417, 419, — favour, 426; use of attendance on, 419; dangers of, 418, 425.
Courteousness, 452.
Covetousness, in private persons, 283, 422, 431, — in princes, 200, 383, 455.
Cowardice, a generic vice, 109.
Creation, its object, 415, — process, 358, et seq.
Crimes and misdemeanours, distinction between, 398.
Culture (moral), subject of, (see Powers); object of, (see Vice-regence); course of, 148, et seq.; should imitate production, ib.; details of, (see Proprieties); when commences, 276.
Cup of Jamshíd, 38, n. See Addenda.
Cure, different modes of, 174; mental, details of, 169, et seq.
Daughters, education of, 287; marriage of, ib. n.
Death, twofold, 223; its nature, 122, 222; cure for fear of, 211; not privation, ib.; condition of living, 217.
Decay, a condition of material being, 216. See Ruin.
Deceit, never admissible, 446. See Falsehood, Perfidy.
Defects of person, 291, n.; disqualify for servitude, 306.
Deficiency, one of the genera of evil, 99, 108, 143, 170.
Deluge, natural epochs, 42.
Deposit and detrition, geological, 43, n. See Addenda.
Desire, (see Power, appetent.) Placed in the liver, 201; insatiable, 239; distinguished from want, 448; defect of, 172; provoked by interdiction, 422.
Despondence, 173, 452.
Devotion, a species of equity, 84; wherein consisting, 141, 142.
Dialectics, 171. See Logic.
Dice-playing, stigmatized, 255.
Diet — of children, 279, — of men, 224; analogy of bodily and mental, 159, 174.
Dignity of husbands, why and how to be maintained, 265.
Dínārs, by whom first struck, 270, n.
Diplomacy, some rules of, 410, 411. See Emissaries.
Disagreement, a general form of evil, 191, 386, 436, 441.
Discipline, see Culture.
Disease, its three descriptions, 170; mostly from excess, 224; mental, may proceed from bodily, 173; chronic, ib. See Cure.
Dishonesty, inexpedient, 256.
Disobedience to parents, 303.
Disposition, determined by temperament, 36; mutability of, argued, 38, et seq., 85, 277; differs as respects irascibility, 182.
Disputes, how avoided or conducted, 290.
Diversities, inevitable in men and fortunes, 320; how determined, 322. (See Heavens.) Must be controlled, 322.
Divination, 171, 291.
Divinity, its traits may descend on human nature, 232. See Theology.
Division of the subject, 10.
Divorce, 267, 273, n.
Dress, to be despised, 278, 281, — of princes, sacred, 423, 445, — in-door, of the East, 134.
Duality, 330.
Dulness of intellect, 171, — of desire, 172.
Earth, liable to universal epochs, 44. (See Detrition.) Its surface, see Soil.
Easiness, a species of temperance, 73, 158.
Eating, proper end of, 279; dangers of its abuse, 224; originally a sacred act, 295, n.; proprieties of, 294, — with three fingers, 296.
Eblis, 402, 19, n.
Education, see Culture; — of sons, 276, et seq., — of daughters, 287.
Eed-days, festival of, 130, 131, 341.
Eggs, may be artificially hatched, 147.
Elements, (see Air, Earth’s Surface, Fire, Water.) Natural repugnance between, 216, 335; how overcome, ib., 233. (See Equipoise and Heavens.) How minister to man, 315; affinity of, or otherwise, for certain states, 330.
Elevation of purpose, a species of courage, 70; desirable in kings, 382.
Eloquence, how determined, 122.
Eminence, differs from perfection, 21, — of a science, what, 30.
Emissaries, a rule for choosing, 306.
Emolument, vicious, to be avoided, 163, 253, 256, 286; virtuous, difficult to be obtained, 92.
End — of all things (proper), 12, 140, — of men, 13, 449, — of faculties and members, 140.
Endurance, a species of courage, 71.
Enemies (private), their use, 167; different kinds of, 440; treatment of, 445. (Public,) rules for the treatment of, 410, 411. (See War.) Vanquished, become subjects, 415.
Energy, social, the want of it in Asia, 136, n.
Engrossing, old prejudice against, 255.
Enmity, most formidable after previous friendship, 433, 436; presupposes intimacy, ib.
Envious, the, how to be treated, 446.
Envy, 171; definition of — danger — cure, 241, — difficult, ib., 446.
Equals, of three sorts, 439; intercourse with, ib.
Equator, political — what, 127.
Equinox, procession of, 42.
Equipage of kings, not to be imitated, 423.
Equipoise, determines virtue, 56, 57, 101, n., 154, 164; physical excellence, 118, 228, and life, 122; real and virtual, 107; of species and individual, 105. Political — between individuals, 390, et seq., 396, — between classes, 385, et seq. (See Classes.) How to be maintained, 405.
Equity, why used for justice throughout, 55, n. (See Equipoise.) How derived, 55, 57; defined, 66; determined, 124; described, 98, 141, 345; its species, 78, — counterfeits, 97, — modes, 373; its three branches, 124; other threefold division, 137, 138; its three preservatives, 127; of kings, the most important, 141, 399; simple or compound, argued, 58, et seq., 98, 154; the universal virtue, 57, 60, 110, et seq., — why, 141, n.; its application, 374; presupposes a mean, 126; superseded by affection, 144, 329.
Essence, real, 367.
Events — dependent on things — produced by spheres — appointed by God, 361.
Evil (moral), its origin argued, 40, et seq. See Excess and Defect.
Exactitude, a species of equity, 78.
Excess, one element of evil, 99, 108, 143, 170.
Excesses, how to be controlled, 164.
Executive, 324. (See Prince.) Its capricious severity, 400, n.
Exercise, its use, 280; mental, 159, 268.
Expenses, rules for — sorts of, 257.
Experience, one of the roads to wisdom, 24.
Fables and fabulists, condemned, 155, 327.
Facility of acquirement, a species of wisdom, 69.
Faint-heartedness — defined — described — cured, 95, 172, 205.
Falsehood, unnatural and inexcusable, 243, 281, 291, 411, 441.
Family, (see Pride.) Privileges of, 92, 404; desirable in a king, 383; questionable in a wife, 264; children not to exult in, 281.
Fancy, characteristic of a low order of mind, 369.
Farming, as an occupation, 252. See Agriculture.
Fatalism, see Predestination.
Father, obligations to, 299; how to be treated, 302. (See Parents.) Three sorts of, 351; spiritual, 350.
Faults, measured by power to avoid them, 178, 370; none exempt, 434; not perceived by those harbouring them, 168; how to be discovered, 166; to be concealed, 265, 440; trivial, not to be permitted, and why, 165, — of children, 278, — of friends, 437, — of kings, 421, — of enemies, 441.
Fear, definition and cure of, 209.
Feast, master of, 296, et seq.
Felicity, supreme — what, 60, 337.
Fettering, a mode of punishment, 394.
Fidelity, a species of equity, 78; must be excited, 345.
Figures, in Scripture, necessity of, 370.
Fingers, only three to be used, 296; sucking of, ib.
Fire, its functions, 388.
Firmness, a species of courage, 71.
Flightiness, a generic vice of reason, 108.
Food, difference of men and animals in respect to, 245.
Foolery, 158, 447.
Forbearance, a species of temperance, 73.
Force, when justifiable, 127. (See Punishment.) Characterizes wrong government, 379.
Forgetfulness, 160.
Forts — when to be prepared — how far to be relied on, 413, 414.
Friday, how estimated, 75, 341.
Friends, value of, 167, 427, 429, 436, — to kings, 430; their two sorts, 439. (See Friendship.) Like condiments, 428; other selves, 345; necessary in all circumstances, 428; differences with, how to be adjusted, 434; rules for selecting, 430.
Friendship, only with a few, 334, 428; why, 432, 433; difficult to gain, 429; how unstable, 339; may turn to enmity, 436; honor of obtaining it, 345, 434; its causes, (see Affection.) Of the wise and good, 335, — of the young, ib., — of the old and commercial, ib.; its value, 430. See Friends.
Generals, rules for selecting, 413. See Universal.
Generation, their opinions on, 192.
Geometry, its value in correcting the judgment, 32, 180.
Gesticulation, rules for, 290.
Gifts, to princes and officers, 257.
Globes, artificial, how esteemed, 197.
Gluttony, ill consequences and cure of, 224, 279.
Gnostics, alluded to, 26, n., 46, n.
God, the only being, 18, 415; source of all others, 358. (See Love and Mercy.) His contrary attributes and designations, 1, 18, 116; above our comprehensions, 112; a jealous God, 72; does nothing but bestow, 301, 448; only entitled, 192; considered in relation with man, 357; how influences, 402; writings begin with an address to, 1, n.; engagements referred to, 51, 83; his grace the cause of excellence, 2, 448.
Good, absolute, the affection it engenders, 333; its origin, 448; persons defined, 447; faith, a species of equity, 81; fellowship, ditto, ib., 158; humour, a species of temperance, 73.
Government, necessary to society, 127, 128, 322, 352; its divine origin, ib., 129, 377; its three instruments, ib., 322; identified with despotism, ib., 378, n.; its degenerate state, 378, n.; equity indispensable to, 386; its two divisions, 378; what lasting, 380, 408; art of, comprises all other arts, 328.
Grace of God, necessary to human excellence, 2, 448, 449.
Gratitude, general obligation of, 299. (See Ingratitude.) To God, 141, 152; proper, rare, ib.; independent of requital, 431.
Greediness, 172.
Greeks, how and when followed, 9, n., 169, n.; abandoned, 139; masters, how estimated, 369; partly inspired, 324, n.; unconsciously indebted to Scripture, 140; reason of their figurative phraseology, 372.
Habit, what, 39; importance of, 105, 173, n., 156; to be controlled, and how, 164.
Harmony, see Equipoise, Proportion, Music.
Haughtiness, towards whom to be practised, 409, 447. See Pride.
Health, its importance to happiness, 162; (mental,) maintenance of, 155, et seq.; restoration of, see Cure.
Hearing, occasioned by undulations in the air, 389.
Heaven, see Paradise.
Heavens, see Orbs and Spheres.
Hell, scriptural, 102; a type of extremes, 104, 157; eternal misery of, 380, 486.
Histories, their popular influence, 155.
Home, necessity for, 245, et seq.; its constituents, 248; free sense given to, 249.
Honor, 261; how to be determined and maintained, 396. See Rank.
Horoscope, reference to, 284.
Hospitality, observance of, 444, 445, n.
Houses, their maximum of elevation, 250.
Humours, the four in old pathology, 36; compounded, 38.
Hypocrisy, its consequences, 194, 375.
Idealism, 200, n., 360, n.
Ideas, how derived, 17, 53, 54, — received, 368, — reflected, ib., — retained, ib.; some innate, 2, 3, n., 148, n.; general and partial, 54; procession of, 118, 364; different orders in the formation of, 367, et seq.
Identity, personal, affirmed, 36.
Idleness, destructive to human powers, 268. See Exercise.
Ignorance, 173, et seq.; simple, 176; compound, 179; cure of, ib. See Knowledge.
Ill-nature, 158.
Imām and Imāmat, see Pontificate.
Impostors, what, 376.
Imprisonment, its object as a punishment, 394.
Impulse, 53. See Power.
Income, its sources, 252. (See Emolument and Profit.) Should exceed outlay, 256.
Indelicacy, its influence on the character, 186; in conversation, to be avoided, 289.
Indifference, a generic vice, 109, 143. See Desire.
Individual, production of, how and when provided for, 150; nutrition of, ditto, 148; defence of, ditto, 149; perfection of, ib.; each has his peculiar excellence, 187, 105. See Differences.
Indolence, 205. See Idleness.
Infant, its state at birth, 148.
Inferiors, treatment of, 439, 447.
Ingenuous persons, how esteemed, 446.
Ingratitude, the worst of vices, 194, n., 431.
Iniquity, opposite of equity, 99; the only vice, 110, 136. (See Equity.) To be avoided, 253, 256. See Oppression, Force.
Initiative, in public war, to be avoided, 412, — in private, ditto, 445.
Inscription, in the fire-temples of Fārs, 74; on Syrian pillars, 457.
Inspiration, the source of unwonted excellence, 152; law, a modification of, 126, 322.
Instinct, held, 148.
Institute, what, 3, n.; divinely derived, 323; (see Law,) 408. Its particulars not to be argued, 84, 141; some of them argued, 340; adapted to all, 370; to be rigidly followed, 395.
Institutor, obligations to, 351; reminded of, 342. See Lawgiver.
Insult, legally cognizable, 397.
Intellect, its two sorts, 53; predominates in all things, 358; celestial, its three forms, ib.; its four orders, 367, et seq.
Interchange, indispensable to society, 126; leads to use of money, 127.
Intercourse, divided and determined, 439.
Interdiction, provokes desire, 422, 278.
Interest, enters into one sort of affection, 333; not into love, 334; of clients, 421, — of money, 394.
Intermediacy, negatives both extremes, 17; characteristic of virtue, 100, 104, 111; varies in application, 143. See Mean, virtual.
Joseph, women not to read his history, 271.
Judicial functions, united with ecclesiastical, 132.
Juggling, condemned, 171.
Kaaba, its supposed building, 283.
Keeping, see Stores.
Kiblah, what, 293.
Kings, unforgiving, 209, 418. See Prince, Court.
Kneeling, only proper to spiritual superiors, 292.
Knowledge, importance of, 92, 176, 179, 373, 388. (See Learning.) Without practice, mischievous, 23; supposition of, bars acquirement, 180; no reserve of, admissible, 436.
Kurān, its power and beauty, 139; its pre-existence, 277, 360, 408.
Labour, division of, 319.
Lasciviousness, a generic vice, 109, 143. See Venery.
Law, originates with God, 126, 322; expressed by revelation, 397; the primary arbitrator, 127; government subject to it, ib.; when first apprehended, 150; maintains maintainers, 408.
Lawgiver, commissioned by God, 322.
Learning, its privileges, 133, 373, 392; its boldness, 133, 406; patronized by God, 352.
Levity, 173, 224.
Liberality, a species of temperance, 75, 455; mean between, what, 143.
Life, an arbitrary state, 2, n.; depends on proportion, 118, 122; how derived, 216, 455; intellectual, 236; vanity of earthly, 161, 237; misery of, too prolonged, 221; none but God has a right to destroy, 455.
Light, proceeds from fire, 388; Muhammedan, 359.
Lineage, important to a prince, 383. See Family.
Logic, its good and evil, 31.
Love, its two species, 227, 334; divine, 123, n., 336; how tested, 236; partiality of, 167; interest enters not into, 334; magically excited, 229.
Lover and loved, 229, — and mistress, 343.
Lust, how, when, and why arises, 150, 172. See Lasciviousness.
Luxury, condemned, 280.
Magic, its nature, 117; how considered, 140, n., 255, 440.
Magnanimity, a species of courage, 69.
Magnet, alluded to in an ancient inscription, 332.
Maiden, preferable for marriage, 263.
Malice, a cause of anger, not to be indulged, 195.
Man, creation of, see Adam. His proper end, 13, 358, 415, 449; his origin unassignable in profane philosophy, 42; his contrary qualities, 15; resemblance to God, 15, 415; his excellence, in what it consists, 178, 415, 448; compared with angels, 19, et seq., — with brutes, 176, 178, 367; his physical vileness, 192; his physical eminence, 315, 317.
Manners, see Proprieties.
Marriage, nature of, and rules for, 262, — of sons, 286, — daughters, 287.
Martexts, stigmatized, 375.
Masters of arts, 372.
Mathematics, their use, 32, 180.
Matter, its subservient properties, 360. (See Body.) Material beings cannot meet, 336.
Meals, rare and sparing, 279.
Mean, difficult to find a, 101, 126; true and involved, 105; all the virtues are means, 100; necessary to determine relations, 127.
Measures, study of, correct the judgment, 180.
Meat, to be used sparingly, 279.
Medicine, its analogy to morals, 30, 107, 153; its division and offices, 170—174.
Meditation, to what lengths carried, 190.
Melancholy, 159.
Men, their diversities, (see Diversities.) How estimated, 179; citizens by nature, 321, 340; to co-operate, 317; why, 318; of the tongue, 373, — of the pen, 388, — of the sword, ib.
Merchants, to be protected, 455.
Mercy, a species of courage, 69; desirable in kings, 404, 406, 415; divine, the source of creation, 416, — and revelation, 444.
Metals, why chosen as the material of money, 251.
Metre, on what it depends, 117.
Mimicry, condemned, 291.
Mind, a simple essence, 335, — of children, a clear tablet, 277; may meet, 336. (See Soul and Intellect.) Affects body — is affected by it, 157, 173, 207, 338.
Minerals, lowest in the chain of being, and why, 118.
Ministers, rules for the conduct of, 419, 420.
Ministration, natural, its various sorts, 313.
Miracles, orthodox belief in, 34.
Mirrors, Persian, improved by the Greeks, 38, n.
Misdemeanours, distinguished from crimes, 397, 398.
Modern, writers — what, 8, n.
Monachism, condemned, 327.
Money, why necessary, 127, 251; the surd equator, ib.; metals, why chosen for, 251; subject to prince, 128; mischief of the love of, 282.
Monogamy, recommended, 266.
Morals, first of studies, 31, 63; analogy of to medicine, (see Medicine.) Its two objects, 153, 154.
Moth and taper, 113.
Mother, her claims, 300; how to be requited, 302; loves more than father, 354. (See Parents.) Of Scripture, 360.
Music, depends on proportion, 119, 458, — of the spheres, 121, — of the state, 390; how and why forbidden to men, 156, 255, 431, — to women, 271, 287.
Mysticism, 80, 81; its subject, 367. See Reunion.
Nakedness, 293.
Name, importance of selecting, 275; when given, ib., — of things, taught by God to Adam, 2, — of God, 14.
Nature, circulation the first law of, 363; its motion, 146; its process, 118, 148; when complete, 151. (See Affection, Love.) Superior to art, 147, 329; human, an arbitrary state, 2, n.; corrupt, 13, n.; depends on soul, 408; particular, follows formation, 306. See Character, Disposition.
Nonconformity, 34, 375, 376.
Nurse, rules for choice of, 275.
Oaths, only to be used for public purposes, 281.
Obedience, to husbands, 272, — to parents, 302, — to public authority, 129, 417, — to divine, ib., — to kings, 417, 423; exceptions to, 133, 136, 417, 423.
Observative, see Power and School.
Occupation, its importance, 165. See Profession.
Offences, see Crimes and Transgressions.
Officers of state, rules for the selection of, 404, 392.
Opinion, the initiative of government, 384, — of men, when to be disregarded, 406.
Oppression, designates both extremes of justice, 110. (See Iniquity.) How to be prevented, 396, 407.
Oppressor, his good deeds transferred to the account of the oppressed, 110.
Orbs, (celestial,) animated and intelligent, 15, 17; their music, 121; their proportions, ib.; influence, ib., 197. (See Heavens.) Their motion, 233; servants to man, 315.
Ordonnance, the right of the priesthood, 135.
Ostentation, to be avoided, 256.
Outlay, should be less than income, 256.
Pæderasty, condemned, 172.
Pain, an intimation of injury, 335; presupposes strength, 213; often produced by pleasure, 335; life never exempt from, ib.; none in death, 213.
Papacy, 350, 407. See Pontificate.
Paradise, scriptural descriptions of, mostly figural, 102, 157.
Parasites, attached to royal households, 383, 402.
Pardon, of kings, 398, 415. (See Mercy.) Of parties, does not bar legal proceedings, 397.
Parents, rights of, 299, 430, 301; differ, 302; mother most loving, 354; causes of their affection, 346; love more than are loved, 300.
Parity, 144. (See Equipoise.) In offences, 166.
Particulars, distinguished from universals, 17, 54, 150; all have their stations and functions, 12, 187.
Passions, (see Vice, Anger, Lust, &c.) Proneness to, 157.
Patience, a species of temperance, 73; its importance, ib., 383, 440.
Patrons, feel more regard than the patronized, 354; their rights, 430.
Pedagogue, see Preceptor.
Penance, its use and object, 174.
Penetration, a species of wisdom, 68.
Perception, an abstruse point, 26; different degrees of, 368. See Idealism.
Perfection, how meant and measured, 20, 107; depends on equipoise, 118; mental — none formed to, 152; difficulty of attaining, (see Proneness.) Method of pursuing, 151, 328, 329, 340, 448; physical — different orders and means of, 312.
Perfidy, inexcusable, 194, 352.
Perplexity, causes and cure of, 171, 175.
Pests, a term for incongruous classes in a state, 375.
Philosophers, Greek, (see Greeks.) Muslim, their inferiority, 26.
Philosophy, a derivative of religion, 23, 139, 324; of first principles, 62.
Phlegm, a cause of disease, 208.
Physics, order of study, 32.
Piety, a species of temperance, 75.
Pilgrimage, its obligation and object, 341.
Plants, see Vegetables.
Pleasure, soon terminates, 333, 451; why, 335.
Plurality, opposite of unity, 191; causes weakness, ib., 330, 342; must be countervailed, 248, 342.
Poets, why they prefer their own writings, 355, 373, 388.
Poison, carried about the person, 97, n.; as a remedy, 174; apprehension of, 295, 440, 456; poison-girls, 457.
Polygamy, condemned, 267.
Pontificate, 324, 379; its situation and rights, 136, 324, 379.
Population, law of, 219.
Possessions, see Valuables, Property, Wealth.
Powers, of the mind, the three stated, 52, et seq., 55, et seq., 170, 368; each of them liable to excess, deficiency, and perversion, 170, et seq.; statement and cure of these in the discerning power, 171, 175, — in the vindictive power, 172, 181, — in the appetent, 172, 223; order of production and culture, 148, et seq.; of the state, how lodged and divided, 136. See Authority.
Practice, essential to wisdom, 22; to mental health, 155, 159, 174.
Prayer, a moral preservative, 174; children to be taught, 277; objects of general, 340; Friday’s, ib., 75; neglect of, how considered, 394.
Preceptor, rules for choice of, 281; reverence to, 292, 303; rights of, extravagant, 350, et seq.
Predestination, explained, 359, n., 401.
Prevention, see Punishment and Interdiction.
Pride, ridiculous, its cure, 187, 188, 281.
Priesthood, their rights and influence, 135, 136.
Prince, essential to society, 127, 324, 418; shadow of God, 377, 418; world’s physician, 326, 383; subject to the law, 130, 135, 325, 395, 417, 455; has a discretion, 325, 397; his claim to gifts, 257, 417; influence of his example, 381, 385; occasionally childish, 197; of two sorts, 381; his proper qualities, 382, 454, — conduct, 348, 405; dependent upon others, 428, 430; his responsibility, 407; should not command his armies in person, 412; his dues, 417. See Obedience, Rebels, Court, Transgression.
Principle, vital, 186.
Prisoners, in battle, not to be put to death, 414.
Procrastination, condemned, 405.
Procreation, how provided for, 150; how limited, 218. See Generation.
Prodigality, excess of liberality, 143.
Production, original, account of, 358, et seq.; three stages in, 362; spontaneous, possible, 43; animal, how conducted, 146, et seq.
Professions, division of, 252; choice of, 284; only one to be pursued, 374.
Profits, the sources of, 253. See Emolument.
Proneness, see Vice.
Property, foundation of, 124; a deposit from God, 240; insecurity of, 199; to be differently invested, 256.
Prophecy, its nature, 359.
Prophets, the prime of men, 119; their end, 342.
Propinquity, material and moral, 81. See Affinity.
Propositions, universal, 24; must be true or false, 175.
Propriety of discernment, a species of wisdom, 69, — of manners, 288, 292, — of intercourse with all classes, 440. See Commendable.
Providence, general, 220, 330, 361, 448; special, 215, 402. See Grace, Law, Government, Philosophy.
Ptolemaic system, 42, n., 53, n. See Spheres.
Punishment, for prevention, 127, 128, 394; its measure, (see Taliation.) Privation of liberty — limb — senses — life, ib. (See Addenda.) Capital, 271, 395, 455; of children, 282.
Purgatory, 407.
Quality, definition of, 38; bad, what, 30; how influences state, 105.
Quickness of intellect, a species of wisdom, 68.
Quoting improper passages, condemned, 156.
Railing, see Abuse.
Rank, importance of maintaining, 124, 374, 384, 390, 396; hereditary, 187; improper reliance on, condemned, ib.
Rarities, danger of a love for — in princes, 196, — in private persons, 200.
Rashness, a generic vice in excess of courage, 109.
Reason, its proper functions, 201. See Power, percipient.
Rebels, to be extirpated, 129, 375.
Recluses, condemned, 90.
Recollection, a species of wisdom, 69.
Refuge, rights of, to be respected, 444.
Regularity, a species of temperance, 75.
Relation of Creator and creature, 301, 349, 455. (See God.) Of parent and child, 247, 276, 299, 350; see in loc., — of husband and wife, 229, 247, 265, et seq., — of institutor and followers, 351, — of king and subject, (see Prince,) 352, 407, 420, 428, 430, — of preceptor and pupil, see in loc., — of high and low, 344, — of patron and patronized, see in loc., — of lover and mistress, 229, 343, — of master and servant, 241, 304, et seq., — of friends, 352, 439, see in loc., — of inanimate objects, see Proportion.
Religion, identified with morality, 186; twin of government, 128, 457.
Repugnance, 158, — of opposites, 330. See Affection, Elements, Disagreement.
Reputation, sacrifices to be made for its preservation, 261.
Resentment, proper functions of, 163, 201. See Power, vindictive, Anger.
Resignation, a species of equity, 82, 83; wisdom of, 215.
Resistance of nature to things hurtful, 330.
Resolution, necessary to success in any thing, 382.
Retention, a species of wisdom, 69.
Reunion of the soul with God, 223, 337, 356, 367; depends on qualities acquired in this life, 102, 105, 187.
Rhetoric, how determined, 122.
Ridicule, condemned, 193.
Righteousness, a species of temperance, 73.
Rights, private, 124; public, 396, — of criminals, 183, 397; precarious, 200, 424. See Relation.
Rings, worn by men, 281.
Ritual, object of, 105, 340, 342.
Ruin, why inevitable, (see Decay.) How effected, 197. See Spheres.
Saints, persons acquainted with truth, 369.
Schismatics, 376. See Nonconformists.
School, contemplative and practical, 17, 21, — who look beneath the veil, 27, — for children, 282.
Science, (see Knowledge.) Sciences, course of, 31.
Scourges, national, 259.
Seasons of pressure to be anticipated, 256.
Seclusion, of women, 265, — of kings, (see Access.) Religious, condemned, 327.
Secrecy of alms, 259.
Secrets, transpire, 411, — to be carefully guarded, 440, — not told to wives, 269, — of children, to be respected, 278, 280, — of princes, 410, 420.
Self-importance, 358; -condemnation, 174; -abandonment necessary, 356, 421, 426.
Sense, (see Perception, Intellect,) 451.
Serpents, conjectured use of, 314, — to guard treasure, 403.
Servants, what, 304; sorts of, 310; how to be employed, 310, — treated, 305, et seq.; of kings, rule for conduct of, 421; slaves preferable, 309.
Servility, a generic vice, 109.
Shame, a species of temperance, 73; earliest and best manifestation of mind, 149, 276, 307.
Shoes, worn only out of doors, 134.
Silence, commended, 281.
Sin, necessary as a negative of divine nature, 416. See Vice.
Slander, condemned, 291, 451. See Falsehood.
Slaves and slavery, 309, et seq.; slave girls, 270.
Sleep, to be limited, 280, 406, — before others, improper, 294.
Sleight, 171.
Society, necessary to life, 318, — a term for coparceny, 384. Societies, debating, 177. See Government.
Soil, its functions, 390. See Agriculture.
Soldiery, a class of the state, 373, 388; require restraint, 409, — encouragement, 414.
Sophistry, 31, 171.
Sorrow, causes and cure of, 236, 240.
Sottishness, 158.
Soul, arbitrarily joined to body, 2, n.; how, 122; its powers, 368; origin and return of, 367. (See Reunion, Mind, Spirit, Body.) Its passion for proportion, 123, 228, — for good, 336. See Affinity.
Species of animals, perpetuation of, 150, — of virtues and vices infinite, 85, — of ideas, 367, et seq.
Speech, proper end of, 243; other ends of, 411; false, inexcusable, ib.; proprieties of, 288.
Spheres, immediate causes of events, 121, 361; bring together particles of being, 197, 216; determine character, 285; their motion, 331, 361. See Orbs, Music.
Spies, use of, recommended, 410, 413, 430.
Spirit, man’s, the most excellent, 3, 19. (See Intellect.) Spirits may meet, 336.
State, specific, defined, 38, — of man, individual, 137, 358. (See Morals.) Domestic, see Home. Political, see Government. The, depends on opinion, 384; represents a single person, 385, 397; constituents of, 372, 388, 391; other classes of, 375; balance of, 384, 388; two descriptions of, 365; how to be preserved, 385, 386; offices of, 404.
Stateliness, a species of courage, 71.
Steadiness, a species of temperance, 75.
Stones, precious, dissolved and drank, 198.
Stores of provisions necessary, 246, 251, 256. See Engrossing.
Strategy, rules of, 410, 412.
Stupidity, a generic vice, 105, 171.
Subjects, how to be treated, 381, 404, 409, — to behave, 348. See Relation.
Submission, a species of equity, 82.
Suicide, condemned, 96.
Sunnah, 18, 379.
Superiors, conduct towards, 439.
Supineness, condemned, 406.
Sweetmeats, to be sparingly allowed to children, 279.
Tales, (see Fables.) Tale-bearers described, 437, 451.
Taliation, a natural measure of punishment, 126, 397, 456.
Taxation, of moveables, condemned, 380.
Taxes, appropriate, to be paid without delay, 417.
Temperament, what, 58; simple, ib.; its excellence how determined, 117; affected by the nurse, 273; immutable except in a latitude, 36.
Temperance, how derived, 55, 57, 151, 164; defined, 65; mean between, what, 143; its species, 73; counterfeits, 90, et seq.
Tenderness, a species of equity, 78.
Territory, dependence of the city on, 408; war to be carried out of, 412.
Theology, its comprehensive nature, 32, 62.
Therapeutics, see Medicine.
Things, order and mode of production, 358; contained in their causes, 359; their circuitous process, 363; their rank and order, 118; connexion between, 420; similar and dissimilar, 336; animated, homogeneous, 79; valuable, 240.
Thought, (see Intellect, Observation.) Should control habit, 164.
Trade, its influence on character, 252; its importance, 389; should be protected, 455.
Traditions, their several sorts, 400, n.
Transgressions, three classes of, 129. See Crimes.
Treachery, inexcusable, 411, 444. See Falsehood.
Treasures, of the Almighty, 83.
Treasury (Prince’s), importance of, 404; repository of rarities and valuable writings, 7, 198.
Truth, (see Falsehood.) Beauty of, 337.
Types and figures, in reasoning, indispensable, 371; in Scripture, 102.
Tyranny, a generic vice, 109.
Valuables, deposits from God, 240.
Vaticination, condemned, 171. See Divination.
Vegetable kingdom, its rank and order, 118, 233, 316.
Veil, its metaphorical sense, 27, 113; use of by women, 265, 271.
Venery, excess in, considered, 224.
Vice-regence of God, the proper end of man, 13; how realized, 21, 138, 448.
Vices, diseases of the mind, 30; extremes, 100; two to each virtue, 108; not properly opposites of virtue, 170; generic, 108; specific, 111; individual, infinite, 105; a natural proneness for, 19, 40, 157, 276, 386, 450; prevention of, 155, et seq., 394; cure, 174, et seq.; partial, may be tolerated, 394.
Virtues, means, 100, 108; how derived, 55, 57; generic, 55, et seq.; specific, 65; mixed, infinite, 85; real and counterfeit, 88, et seq.; absolute and approximate, 107; must be realized in act, 66, — on others, 293, — and sought in essence, 98; differ in individuals, 106; how maintained, 155, et seq.; how acquired, see Perfection. Difficulty of acquiring, see Proneness. The only lasting good, 161, 333, 345, 452; aim of creation, 391.
Visiting, women to be restrained from, 271.
Viziers, difficulty of their situation, 424.
Unanimity, virtual, 372.
Union, a species of equity, 78. See Reunion.
Unity, the only state, 17, — of God, 113, et seq.; numerical, 115; source of all delight, 117, 337, — and affection, 308, 330, 426, — and order, 191, 248, 386.
Universals, distinguished from particulars, 17, 54, 150.
Want, measured by wishes, 162, 163; distinguished from desire, 448.
War, rules for the conduct of, 410, et seq.
Way, of rectitude, metaphorical, 101, et seq.
Wealth, its importance as a means, 91, 256; its vanity as an end, 161, 162, 187; proper object of, 284; in wives, dangers of, 264, 274.
Wine, its mischievous effects, 156, 253, 255, 280, 371, 394.
Wisdom, defined, 21, 62, 65, 86; archetype of law, 408; therapeutics of the mind, 30; how derived, 55, 57; how attained, 24, 151, — preserved, 159; practice essential to, 22, 451, 452; species of, 68; counterfeit, 89; pleasures of, 335; essential to other virtues, 97; consists in selection, 65, 335, n.
Witchcraft, 255, 440.
Wittoldom, 172.
Wives, why needed, 247, 268; plurality of, indefensible, 266; rules for choice of, 262; rules for treatment of, 265, et seq., — for conduct of, 272; good and bad described, 272, 273.
Women, contempt for, 225, 264, 269, 272, 442.
World, — to come, (see Paradise, Reunion.) Present, (see Life and Earth.) Produced and conducted by intellect, 360; why, ib. (See Love, Mercy.) Fortune turns to its contemner, 422. Of patterns, 17, 336.
Wrangling condemned, 171, 290, 442.
Writers, 388. See Ancient Learning.
Zeal, a species of courage, 72.
Zones, collapse of, 42; temperate only, inhabitable, 43.
Aaron, 419.
Abdorazāk, 21.
Abdulla Ansāry, 110.
—— bin al Mubārak, 142.
Abraham, 282.
Abú Aly Mashkovy, 32, 202, 217.
Abú Aly Yashāghy, 392.
Abú Hāmid. See Ghazāly.
Abul Hasán Āmiry, 327.
Abú Jaafar, 392.
Abul Khair, 25.
Abul Muāly Jobìny, 132.
Abú Muhammad Rozbahān, 232.
Abú Muslim, 443.
Abú Nasar Fāryāby, 313.
——— of Herāt, 392.
Abú Jazíd Bistāmy, 27.
Abyssinia, 313.
Adam, 1, 316, 320.
Æthiopia, 195.
Ajam, 387, 399, 453.
Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry, 7, 8, et passim.
Alexander, 204, 350, 386, 405, 408, 415, 453.
Alites, 218.
Aly, 76, 158, 179, 185, 188, 192.
Aly bin Kāsim, 392.
Arabs, 273, 310.
Ardshír Bābak, 387.
Aristotle, 25, 26, 47, 49, 85, 136, 138, 324, 325, 336, 357, 387, 405, 415, 428, 453.
Avicenna, 25, 42, 64, 345.
Bāverdy, 75, 252.
Bostān, 79, n.
Cicero. See Ifsikar.
Constantine, 392.
Cyrus, 202.
Darius, 386.
Dilemites, 286.
Eesa, 153, 167, 180.
Esdras, 456.
Euclid, 164.
Fārs, 74, 286, 454.
Fírdúsy, 36.
Gabriel, 76.
Galen, 40, et seq., 153, 166, 167.
Ghazāly, 59, 76, 132, 183, 235, 282.
Hadiyah Saheeh, 110.
Hajāj bin Yúsaf, 269, 382, n.
Hasán Bēg, 5.
Hasán Buyah, 391.
Heraclitus, 336.
Herāt, 391.
Hermes Trismegistus, 456.
Hindus, 311, 454.
Hippocrates, 33.
Ibn Abíd, 392.
Ibn Khafeef, 115.
Ibn Mukanna, 424.
Ifsikar Atlias, 428.
Ihyā Ikhtiyār, 59.
Irāk, 392.
Istilāhāt Súfíya. See Súfy.
Jacob, 131.
Jamshíd, 37.
Janíd, 27.
Joseph, 131, 271.
Kaab bin Zohair, 444.
Khorāsan, 207, 443.
Kulzum, 207.
Magians, 40, 74.
Makāmāt ul Arifína, 26.
Malik Shāh, 130.
Māmoon, 382, 415.
Mansoor bin Nuh, 206.
Marwān, 443.
Moses, 77, 402, 419.
Muhammad, anecdotes of, 158, 179, 186, 288, 378, n., 409, 410, 445.
Muhammad Zākiria, 206.
Mulúk-u-tawāyif, 387. (Sets of Kings.)
Nasar Sayār, 443.
Nāsirodin Túsy. See Akhlāk.
Neeshāpor, 130.
Omar bin Aziz, 183, 407.
—— Ibn-ul-khitāb, 81, 400.
Pharaoh, 401, 419.
Plato, 25, 26, 32, 250, 323, 325, 408, 441, 450.
Porus, 204.
Pythagoras, 105, 120.
Rāghib (Imām), 115, 116.
Ramzān, 130.
Rúm, 195, 392.
Sadr Mutakid, 115.
Sahal bin Abdalla, 27.
Sāmiry, 77.
Sāssān, 404.
Shafā, 42, 64.
Shāfei, 132, 241, 253, 397.
Shahāb odín Maktúl, 26.
Shaily, 80.
Shíites, 19, n.
Sir ul Asrār, 454.
Socrates, 164, 287.
Solimān Fārsy, 158.
Solomon, 91, 163, 235, 423.
Súfy idioms, 20.
Sunnah, 18, 379, n.
Tair, 345.
Touriat, 316, 422.
Tulwíhāt, 26.
Turks, 194, 311.
Tústery, 27.
Unter, 76.
Xantippe, 165.
Xerxes, 202.
Zúl Nún, 27, 232.
KING’S HEAD COURT, GOUGH SQUARE.
This is admitted even by Gillie (Anal. Suppl. p. 216), who denies all he can to the Arabs.
↩Akh.-Jāl. Exordium, in the passage omitted at p. 6.
↩See the motto of the title-page.
↩Pages 31, 32, 63, 64, of the Version.
↩See in the preliminary discourses to Sale’s Kurān.
↩Akh.-nās. Proems to the first and second Books.
↩Ibid. Proems to the second and third Books.
↩Tusc. Disp. iii. 1—4. and 34. iv. 5. and 19. Hor. Ep. I. 1. 32.
↩De Am. xiii.
↩Particularly pages 128, 202, 265, 310.
↩Pages 279, 286, 293, 296.
↩Pages 223, 429.
↩Pages 56 and 57, 107, 277, &c.
↩“Strictly speaking, that cannot be evil from which good comes.” Paley, Mor. Phil. Book ii. c. 8.
↩See pages 191, 384, 394, 396, 398, 436, 447.
↩Muhammedan philosophy might be reduced to a partial and scientific interpretation of the following passages: Metaphysics — Gen. ii. 7. Job xii. 16. xxxiii. 4. xxxiv. 14, 15. Ecclesiastes iii. 11. 1 Esdras iv. 33, 40. 2 Esdras iv. and ix. Wisd. Sol. vii. 22—27. xii. 1. xv. 16. Ecclesiasticus xlii. 23. xliii. 27. Morals — Job xxviii. 7. 2 Esdras vii. 1—14. Wisd. Sol. viii. 7. Ecclesiasticus xvii. 1—12. xli. 1—8. xlii. 24, 25. Physics — Ecclesiastes i. 4—11. iii. 1—10. Ecclesiasticus xiv. 17, 19. xviii. 7. xxxix. 21. xl. 8.
↩Paley, Moral. Phil. Book i. c. 7. Book ii. c. 3.
↩Pages 80, 81.
↩Asserted at length in Archbp. Tillotson’s Sermons on the nature and attributes of God. Grotius is more concise: “Quæcunque autem subsistunt, a Deo existendi habere originem, connexum est his quæ ante diximus. Conclusimus enim, id quod per se sive necessario est, unum esse. Unde sequitur, ut alia omnia sint orta ab aliquo diverso a seipsis. Quæ autem aliunde orta sunt, ea omnia, in se aut in causis suis, orta esse ab eo quod ortum nunquam est, id est a Deo, jam ante vidimus.” De Ver. I. c. 7.
↩Pages 191, 436.
↩Pages 122, 229, 231, 233, 330, 331.
↩Pages 79, 145, 223, 338, 358, &c. 420.
↩Pages 17, 72, 112, 113, 192, 339, 349, 415.
↩Pages 16, 118, 331, 363, 364.
↩Pages 118, 122, 228, 336. They might urge the old Epicurean argument, never yet answered, that if mind and matter were heterogeneous in the last resort, they could not act upon each other; but instead of concluding with the Epicureans that mind was a form of matter, they would use it to show that matter is a form of mind.
↩Am. c. viii.
↩The first, pages 145, 416; the second, pages 301, 448.
↩Pages 102, 103, 450. Cf. Plato, Rep. x. ad fin.
↩See the concluding portion of Plato’s Timæus.
↩Tanāsukh seems conventionally confounded with Tamāsukh; which is strictly metamorphosis.
↩Pages 16, 17, 315, 317.
↩See in pages 26, 200, 237, 360.
↩Cf. Grotius, De Ver. I. c. 8. “Nam cum diximus Deum omnium esse causam, addidimus eorum quæ verè subsistunt;” from which category he proceeds to exclude evil.
↩See in page 416.
↩Pages 27, 28, 33, 34, 171, 235, 376.
↩Page 80.
↩The preface to Saädy’s Bostān is a familiar and accessible example.
↩Pages 79, 304, 305.
↩ Most of their early states were founded by Egyptian and
Asiatic fugitives. At a later period, see in Herodotus, Clio, cs. 27
and 29, and in Herodotus’s conduct, instances of their sagacious
system of inquiry. References might be multiplied
Eastern writings all commence with an appeal of some sort to the Divinity: to this Muhammedans add another to their Prophet, and Persian Muhammedans a third to their king or other temporal patron, for reasons to be found below.
↩Words used by Muhammad to describe the flocking of souls to judgment at the last day. See Kurán c. xxxix.
↩Earth-red is the exact signification of Adam’s name in Hebrew and Arabic (Josephus, Ant. i. 1. 2. upon Genesis ii. 7). Edom and Idumea had the same derivation (ib. i. 2. 1). Hence St. Paul, in his learning, says, “The first man is of the earth, earthy.” The same connexion may be observed in the Latin homo (and still more in its derivatives) with humus.
↩In all the schools of Eastern philosophy the connexion between the soul and its human state or nature is not a necessary but an arbitrary one; the world and life being a peculiar process to which soul is subjected for certain ends. See Introduction.
↩For this and the following text see Kurán c. vii. vs. 10. 26. according to which Adam was taught by God the names of all things, and then made to display his knowledge before the angels, who, having no terms of their own for them, were thus compelled to acknowledge man’s superiority to themselves: see, in continuation, Kurán c. xv. vs. 26. 49. ii. 30—6. xvii. 62—6. xviii. 50—4. xxxiii. 2—16. which are all so many expansions of the Scripture account, adopted from traditions of the Talmud. The two texts above are founded on Genesis ii. vs. 19, 20. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names,” &c. Muslim commentators, knowing little of Scripture, suppose the names of God to be partly intended by the Kurán; and hence the allusion to the divine attributes, &c., which are subjects of superstitious attention in their schools: see an instance in Sect. 5. Book i. “The perfection of every quality lies in its meeting and embracing its opposite,” &c. See note 29. The doctrine of innate ideas, though held by the Muslims, is not to be inferred from this passage, which alludes to divine instruction given after the creation of Adam, and to him only.
↩The words so rendered are taken from the proëm to the Hidāyat. Institutory, — belonging to the institute or body of national persuasions and practices, which they held in every instance to have been originally appointed by an inspired delegate of God, and which, when perverted and corrupted (as in process of time they generally became), were renewed in the case of more favoured nations by a fuller dispensation. See Sect. 1. Book iii. on the Origin of Government.
↩Not inexplicable, however, or purely arbitrary, since in the later ages of the faith attempts were made to resolve them into systems of moral discipline. See an instance in Sect. 3 of Book iii. on Affection.
↩Companions, technically speaking, were those who fled from Mecca with Muhammad; the converts of his prosperity being termed only Ansārs, or supporters.
↩Such are the taxes to which learning is subject in an immature and unsettled society, where it must live by flattery or not at all; the subject will recur in Sects. 4 and 5 of Book iii. Most of the panegyric has been omitted in the version, as denoted by the asterisks; indeed, this sort of adulation, being always expected and always given, passed in fact for nothing at all but a display of the writer’s graceful ingenuity.
↩A Tartar title, at first peculiar to kings beyond the Oxus.
↩Sixth of the White Sheep dynasty of Turkmáns, then reigning in Irāk or Mesopotamia. He defeated and put to death Jahān Shāh of the rival dynasty, and Abú Saäíd the Great Mogul; was himself afterwards defeated by Muhammad II., who took Constantinople; called by European historians of that age Ussen Cussen; reigned 1467-79. (Khondemir, Hist. x. D’Herbelôt.) His love of letters may be presumed from the praises of Dowlat Shāh, his enemy’s partizan, and from one or two letters addressed to him by the poet Jāmi (Tazkarah Dowlat Shāh at Mahmood Barsā): the progenitors mentioned just before were Hamzā Aly Bēg, Karā Ilagh Bēg, and Karlu Bēg, of which the first only (his father) would be termed sultan by any but a dependent.
↩Properly speaking, the empire of Muhammad’s successor: which, after the downfall of the legitimate caliphat in 1258, every prince assumed his own to be; and the term became a general one. Hasán Bēg, however, was better entitled to it than most princes, as he reigned in Irāk, the last seat of the caliphat.
↩Alluding to the princes he had destroyed: another passage is omitted at the asterisks.
↩Of the planets, Scil; a title originally assumed by Timúr, and properly belonging only to his representatives. Hasán Bēg however claimed equal rank with these, as we learn from his reception of Abú Saäíd’s ambassador (Khondemir). The language of astronomy was just then in fashion, in consequence of the late emperor Ulug Bēg’s devotion to the study; and all titles derived from that would be eagerly caught up and applied to every potentate. The propensity of the Asiatics to exalt their own immediate sovereign into the highest of any is one cause of the confusion reigning in their early history.
↩The heir and successor of Hasán Bēg was Khaleel, who reigned only six months, when his younger brother Yúsaf Bēg killed him, and took his place. In the khātimeh, or conclusion of the work, he is spoken of as discharging most of the functions of government during his father’s life, then probably one of seventy years, his brother having reigned before him.
↩The highest compliment a work could receive. The prince’s treasury, to an Asiatic, was like the temple of Apollo to a Roman writer.
↩The writers of the fifteenth century made constant use of the terms of ancient and modern, applying the latter to themselves, and the former to those who preceded the century of Mogul dominion. The depression under which letters then laboured (about 1250-1350) suggested the division. Saädy, Imāmi, and a few others, who flourished within this period, under the precarious shelter of the Atābeks, are ranked with the moderns.
↩Stated in the khātimeh to be Jāni Muhammad Asaäd, of whom no further particulars are known.
↩The Greek philosophers, from whom their sciences were entirely taken. The leading principles of these were indeed common to the Arabs and to all the people of the East, from whom the Greeks originally derived them. At a later period, but prior still to the age of Muhammad, they were given back to the East in an improved form, by the schools of the lower empire; and lastly, when compelled by the mastery of the Eastern world to carry out leading principles into practical details, the Arabs were glad to find it done to their hands in the works of a subject language. In the reign of Māmún (ninth century) they gave themselves fully up to the study of the Grecian masters (in translation), and have ever since adhered to them, holding with Plato in metaphysics, with Aristotle in physics and logic, with Euclid in geometry, with Ptolemy in astronomy, and with Galen in medicine; allowing the highest place to the first, but being most influenced by the second. Their digests and adaptations were then once more given back to the West (through the Spanish and Italian schools) in the form of the Aristotelian philosophy of the middle ages. (Supp. Gillie’s Anal. ad fin.) Their knowledge however was limited to principals. Theophrastus and Diogenes are the only secondaries included in Khondemir’s account of the Grecian sages. Of Pythagoras they knew nothing but the name, of Porphyry only the Isagoge.
↩From this it would appear that the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry is the former work, on which the present is founded, that being adhered to throughout in the order and manner of the treatise. Having been composed too in the province of Irāk, under the auspices of a former governor, no work was more likely to have gained possession of the royal attention. Muhammad Asaäd hardly does justice, however, to the work or its author, considering that the latter was the foremost of his age (the thirteenth century) — Nāsirodín Thusi.
↩ Alluding to the two leading schools, the experimental and the
speculative, on the respective merits of which he enlarges in the
Introduction: called also
Under the last of these two he silently introduces a third, which, however, is only a subdivision of the second.
↩The title of modern Oriental works is always of this figurative sort. How the work became known by its more convenient name, we are not told; probably from the esteem in which it was held, as Akhlāk-i-Jalāly may without violence be rendered, Transcendental Ethics.
↩ The original word signifies a pencil of light or ray, and
thence any divergent extension of a particular idea or subject.
The term is peculiar and affected, and seems suggested only by
some temporary preference for the images and phrases of astronomy
(see note 14); possibly however by its phonetic resemblance
to the Greek word
Such appeals to the conclusions of other sciences are of constant occurrence throughout. See end of Introduction, note 97.
↩The first two texts are from the passages referred to in note 5; the third from chap. xxxiii. (Kurán.) The idea is characteristic of the Muslims and their religion — too daring throughout. The vice-regence was destined however for man in his purer state. After his fall, it could only be accomplished by a new adjustment of his circumstances and expectations, by subjecting him to the trials of life and the exactions of religion. In their ideas of natural corruption they go further perhaps than the Christian Church; holding (as we shall see in Book iii.) that men are incapable of constituting society, unless this be arranged in the origin and supported in the process by divine favour.
↩A powerful, passionate, and only half-reasoning order of creatures, more or less employed in modifying defective arrangements of matter. These fancies of the Arabs are sanctioned by the Kurán, chaps. xxvii. xlvi. and lxxii., where some genii are said to have been converted by passages of the Kurán which they accidentally overheard.
↩See note 4. In order, that is, to accomplish the vice-regence.
↩In the Exordium to Sect. 5. Book i. an instance is given, “He is the first and the last, the manifest and the hidden.” In Plato’s Parmenides the idea is worked out through every relation. The passage in the text contains their interpretation (from the Talmud) of the words of Genesis ii. — “God created man after his own image.” This notion of theirs involves, if not the materialism of the Deity, at least the subsistence of matter by and in him; which indeed is a leading point in their pantheism.
↩Contrary to the persuasion of the Christian Church: all Scripture passages implying the materiality of angels are resolved by the Muslims into illusion exercised on the witnesses. Milton however holds their dimensions reducible at will (Pandemonium), which notion, as well as the passage “millions unseen,” &c. agrees very well with a verse of the Kurán, where we are told that, “there is no span in air or æther unoccupied by a worshipping spirit.” Two angels, one to tempt and the other to support under temptation, attached to every man. (Kurán c. l. and c. xiii. v. 13.) Two others were to raise them at the last day.
↩ Inferred from continuity of motion and influence without
perceptible external cause: this seems men’s earliest conclusion,
and the origin of star-worship. Next comes the indefinite suspicion
of some ratio of forces, (see Sect. 5. Book i.) though at
the end of Sect. 2. Book iii. the motion is again said to be
appetent: the opinions may indeed be held together. Plato
(Anima Mundi), after resolving every thing into proportion, considers
the orbs not only as vital, but the cause of vitality upon
earth,
Circu-lation has come to signify a voluntary rather than a passive movement, which is here essential.
↩See two passages, middle Sect. 5. Book i. and Sect. 2. Book iii. ad fin. The words here used are carefully adapted to signify change either from previous states, or in the gradations of this one; hinting rather than affirming the transition they seem to have held. See the passage on Tenderness in Sect. 2 of Book i.
↩Provided the opposites are states — not when they are faculties, still less when they are natures. Horace (“totus teres atque rotundus”) intends the same comparison.
↩The first being the opinion of the speculative and the second of the experimental school — the first Platonic (Phædrus), though only developed by the later Platonists — the latter Aristotelian. — See Gillie’s Analysis, chap. ii. (on Imagination and Memory), with references. — Cf. Sect. 3. Book iii.
↩ This, the transcendental doctrine of Platonists as well as
Pythagoreans, it was the object of Plato’s invaluable Parmenides
to develope: take the conclusion —
An allusion to servitude for debt which all early communities seem to have held legitimate. Tacitus, Germ. xxiv. 5. Modified among the Jews, Exod. xxi. Levit. xxv. Deut. xv., and Egyptians, Genesis xlvii. 18—23. But then, as Tacitus observes, such slavery was very different from that of more advanced society. Muhammad discouraged the slavery of believers to each other, but it has always prevailed among his followers. In Turkey liberty may be publicly claimed, but the privilege is often waived.
↩A tacit allusion to their sectarian denomination of Shíites, from a root signifying conformity in multitudes. Their opponents are the Sunnites, the former discrediting all representatives of Muhammad other than in the line of Aly; the second paying equal veneration to his predecessors and successors, and receiving for authentic the Sunnah or digest of traditions compiled by them. The stronghold of Sunnetism was in Syria, where the Ummíyan caliphs reigned to the prejudice of Aly’s line. The Turks, from their vicinity apparently to that quarter, adopted its persuasion. The prevailing feeling of the rest (far the majority) of Islām is, and always has been, to Shíitism.
↩See note 5. After Adam’s display of knowledge, the angels were commanded to fall down and worship him. All obey but Eblis, who is thereupon driven from heaven, and becomes the enemy of God and man. This old Arabic tradition is borne out by the opening to the book of Job. The author’s object in dwelling on these topics is to raise the reader’s mind to the level of the subject.
↩Not absolute perfection, but the nearest attainable approach to it. They very properly contemplate every thing that is in connexion with what it might be, and what it ought to be. See a passage in Sect. 4. Book i. on the real and virtual equipoise, from which it is clear enough that they do not hold the doctrine of perfectibility.
↩ Súfy: a term for the erotic and pantheistic school, borrowed
apparently from the Greek
The paramount and universal virtue is here denominated
Wisdom. Elsewhere, as in Sect. 5. Book i., it is taken to be
Justice: this vagueness (which is only one of terms) will there
be explained. The perfection of either implies the other, and
perfection itself may be properly considered one or the other, according
as man is regarded in an individual or social aspect. Plato
and Aristotle, when writing politically, have in many passages
given precedence to the latter; Plato, most specifically, Rep. iv.,
Is this said in the old philosophy, eisdem verbis? I think
not; though implied in a hundred places. Plato comes very near
it (Phædrus),
Herein lies the banefulness of natural knowledge. Man is not so able to imitate as to understand — to execute as to devise. — “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. ” This imperfection it is the object of revealed religion not only (as above) to affirm, but in some respects to remedy, and in more to console. The imitation of God is an inspiring thought, but it can be nothing more.
↩One of Muhammad’s most frequent designations, meaning that he was sent to punish the world’s dereliction of former Prophets: refuge of Prophet-hood is the technical rendering, a Prophet being that inspired person who is especially delegated to convert a people.
↩Self-denial — a school which combined the Platonic love of virtue with the Stoic indifference to every thing else. Dowlat Shāh tells us that Hakím Sanāi, one of the earliest practical instances of this class, carried his carelessness about person and property to such lengths that his friends wept for him. In later times austerity was a sure road to veneration.
↩ A much celebrated saying of his was
Ethics, vi. 6. is on this subject. “Since the object of science is universal and demonstrable truth, and whatever is demonstrable must be founded on principles, it follows that there must be primary principles which are not science any more than they are art or prudence. * * * * It follows that intellect, operating on experience, is the only source from which these great and primary truths can be expected to flow.” (Gillie.) Some other passage is referred to in the text.
↩So Plato is called, as being the greatest of natural divines. See note 19.
↩Ârifína — a translation of the Greek word Gnostic, a school which, in point of fact, they much resembled.
↩Shehrwerdy, thirteenth century, put to death by the Syrian Saladin for being more philosophic than orthodox (Stewart’s Catalogue): hence his epithet Maktúl, which means killed.
↩See their notions of this in a passage of Sect. viii. Book i. Cure of Pride.
↩A blind veneration for names is the besetting weakness of Muslim philosophers, old and recent.
↩ So I have throughout rendered the expression
Janíd was spiritual representative of Aly Razā the 8th Imām, as being head of a religious institution founded by him — (Dowlat Shāh at Jalālodín Rúmy). He and Tústery were both hearers of Zul Nún, a still more celebrated mystic of the third century, A.H., or tenth A.D. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩The words in italics belong to a passage in the Kurán, interlaced as above with the author’s own.
↩Alluding to some fabulous legends, of which the Arabs had as many connected with the notes and demeanour of their birds as the Greeks had of theirs.
↩Men and genii; see note 27. Aly Razā, their eighth Imām, is usually styled Imām of men and genii.
↩Said by Muhammad, in order to impress his followers with high notions of his infallibility. See Kurán, chaps. xxxiii. and lxvi. Far different is the language of real inspiration, Job c. iv. 18. “Behold, he put no trust in his servants, and his angels he charged with folly.”
↩ A metaphor constantly used by the ancients, with whom it
was likewise a general position, that passions were diseases of the
mind. Cicero, Tusc. iii. 1—4. “Est profecto animi medicina
philosophia; quæ Græci
Particularly Ghazāly, the most orthodox of all their doctors.
His work on ethics is named
Only the scientific department. They began as boys with learning Arabic, the language of their Scripture, and of all standard works on science. The notion of beginning with morals as a science is very unsound. We are not to reason before we know how to reason. Moral is application — abstract science, exercise and method; and then their science of morals was confessedly deficient. — See end of Introduction, and of Sect. 1. Book i.
↩This is the most general object of attention in the Muslim schools. The Arabs, being suddenly called from their deserts to all the duties and dignities of civilized life, were at first much pressed to reconcile these with the simplicity of their Scripture. The multitude of distinctions they were obliged to adopt gave dialectics an importance which they never lost.
↩A writer on education in the tenth century, treasurer to Azdodoulat, the greatest potentate of his time. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩ Meant to represent
In a hundred passages in the Kurán, Muhammad disclaims miraculous power; visions he professed to have sometimes, but no more. Chaps. xlii. and liii. The angels that fought on their side were wholly invisible. His followers, however, being pressed on this point by the Jews and Christians, searched his life for incidents which they could conveniently magnify into such.
↩The passage resembles one in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where the same charge is brought against the Greek sophists: so much for the supposed fanaticism and intolerance of the Muslims! They too, it seems, had early their infidels, non-conformists, and free-thinkers.
↩Meaning their Scripture or Kurán. He opens the case with scripture quotations, because it is the doctrine of the fanatic school, particularly of the Jebbāries or fatalists, who utterly denied free agency, and merged every thing into a series of actuations from the divinity. The real state of the question is well put by the author a little below — “Every one has a latitude of temperament,” &c.
↩See further on, at note 75.
↩This is not an admitted point, as he seems to suppose; — it would be argued on the other side, that if the intended identity were vicious, it might be superseded not only without prejudice to life, but with advantage to it. Identity of being has often been doubted.
↩From Firdúsi’s celebrated satire on Mahmúd of Ghuzni, whom he taunts in these words with being the son of a vassal. These metrical passages, so constantly occurring, are all quotations from established authorities, though Persian reading is not yet exact enough to enable us to recognise many. This is what is meant in the Exordium by “giving prelibations from the striking passages of those who look beneath the veil.”
↩ Plato had said before him, not only metaphorically but
allegorically, —
Jamshíd, fourth of the Kaianian dynasty, the Solomon of the Persians. His cup was said to mirror the world, so that he could observe all that was passing elsewhere — a fiction of his own for state purposes, apparently, backed by the use of foreign mirrors. Nizāmi tells us Alexander invented the steel mirror, by which he means, of course, that improved reflectors were introduced by the Greeks. Mirrors or reflectors were used for telescopy in the days of Archimedes, but not early enough to have assisted Jamshíd, who belongs to the fabulous and unchronicled age. In the romance of Beyjan and Manija in the Shāhnāmeh, this mirror is used by the great Khasrú for the purpose of discovering the place of that hero’s imprisonment.
↩ Used in its proper sense of moral mould or shape, from
These terms belong to the humoral (which was once the universal) pathology: the last popular treatise on this is to be found in the discussions in Tristram Shandy on radical heat and moisture. It is now exploded, not because it was not true as far as it went, but because other influences have been brought forward, which reduce these to the class of symptoms and intermediaries.
↩Almost the words of Locke, II. chap. xxii. Sect. 10. “Power or ability in man of doing any thing, when it has been acquired by frequent doing the same thing, is that idea we name habit. When it is forward and ready upon every occasion to break into action, we call it disposition.”
↩The old Magian, — the leading principle of which was revived in the heresy of the Manicheans, and entered likewise into the Gnostic system.
↩The writer’s difficulties here arise from following the ancients in their erroneous mode of arguing upon ideas instead of phenomena. Evil (which is here injurious inclination) arises not from the nature of man, but from the nature of his relations with surrounding objects; that is, from material limitations and privations, which teach him to find his own gain in others’ loss; and thus by habit and association to take pleasure sometimes in others’ loss, even when unattended by any other advantage than the indulgence of such habit. Now habit being peculiarly under the influence of discipline, so is this last species of ill-feeling, — the only one of the two which is properly anti-social. The passage in the Akhlāk-i-Nāsiry is first section, second division — On the Definition and Nature of Disposition.
↩ The Grecian or natural philosophy, scil., unenlightened by
revelation. Avicenna, in the subjoined theory, attempts to reconcile
the two: the word in the original is filsefia, representing of
course
One of Avicenna’s most celebrated works, comprising the whole round of the sciences.
↩ In the original
Those of the equinoctial precession.
↩According to the Ptolemaic system (which is still in vogue in the East), the heavens are a solid cylinder or firmament, the fall of which was contemplated as possible. Hence Horace: “Si fractus inlabatur orbis.” “If the crystalline orb break up and drop upon him.”
↩ By gradual detrition and deposit. The process so much
built on in modern geology; yet familiar it appears to Avicenna
in the tenth century. Plato has indeed hinted at it in his Critias,
though with specific reference only to Attica:
That is, one of the two zones adjacent to the torrid one.
↩Obliquity in the sun’s rays that is; the old notion of the torrid and frigid zones being uninhabitable: it is amusing to find it held by persons writing perhaps in the torrid zone.
↩ The periodical destructions we have in Plato’s Critias, (passage
above, note 84) and Laws iii.
It is said that hair confined in running water becomes vitalized.
↩That is, at the first origin of art and science many persons were already in the world to profit by it; that is, many were originated at once. This argument rests on a standard principle of their political reasoning (Sect. 1. Book iii.); namely, that without art and science not only society could not subsist, but not even a single individual. Hence it follows, that if art is invention, and the invention be not for the inventor, art, the inventor of art, and the multitude to profit by it, must all have been produced together. This reasoning would not apply to Adam, whom we see, in former notes, they suppose to have been divinely instructed in the necessary arts. The scriptural account of creation they hold intact; seeking, however, by this theory, to engraft these traditions respecting the progress of early society, which they found so fondly recurred to by their masters in philosophy, the Greeks. Of the priority of Egyptian and Phœnician civilization, by which these traditions are explained, they had no idea.
↩This passage seems a sort of traditional extract from Aristotle, transferred from writer to writer till its real author was unknown. “Properties given by nature cannot be taken away, or altered by custom: thus the gravity of a stone, which naturally carries it downwards, cannot be changed into levity, which would carry it upwards, were we to throw it in that direction ten thousand times; and fire, which naturally seeks the extremities, cannot be brought by custom to tend towards the centre. The moral virtues, therefore, are neither natural nor præternatural: we are born with capacities for acquiring them, but they can only be acquired by our own exertions.” (Ethics, Arist. ii. 1. Gillie.) This conclusion he was the readier to arrive at for his distinction (abandoned by these writers) between the intellectual and moral virtues. (Ethics, v. 1. and vi. 7.) He never means to deny that intellectual habits are largely determined by unalterable constitution of intellect. Now moral habits being partly determined by intellectual ones, if the last are unchangeable in a greater degree, the first will be so in a lesser.
↩Aristot. Pol. iv. c. 14. “Man only is disciplined by reason, and may be persuaded even to change bad habits by the influence of example and the conviction of argument.” The fault indeed of Grecian theories lay in attributing too much influence to law and discipline, and too little to circumstances of nature and situation: and hence, though for a time they achieved splendid victories over nature, their systems had no endurance, but were speedily overwhelmed by higher agencies.
↩So universal among all literary classes in all places is the depreciation of the age they live in: the more invariable the less just. — 1. They compare the achievements of innumerable ages with that of their own single one. — 2. They see only the achieved, and not the achievements in preparation.
↩Meaning the inspired words of Muhammad: a short ejaculation or benedicite is omitted here and everywhere else where his name occurs. The Muslims never mention the name of any distinguished character without inserting a benedicite after it. In the version these are generally omitted.
↩That is, the vice-regence: see beginning of the Introduction.
↩The word in the original is the very converse — a concession: but this, by a technical use, they understand as coming from the antagonist, not from the party applying it; it is in fact equivalent to our petitio principii.
↩End of Sect. 1. Book i.
↩ In verse 25, chap. xviii. of the Kurán, Muslims are forbidden
to say they will do any thing without adding, “If it please God.”
For this reference to divine pleasure they have a particular term
Powers of animal as well as human nature, according to Akh.-nās. i. 3, where reason constitutes a third power. According to the text, reason would not be a separate power, but only the excellence of the first; which agrees with Locke, Essay l. ii. c. 11. s. 5, 7, 10.
↩ Plato gives two parts or powers, rational and irrational
(Timæus, and note 4): the last Aristotle further divides into
sensitive and passionate (Eth. i. c. 13. vi. c. 3), which nearly
agrees with the text. Memory and imagination are held not
faculties, but states (see Sect. 2), as in the Greek system,
Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iv. 5. “Veterem illam equidem, Pythagoræ
primum, dein Platonis descriptionem sequar, qui animum,” &c.
“I wish to follow the old distribution; that of Pythagoras first,
and of Plato afterwards, who both divide the mind into two parts,
one of which they hold to partake of reason, and the other to be
devoid of it. In that which partakes of reason, they place tranquillity,
that is, placid self-possession, and in the other those
turbulent commotions, whether of anger or desire, which are
opposite and hostile to reason.” These are involuntary motions.
How far they intended to limit voluntary motion likewise to the
second power (thus rendering the two identical with the passive
and active principles) is not clear in either school. Túsy says,
“Perception in its (the soul’s) nature and impulse by its organs.”
Akh.-nās. ii. 5. On the other hand, active intellect (and more,
active power) is often loosely used as a moving principle. In
the higher science we know perception itself was only a form of
motion,
The Ptolemaic orbs, with the motion of which they supposed the procession of ideas to be connected — a compromise between Platonic recollection and Aristotelian attainment. See Introduction at note 35, and Sect. 5. Book iii.
↩The immediate source then is in the power of impulse.
↩ Said only for illustration; not that they divided the faculties.
So Aristotle, “It makes no difference whether the soul is divisible
or indivisible; it has at any rate distinct powers.”
I am obliged to use equity instead of justice throughout; in order to maintain the connexion, all along insisted on, between the quality intended and equipoise, both physical and metaphorical.
↩
| 1. Reason. | 2. Excitement. | ||
| 1. Contemplative. | 2. Active. | 3. Appetent. | 4. Vindictive. |
There are many logical anomalies in this derivation of the virtues, the terms in the several processes not bearing the same respective relation. The actions in which such qualities are observed proceed indeed from the powers assigned, which may so far justly be termed their first material. On the relation of coolness to courage hear Aristotle. — “The office of courage consists in moderating the impulse of rash boldness, as well as the excess of cautious timidity.” — Eth. iii. 9.
↩In ii. 5.
↩In i. 3.
↩From this time forward he uses power and intellect indifferently when speaking of the contemplative and active divisions; thus endangering the distinction between active intellect and impelling faculty (see note 4), as in the sentence next noted.
↩That is, equity (of which the first member of the sentence is a description) exists in and by the active power (or power of making one power influence another) to which (and therefore to equity) the other three virtues were shown (in the preceding sentence) to be substrata.
↩Hujet ul Islām; so Ghazāly was called. See Introduction, note 61. Ihyā Ikhtiyār signifies resuscitation of the will — importing the work to have been partly directed against the heresy of the fatalists.
↩This question, which bewilders the writer and reader throughout the treatise, is raised on the old error of looking for specific essence in qualities themselves, instead of in the minds of those contemplating them. (Locke, Ess. iii. chap. 5.) No doubt the ruling disposition of the mind, be it to good or evil, or any degree or intermixture of the two, call it by what name or classes of names we will, is as single and indivisible as the mind in which it exists; but the actions in which it is exerted have various aspects and relations: it is these actions, and not the disposition originating them, which are properly the subject of classification and nomenclature. In different classes of these, according to situation and habit, the ruling disposition will manifest itself in different intensity, and then we suppose different dispositions to each, instead of different degrees of the same. But by reason of the sameness of the ruling principle, most of these subordinate divisions are liable to be expanded into the whole; and hence the indistinctness and versatility of the terms employed. In the case of justice the question had already been settled by Aristotle. “In one sense justice comprehends every thing that has a tendency to produce or maintain happiness in society.” — Eth. v. 1. “But our present inquiry is concerning justice in a more limited sense, denoting one virtue in particular.” — Ibid. 2. (Gillie.) This is equally true of wisdom (see Introduction, note 42), of temperance, of courage, even of modesty, patience, and others (see Sect. 2.), all which, by merely generalizing the terms of their definitions, may be identified with universal virtue; though there will always be a particular class of actions coming under it, to which each is respectively and peculiarly appropriate.
↩Akh.-nās. ii. 5. ad fin.
↩After Aristotle in his Metaphysics, where he applies this term to the science of first principles in all things, called also Wisdom and Theology. (Gill. Anal. c. ii.)
↩Take Túsy’s illustrations, Akh.-nās. i. 1. “First principles are those which, when not self-evident, are established in some other science higher than the one in question, in which latter they are to be at once admitted. For instance, it is one of the principles of medicine that there are four elements, and no more: a proposition which is made out in natural philosophy, from the adept in which the physician must receive it, and consider it as granted in his own science. It is a first principle of mathematics that quantities are points of being in continuation, and that their species are three and no more — line, superficies, and body; an axiom established in theology, or what is termed metaphysics, from the adept in which the mathematician is to receive it for application in his own science. This science of metaphysics is that on which all other sciences bottom, and in this only can there be no first principles which are not self-evident.” — See Introduction, note 62.
↩Avicenna; for the Shafā, see Introduction, page 42.
↩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.
↩Re-written and arranged from Ak.-nās. 1. (of the second Treatise), where we learn that Abú Aly Mashkovy’s Kitāb Tahārat, from which the previous materials were drawn, carries us no farther: and we now come upon the works of the well-known Avicenna. For this and the following book the Muhammedans profess to be less indebted to the Greeks than for the preceding one. But there is a Greek or Latin, or Byzantine, writer to whom they refer under the name of Abrúsan, as their principal foreign authority. (Ak.-nās. ubi sup.) The laws of conversion have not yet been sufficiently attended to, to enable us to identify the name.
↩The doctrine is overstrained, but it is Aristotelian. “It is chiefly the want of food, and the various means employed for supplying it, that produces the wide varieties of manners and modes of life in men and animals. By the constitution of nature, different animals delight in different kinds of food — some in herbs, others in flesh, others again in both — and in subservience to the facility of acquiring such their natural nourishment, some animals are solitary and others are gregarious.” Polit. i. 5. (Gillie.) Shelter, clothing, and firing, all so indispensable in our part of the globe, are here not noticed. This then seems to be the primal cause of the inferiority of Asiatic civilization. Political society is kept together by want, as domestic society is by affection. In Asia, the wants of man are less urgent, and therefore society is less widely and intimately united.
↩The origin of towns and states, as well as houses, according to Cicero, Off. ii. 21. “For although in the course of nature men are sure to congregate, yet it was for the purpose of preserving their property that they took refuge in cities;” which was exemplified during the middle ages, when the fortification of the boroughs originated political power in the tiers étát.
↩ This is properly the origin of the domestic state (Arist.
Pol. i. 7. Cic. Off. i. 17.), and would have been considered first,
had this been a treatise of general, rather than moral, philosophy.
As it is, they consider the domestic rather as a derivative than an
element of the political state: and rightly — because, though the
first does not derive its existence, it does derive its duties, from
the appointment of the second. How can our conduct to wives
and servants be determined, except by reference to the law of the
land? Or how are we to educate our children, except in harmony
with the feelings, practices, and expectations of others?
The problem of the Section is, in fact, not how were houses first,
but how are they still, required. Even Aristotle makes the same
intentional oversight, on the same grounds. Pol. i. 2.
Arist. Pol. i. 3. “The elements of a family — master and servant, husband and wife, father and children.” Either two of these relatives, with the addition of property, make a quasi family: the elements in the text are necessary to complete one. Hesiod begins with man and wife and labouring ox. (Erg.)
↩More should have been said on the external relations of the state, which we are left to collect from Sects. 2 and 5. Of these the most comprehensive sketch is given by Cicero, Off. ii. 3.
| Things | |||||
| Inanimate, further divisible into |
Animate, | ||||
| 1. Necessary. | 2. Profitable. | 3. Pleasing. | Irrational. | Rational, | |
| Men. | Gods. | ||||
To which Túsy adds, that it ought to be safe, in case of earthquake, from the downfall of other buildings. — Ak.-nās. ubi sup.
↩Some such anecdote was current of Demosthenes, “who used to say, he reproached himself as often as he chanced to be surpassed by the day-break industry of artisans.” — Cicero, Tuse. Disp. iv. 19.
↩Little more or less than Ak.-nās. 2. (2d Treatise.)
↩See in Sect. 5. pp. 127, 128.
↩After Aristotle, Pol. ii. 6. “The goods necessary to man were not found to be either of easy conveyance or of constant use. Markets would often lay at a distance. It became necessary therefore to,” &c. These views are adopted and carried out by Adam Smith, I. iv.
↩The further treatment of this division is omitted.
↩See in Sect. 5. p. 132, note 37.
↩That is, is now held by a bad title, the present owners or some of their predecessors having acquired it by fraudulent or illegal means; such as usury, which (after the Jewish) their code prohibits; or having failed to devote the assigned portion to the religious expenditures noticed at the end of the Section.
↩A remarkable instance of the influence of Grecian authority. It actually prevailed over that of their early ecclesiastical writers. The ancient opinion of pastoral innocence is well known, and is countenanced by Aristot. Pol. i. 6 and 7; and by Cicero, Off. i. 42; De Sen. 15—17, &c. The early preference of the Arabs for trade may have proceeded on the principle omne ignotum pro magnifico. They were themselves at first a nomadic people, and saw as much virtue in the contrary way of life as others did in theirs. Cicero, Off. i. 42, rightly remarks, that trade is either a liberal or a mean occupation, according as it is conducted on a grand or a petty scale.
↩Dealers in wine, we learn from the Alf Lailat, were generally Jews or Christians. Its use was prohibited (Kurān ii. 219. and v. 99.) as productive of more evil than good. But the Caliphs allowed it to be sold as a medicine, in which stage their law was a copy (in all but the penalty) of an old law of Locris. “If any drink wine unmixed, except as a remedy and by prescription of a physician, let him be punished by death.” (Athenæus x. p. 226. ap. Gillie ii. 143.) By the Mosaic (Lev. x. 8. 11. Numb. vi. 3.) and the Hindu law, wine was so far illicit, that the pure classes were forbidden to drink it. And at the end of the 4th century, A.D., wine was first interdieted in the Persian empire for its mischief, and afterwards permitted for its utility, by Bahrām Gúr, the contemporary of Theodosius. (Shāhnāmah.) Montesquieu justifies its prohibition in tropical climates from the state of the blood; legislators, however, were more probably influenced by the state of the feelings. Where exhaustion is so general, the stimulus is sure to be abused. Muhammad’s law has certainly limited the frequency of this abuse, though it may have added to the violence of debauches once begun. (In Sparta it was restricted. Plato, Laws, i.)
↩The further treatment of this division is omitted.
↩Cf. in Sect. 3. p. 92, and Sect. 8. p. 188. Distinction is more strictly hereditary with them than with us; so much so as to be independent of the fluctuations in wealth and power. — Respect has ceased to wait upon obedience, and many among a great man’s servants are more revered than their master.
↩Of provisions, scil., which is still an indictable offence at English common law (Blackst. Com. IV. c. xii. s. 8.); though the notion of its being injurious to the public was exploded by Adam Smith, W. of N. IV. c. v., and was previously little acted on.
↩Kurān ii. 219. Wine, music, dancing, dice, and debauchery seem to have gone together in the East from time immemorial. — Requiring stimulus more, the Asiatics are likewise more susceptible to it when applied. Cf. Isaiah v. 11. “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them! And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts,” &c.: and ibid. xxiv. 8, 9.
↩After Aristot. Pol. i. c. 6. “Those occupations are vile and sordid which hurt the health or deform the body; those are truly servile which may be exercised by the corporeal powers alone; and those are the meanest and most contemptible which require not any vigorous exertion either of mind or body.” Cicero, Off. i. 42, is fuller; but, like these writers, allows himself to be confused by the question of utility to others. If this was the view with which vile occupations were pursued, it might indeed redeem their character: as it is, the fact of necessity no more ennobles the caterers to vile wants, than it does the wants themselves. In Sect. 3. Book iii. the subject is renewed.
↩This is all that is given under the head of keeping, which he considers only a negative of spending.
↩In Kurān c. ii. v. 215, alms are enjoined to be given to — 1. relations; 2. orphans; 3. the indigent; 4. Muslimāns; in fact, in this order, to every one who needed them: but in verse 220 it is added, only out of what is superfluous. The practice is a fundamental point in their ceremonials. It is certainly connected with the Jewish tithes, (the three species of which see briefly stated in Tobit i. 7, 8,) and hence it is popularly considered as a tithe (even by Gibbon, c. 1.); but the proportion varied, and there is much intricacy in the law that determines it. See Hidāyat, Book of Alms.
↩ The practice of approaching princes with a gift is rational,
and proper enough in the outset of society, and before the sums
and sources of revenue have been accurately settled. For the
prince being a creature of society, constituted for certain purposes,
is of course to be paid for his trouble, as well as any other
professional person. There are numerous instances, even in more
advanced stages, of the judicatures being supported by commission
on the value in dispute, as appears to have been the case in Greece
when Hesiod wrote. (See
These national scourges consisting always of the undue operation of some of these elementary powers; which are therefore said to be less strong than the act by which they are averted. Cf. the well-known passage from which these texts are taken, Matth. vi. 1—4.
↩It is very clear from this and other parts of the passage, that it is intended to apply to the first division of the third head, instead of to the second head, which treats of gifts without a purpose. Many other marks of haste are observable throughout the Section. Besides expenses for duty, advantage, and precaution, those for amusement or gratification not amounting to gain, might have afforded an instructive passage.
↩So in both the MSS. in the translator’s use. But the corresponding passage of Ak.-nās. has one instead of three, which last seems a slip of the pen by some very early copyist.
↩The black mail of the Scotch Highlanders is a familiar example of the payments intended. There are few times and places in Asia exempt from such necessities. In the text they seem argued on as inevitable evils.
↩Re-arranged from Akh.-nas. 3. (2d Treatise.) The anecdote of Hajāj and his chamberlain is new. Here it is that their Greek authorities seem first to fail them. (See note 1 to Sect. 1 of this Book.)
↩Precisely the three objects assigned in the marriage-service of our own church, only that the first is not sufficiently expressive of the social, as opposed to the animal craving. In the Akh.-nās. it is omitted altogether as a distinct head, but more dwelt upon as subsidiary to the third. See note 12.
↩Where the law is unequal to public protection, the security of individuals depends on the numbers of the family to which they belong. Hence, in turbulent societies, the feeling of clanship and the value attached to children — “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.” The feeling was of course encouraged by the legislators, for the same reason. The early Arabs held public rejoicings at the birth of a male. See in the laws of Menu, and cf. Æschyl. Choëph. 501. Herod. I. cxxxvi.
↩The law originally prohibited the marriage of proprietors with their own slaves (it was often evaded), but they were allowed to marry those of others with the owner’s consent. The essence of marriage was a reciprocal engagement on either side, to recognise, on the other, the rights of the connubial relation. This engagement the law refused to consider serious or complete, unless concluded in the presence of witnesses. Ecclesiastical rites were commonly superadded. See Hidāyat, Book of Marriage, cs. i. and viii.
↩Hence one reason and one advantage of the prevalence of polygamy in insecure, and still more in vagrant societies. It multiplied the sources of security and the means of union.
↩Juv. vi. 161.
Taken probably from some similar and serious enumeration of qualities that ought to be sought for.
↩Ibid. 163.
Ibid. 210—240. “Imperat ergo viro,” &c.
↩Almost equally ungallant is Aristotle, Pol. i. 8. “In slaves the faculties of deliberation and resolution are almost entirely null; in women they are weak and dependent.” The women of Asia are no better than grown children. True it is that the men are partly obnoxious to the charge of having made them so; but equally true, that they are ignorant it can be remedied, and that till it is remedied, they can only speak of them as they find them. Again, there is a difference in the mental characteristics of the two sexes, that can never be removed, being based upon that of physical power and domestic position. All that operates to the disadvantage of women in this difference, the climate of Asia tends to aggravate.
↩Strangely enough the seclusion is put as a compliment rather than a restraint; and no doubt, when it had once become an established practice, the neglect of it would be insulting. Hence the anger of Candaules’ wife, Herod. I. x., who was most likely unveiled only, not undressed. (Cf. Esther i.) Persons of the harem are technically those within the prohibited degrees of affinity, including domestics, who were generally slaves. (Hidāyat, Marriage, c. ii. Kurān iv. 20, 21. and xxiv. 31, 32. and xxxiii. 56.)
↩Monogamy is so far a state of nature, as it is the most perfect form of marriage; and therefore that developement of the relation which she may be supposed to have intended (see note 10, p. 107). Unfortunately, however, these perfect developements are generally thwarted by other tendencies equally conferred by her; so that the immediately and the ultimately natural states very seldom coincide. Nor do they here. When parties are discontented with a present partner, the immediate tendency is to take another. Women, being the weaker party, are not allowed to do this. But men, being controlled only by men, have done and do it, in most parts and periods of the world: nay, in some parts and periods it is inconceivable and undesirable, other things remaining as they are, that they should not do it. But wherever nature’s immediate and ultimate purposes are brought into collision, it will be found that means are provided gradually to correct the aberration. Sages point out, legislators in time perceive, and communities acknowledge, the preferable course. It is adopted in some single instance; the adopters become enviable and powerful in consequence; and the same practice is forced upon some, and imitated by others. Exactly in this state of transition was the question of marriage in ancient Greece. Polygamy was disapproved, but not disallowed. In the Roman polity the convictional improvement appeared in a legal form. From Rome it was of course adopted by Christendom. In the north of Europe monogamy preceded civilization (Tacit. Germ.); and hence some colour to Montesquieu’s argument, that the practice depends on climate, and is never likely to disappear from Asia. The turning point has certainly not yet been reached; but let us hope it may be reached, since we can here trace an advance to it. The Muhammedan Institute (for the first time in central Asia, see Herodot. Clio, c. cxxxv.) fixed a maximum; lax indeed, but as strict as could then be ventured. “Freemen may marry as many as four wives, free or servile, but no more.” (Hidāyat, Marriage, c. ii. from Kurān, c. iv.) And here we have their moralists expounding the question in its true aspect, with a force and beauty not easily paralleled.
↩A more liberal account of this the author has already given in Sect. 1. Man requires a partner to attend to his affairs in his absence. A still more important truth follows; he requires an object of affection for the repose of his own feelings. These benefits, derived from women, should have been more dwelt on here, because their rights follow from them. Túsy is juster: “A good wife is partner in her husband’s property, sharer in his domestic power, and substitute for him whenever he is not present.” (Ak.-nās. ubi sup.) “The industry and excellences of each are brought into the common stock of domestic happiness, which their distinctive virtues are calculated wonderfully to augment.” Arist. Eth. viii. 12. ad fin. (Gillie.)
↩Juv. vi. 206.
For the cure alluded to, see in Sect. 8. Book i. p. 227.
↩A great captain and harsh governor employed by the Omian Caliphs in reducing and extirpating the unfortunate Alites (see note 83, p. 218) at the latter end of the seventh century. He is commonly called Hajāj Yúsaf or Bin Yúsaf.
↩ Theirs was the office attributed by Xenophon to the cup-bearer
of Astyages the Mede, Cyrop. I. c. iii. s. 7. “Now this
Sacas (
The gold dinār, which this Hajāj was the first to strike in the Caliph’s name; the specie previously in circulation having been of Greek coinage. (D’Herbelôt.)
↩A high mark of favour; as are also such presents of food from the prince’s table as Xenophon describes, Cyrop. I. c. iii. s. 6.
↩Cf. Juvenal, vi. 377.
Some remains of the old system survived in the Roman practice, and more of course in the Grecian. Veiling, seclusion, confinement, restraint, are all parts of the general system. Till they know how to elevate women’s feelings, they are quite right to prevent their going abroad. The constant prevalence of the most refined duplicity and intrigue is observable in the Alf Lailat (Arabian Nights). Lady Montague doubted whether it prevailed more in Turkey than in England (Letter XXXI.); and yet she allows that “the masquerade of veiling gives them more perfect liberty.” Is not such liberty conclusive against her former opinion, coming, as it does, after moral neglect, and in spite of attempted restraint?
↩The duties of wives should have been deduced from the benefits they receive, as their rights from those which they confer. The peculiar views of Muhammedans on the nature and origin of power (which will be noticed in the third Book) made them slow to perceive its proper limits.
↩Cf. Bacon’s Essay on this subject: “Wives are old men’s nurses, middle-aged men’s companions, and young men’s mistresses: ” and Simonides’ Poem on Women — “The Gods have given to man nothing better than a good woman, and nothing worse than a bad one.”
↩Divorce at the husband’s discretion is the very element of polygamy, as we have seen above; as also the cause of the wife’s not possessing the same privilege. Kāzies, however, might interfere at the wife’s instance, and compel temporary separation à mensâ et toro. See Hariri. Makām. xlv.
↩“Intolerabilius nihil est quàm fœmina dives.” — Juvenal.
“Rich heiresses acquire more than their due share of power: wealth is preferred to worth, the gifts of fortune to the distinctions of nature.” Arist. Eth. viii. 10. ad fin.
↩Little altered from Akh.-nās. 4. (second Treatise), except as noticed at note 41, and note 1, Sect. 5. The Orientals seem averse to any orderly derivation and distribution of precepts. As in the Proverbs and other ethical books of the Hebrews, rules are here thrown together rather undigestedly.
↩With the Jews it was the eighth. (Luke i. 59.) There is always a resemblance in the practices of the two people.
↩Sterne’s amusing disquisitions on the value and importance of names are taken then from the old schoolmen.
↩Introduction, pp. 19—40, et seq. Book i. p. 157.
↩See Book i. Sect. 6.
↩See p. 73, where shame is said to be a part of temperance; and pp. 55 and 57, where temperance is a form of the appetent power. Yet is shame here said to be the earliest and strongest manifestation of the reasonable power. This is partly explained in note 10, p. 57. They would probably further say, that though the appetent power was the material, reason was the instrument. The share which reason has in the formation of all virtue having been once fundamentally noticed, they leave it to be understood when treating, as in Book i. Sect. 2., of other elements. Were they to refer to the reasonable power for the origin of every virtue into which it enters, these qualities would be all of one class, and the benefits of subdivision and analysis must be given up. Thus it is that the two statements may be reconciled. As to the fact, as here put, see p. 149, note 7.
↩This, the well-known illustration of Locke, and commonly attributed to his own suggestion, has been in the possession of the schools from time immemorial. Aristotle called the soul tabula rasa, a clear tablet. (Gillie, Anal. note g.) We now see the origin and secret intent of Muhammad’s assertion, that the Kurān pre-existed in a preserved tablet (Lúh Mahfúz), Kurān c. lxxxv. ad fin. It was equivalent to the old eastern notion enforced by Plato, that natural religion was an instinct of the human mind. See Sect. 5. note 26, p. 127.
↩Xenoph. Cyrop. I. c. iii. s. 2. “Of the Persians, as he had left them in their own country, nay, as still subsisting, the apparel was mean and the diet moderate.” Cf. Herod. Clio, c. lxxi.
↩Xen. Cyrop. I. c. ii. s. 8. “They teach them to keep in check their appetite for food and drink.” Ib. c. iii. s. 10. “And your father, asked Astyages, my boy, does not he feel tipsy when he drinks? No, indeed, says he. How then? He feels no longer thirsty.”
↩Yet, strange to say, in the Akh.-nās. we have a paragraph on the proprieties of taking wine. See at note 41.
↩By the rapid evaporation of water, a sort of coolness may be preserved in the hottest times at the hottest places.
↩Herod. Clio, cxxxvi. and cxxxviii. “Three things the Persians teach their children — riding, archery, and truth.” “The basest of offences they hold to be falsehood.”
↩ In Kurān ii. vs. 225, 226, Muslims are forbidden to use the
name of God unnecessarily or irreverently; but no precept could
be more completely disregarded than this. Like the
See again Sterne’s description from the schoolmen of what a pedagogue ought to be.
↩The old Spartan notion.
↩From the prayer of Abraham when founding the Kaaba at Mecca, according to Kurān c. xiv.
“Defend, O Lord, this land, and preserve me and my child from the worship of idols:
“For many are those, O Lord, whom they have led astray.
“Then whoso obeys me is with me, and whoso opposes me — thou, Lord, art merciful and gracious!
“Lord! of my offspring do I populate this barren valley near thy sacred house.
“Grant, Lord, that they may be constant in prayer.
“Incline the hearts of men towards them, and supply them with the products of the earth, that they may be grateful.
“Thou, Lord, knowest all we hide and all we discover; there is nothing hidden to God in earth or heaven.
“Glory to God! who has given me Ismael and Isaac in my old age. Yea, my Lord gives ear to supplications.”
The only colour to Ghazāly’s far-fetched notion would be
derived from the faces and figures stamped upon coin. In the
time of Abraham, however, money was not coined — hardly
stamped, or, if stamped, hardly with a figure. See Genesis
xxiii. 16. “And Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver.”
Ghazāly seems led astray by St. Paul’s expression, Col. iii. 5.
“Covetousness, which is idolatry.” Cf. Phocyll.
Manifestly a translation (to or from) of the Latin “Non omnia possumus omnes.” Cicero rests much on this topic, Off. i. cs. 31 and 33. “Nothing is to be gained by a conflict with nature, or by pursuing that which you cannot overtake,” &c. &c.
↩See p. 15, note 31, &c. Admitting Plato’s notion that souls were introduced, or perhaps kindled, by the heavenly bodies, nothing could be more reasonable than to attempt by observation and induction to ascertain the influence contributed by each. The premises only are to be attacked; and for these the chiefs of classical as well as of oriental literature are responsible.
↩Cic. Off. i. 33. “Should it happen, as it may, that he finds himself to have made an erroneous choice of a profession, the practice and destination must be changed,” &c.
↩In the East, where obvious and safe means of investing principal are rare, this often happens.
↩Faridún and his three sons, Kai Kāus and Kai Khasru, Luhrasp and Kishtāsp, Kishtāsp and Isfandiār, Bahman and Dārāb, Sam and Zāl, Rustam and Suhrāb, are all instances from the Shāhnāmah. The fact corroborates the authenticity of Xenophon’s historical data, though not his capacity to use them. He represents Cyrus as visiting his grandfather; but more for gratification than improvement.
↩“Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” — Pope.
↩By the law of Menu, if the father did not provide his daughter with a husband by the age of ten, she might provide one for herself. So great was the difficulty, under the Asiatic system, of settling daughters with respectability, or keeping them unsettled without disgrace, that the Arabs, before the time of Muhammad, used to destroy female children as systematically as the Chinese are said still to do it, in order to avoid the dilemma. (Kurān vi. vs. 40, 45, and 51—53. xvi. 59.) Legislators and parents are not entirely to blame; climate contributes.
↩The celebrated vizier of the celebrated Noushirwān, who was contemporary with Justinian, and the protector of the seven Athenian sages. See Gibbon, c. xl. ad fin.
↩Ecclesiasticus xxxii. 8. “Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words; be as one that knoweth, and yet holdeth his tongue.”
↩In Xen. Cyrop. VIII. c. vii. s. 4. “I have been taught by our common country to give way to my elders — not brethren only, but citizens no less — in walking, sitting, and conversing.” Eccl. xxxii. 9. “When ancient men are in place, use not many words.”
↩Meaning Matthew vii. 6. “Cast not your pearls before swine,” or more probably some perversion of the passage, in their own uncanonical scriptures.
↩ “Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block
before the blind.” Lev. xix. 14. Deut. xxvii. 18. In early society
personal ridicule of any sort is a serious offence against
morality, owing to the great store then set by bodily qualifications
and the inflammable state of the passions. See Hom. Iliad
iii. 64. Hesiod,
Divination by casual vivá voce expression prevails to this day in Asia, as it did in ancient Greece and Italy, though not quite so much depended on.
↩Polonius to Laertes — “Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice.”
↩Cicero, Off. i. 36. Hor. Sat. I. 3. 10. “In our movements we must equally beware of indolent delay and excessive speed.” For this and the latter part of the passage consult too Sallust’s description of Catiline.
↩The Asiatics sit either on the ground or on cushions slightly elevated above it. The elaborate mechanism of European house-furniture is a consequence of our in-door mode of life: another illustration of the influence of climate.
↩Hence St. Paul says, he was “brought up at the feet of Gamaliel.” Acts xxii. 3.
↩ Xen. Cyrop. I. c. ii. s. 15. “Among the Persians it is disgraceful,
to the present day, both to spit and blow the nose,” &c.
The kiblah is that point of the heavens to which men turn in
prayer. The kiblah of Magians and Greeks was the place of the
sun; of Jews and Christians (eastern), the site of Jerusalem; of
Muhammedans, the site of Mecca, — an alteration defended in
Kurān c. ii. vs. 125—132 and 143—145. Compare in Hesiod’s
A very old rule. See Gen. ix. 20—23. Levit. xviii. 6—19. xx. 11—21. Deut. xxii. 30.
↩ His hands particularly; since they all eat with them out of
the same dish. So with the Greeks. Xen. Cyrop. I. c. iii. s. 5.
“I perceive that you no sooner touch any of the meats, than you
cleanse your hand with the napkins; as if you repented having
had such a handful.”
In the early ages of the world (and in many parts of it to the present day) eating is more or less a religious act; because — 1. Killing animals for human food is only justifiable under the authority or pleasure of God. In our present state of refinement we overlook the fact: but at times when the lives of men are hardly more secure than those of animals, and hardly (to any ostensible purpose) more worth securing, the analogy is evident; and therefore means are taken to render the distinction equally so (see Gen. ix. vs. 3 and 5). 2. Being in the primitive regions almost the only want (see Sect. 1.), and in all regions the most universal and constant one, gratitude is more especially excited by the supply. 3. These facts and feelings have been encouraged and worked on by Pagan priests for their own purposes. 4. In warm climates public health and public delicacy has led to the moral interdiction of different kinds of food among different parties, and therefore to a religious distinction between the different feeders. 5. In the dark ages it appeared desirable to provide against the possible treachery of comrades in the course of an act which placed men at each other’s mercy; and therefore the act was ushered and concluded by appeals to heaven. 6. It is a tendency of simple people to confound moral with personal purity; and therefore an impure person joining in the meals in the manner described in the preceding note, would desecrate the food and all who partook of it. Hence the use of religious rites to discover who did and who did not belong to any given fraternity. Thus in the Bostān (c. ii.), there is a story of Abraham’s detecting, by these means, the irreligion of a guest, and driving him out both from food and shelter, for which he is rebuked by God.
↩Ecclesiasticus xxxi. 18. “When thou sittest among many, reach not thy hand out first of all.”
↩ Xen. Cyrop. I. c. iii. s. 7. “These cup-bearers of eastern
kings pour out wine gracefully — pour it in neatly; and in presenting
the cup hold it with three fingers.”
Ecclus. xxxi. 13, 14. “Remember that a wicked eye is an evil thing. Stretch not thy hand whithersoever it looketh, and thrust it not with him into the dish.” The bread alluded to in this passage is a flat limp cake, like a pancake, and is commonly used by them as we use plates, for a receptacle of their other food. So in Virgil the Trojans “eat their tables.”
↩“Leave off first, for manners’ sake; and be not insatiable, lest thou offend.” Ecclus. ubi sup.
↩People are apt to wonder at the frequency of Muhammedan ablutions, without reflecting that in Asiatic climates washing is an indulgence. Strange to say, the Akh.-nās. contains another paragraph (not inserted here) on the proprieties of wine-drinking. We know from the Alf Lailat, and Hariri. Makām. xii. ad fin., that the practice was common, though infamous.
↩The original of this Section in the Ak.-nās. is the concluding paragraph of Section 4: the matter is similar.
↩We here again come upon Greek authority. “Children should love their parents as men do the Gods; since they are to them the authors of the greatest benefits, their life, nurture, and education.” Arist. Eth. viii. 12. (Gillie.) Cf. Cic. Off. i. 15, 16, and 17: and again, Eth. viii. 14. “The son has to pay obligations which are too great for him ever to discharge.”
↩Under Aristotle’s technical division of causes, into material, formal, efficient, and final. Metaph. v. ap. Gillie. Anal. c. ii.
↩“The love of parents is strongest, because they know their children with greater certainty, and for a longer time, than their children can know them.” Arist. ubi sup. Hence it is that Simplicius justifies the extravagant authority entrusted to fathers by the Roman law. “They knew from the instinctive affection of parents for their offspring it would be mildly exercised.” Simp. ad Epictet. Enchirid. ap. Gillie.
↩Perhaps suggested by Arist. ubi sup. And yet we know the idea was widely known at an early period: thus in the Shāhnāmah, Zāl says to the phœnix who had nursed him, —
This is particularly the case in the eastern system, where the women, and consequently the young children, are separated from the rest of the establishment, so that the latter can very seldom see their fathers; which Herodotus, erroneously, explains on philosophic principles: “Up to the age of five, the child never comes into its father’s sight, but passes its whole time with the women; which is done on this principle, that in case of its dying in the course of nurture, the father may not suffer by its loss.” Clio, cxxxvi.
↩Book i. Sect. 2. p. 81. This and the other topics of this Section recur in Sect. 2 of Book iii. — on Affection.
↩Little more or less than Akh.-nās. c. 5. of the second Treatise.
↩Here would be a good opportunity of enlarging on the superior humanity of eastern moralists — the principles propounded in this Section being purer and higher than any that can be brought forward from Greek or Latin writers. The truth is, however, that the lower the stage of civilization may be, the greater is the tendency of the highest to sympathize with the lowest order; for this plain reason, that there is less interval and greater intimacy between the two. This holds good even with regard to animals, to which homogeneity is more readily conceded by barbarians than by citizens. No doubt as civilization proceeds another tendency arises, calculated to correct, and in course of time, perhaps, to control the first; but it is long before its operation is felt. By philosophers in Greece and Rome domestics were more harshly treated than they ever were by the other barbarians of the same age. Hear how Tacitus was struck by the contrast: “Their slaves they employ, not, as with us, in the assigned services of home: each has his separate residence; ay, and his separate feelings, (Penates.) The amount of agricultural, pastoral, or mechanical produce, the master determines, as to a tenant, and the (so far) slave conforms to. Other domestic duties their own wives and children execute. To scourge or discipline by chains and labour is uncommon. Kill them they do, not by systematic harshness, but in their bursts of passion — foe-like, in all but the power of killing.” Germ. 25. The Romans killed in both ways.
↩Arist. Eth. ix. 12. “Love enters first by the eye.” Fire or the Sun is the God here intended.
↩“Ingenui vultûs puer ingenuique pudoris.” Juvenal in commendation of his slave.
↩The right of slavery is now universally given up: for the origin of it, on which much is still said, we need look no further than power. Men’s first idea of property was only that it was something over which they had absolute power; and therefore, wherever they perceived the power, they inferred the property — even in the case of objects properly unsusceptible of the relation. A striking instance of this we have in that practice (for law it was not, but the absence of prohibition) in the States of ancient Greece, whereby any unprotected alien discovered in them was liable to be seized and sold by any citizen who could overpower him; simply because, not being part of the state, the public protection was not held to extend to him. Slavery then is a phenomenon incident to early society — one of the many instances of practices then prevailing, which are unnatural in the race, but natural in a given fraction of it. As the objections to it are not in such a state perceived, so neither, as before remarked, have they so prominent an existence. In the progress of civilization the relation gives birth to atrocities which gradually operate its extinction. Slavery is only a reproach to those who ought to know it is reproachful.
↩Aristotle is still sterner: “A slave is a living instrument, and an instrument a lifeless slave.” (Eth. viii. 11. ad fin.) In societies verging on the pastoral, “the treatment of cattle and beasts” is by no means harsh.
↩This is the old Asiatic system. “They marry each of them many wives, and young; and yet more numerous are the concubines they purchase.” Herodotus, Clio, cxxxv. The difficulties with which the question is beset in Asia, and the improvement effected notwithstanding these difficulties by the Muhammedan Institute, have been noticed in Sect. 3. p. 267.
↩Another instance of the incorrectness of their geographical notions, about Africa in particular. They are not, however, so much out as at first appears. In the old geography, it was a question whether the Red Sea or the River Nile was the boundary of Africa and Asia. (Herodot. Eut. xv.—xviii.) If they took the latter opinion, the space between the Nile and the Red Sea, as it belonged to Asia, would belong rather to Arabia than any other of Asia’s larger divisions. Now though the Abyssinian nation may have been a little beyond the Nile, the Abyssinian slaves were no doubt procured from scattered tribes settled opposite to Arabia on this debateable ground.
↩See Sect. 8. p. 194, note 39.
↩From Akh.-nās. 1. of the third Treatise, which certainly has here the advantage of its follower.
↩Then known only in their influences, and not in all of those. The existence of any process to maintain their influence, if allowed, takes them out of this class, which indeed, rigidly speaking, would comprise only the simple elements, or even gases.
↩This is explained a little below. “In like manner as he depends on the co-operation of the elements and their products, man is likewise dependent on that of other individuals of his own species.”
↩The greatest of their Grecian philosophers — second, they mean to say, to Aristotle only, (Avicenna avowing himself indebted to him) — condemned by Ghazāly for heterodox theology — died in the maturity of his powers, A. D. 954. Túsy tells us this third book is mainly drawn from his writings, which, judging from the above passage, must have been of infinite value in his age, and not without value in our own. The examples and instances falling under the several classes might be differently arranged by natural philosophers at the present day; but no fault can be found with the classification itself, which bespeaks great powers of analysis. The germ of it may be found in Aristotle, Pol. iv. 14. “In the works of nature and art it is easy to observe, that things which are worse are always made for the sake of those which are better: how long soever may be the series of means and ends, they all terminate and centre in some one great and ultimate purpose.”
↩An exploded idea of the old philosophy. There is no inconsistency in supposing animals made only to nourish others, but great inconsistency in supposing any made only to be destroyed without nourishing: and then as to facts, “The species of serpents described by Linnæus amount to 218, of which 32 only are poisonous.” Paley, Nat. Theol. c. xxvi. In the absence of any better solution, we may suppose poisonous reptiles were created in order to render waste ground terrific and noxious to civilized man; and so multiply the dissuasives against his abandoning society. At certain times and places they certainly operate in this way.
↩Society could not go on without some common measure of time. This the movements of the heavenly bodies supply, though, as Locke observes (Essay, II. cxiv.), any other phenomenon of equally striking and regular occurrence (if conceivable) would answer the purpose as well.
↩As much may be inferred from Genesis i. 26. 30. They have only a very slender acquaintance with the text of the Bible. “He for God only; she for God and him.” Milton.
↩It is needless to refer to the many passages of Greek and Roman writers where the os homini sublime dedit, cœlumque tueri jussit is so fondly dwelt on; but a comparison of the bare statement as there made, with this ingenious illustration of it, will exemplify the different character of eastern and western literature — the figurativeness of the former being invariably bottomed upon truth, which, by adorning it serves to recommend. The apophthegms of the East include those of the West; but add to them a conciliating ingredient. Of course there is a danger of impressing the fancy more than the reason by this arrangement; and when a taste for pure speculation has once been engendered, it will be best carried on in its purest form. No one would say, therefore, that the march of European science has not been promoted by its rejection of the figurative element. But for deeply impressing with a few momentous and elevating truths the minds of a rude and illiterate people, whose attention is not to be commanded by their simpler form, this style of writing has incalculable value.
↩ The analogy between the society of men and animals is
pointed out by Plato in his
Cf. Book ii. Sect. 1. p. 246, note 2. Clothing and shelter are here enumerated as wants, if not as urgent ones.
↩ See these views worked out by Adam Smith (W. of N. I.
c. i. ad init. on the division of labour), and suggested by Cicero,
Off. ii. c. 4. “What need of specifying that multitude of professions
without which life could not be maintained?” It is from
the Peripatetics and Stoics of that age that Abú Nasar probably
derived this reasoning, which, though sufficient to show the
necessity of supporting society as actually constituted, is overstrained
(as Cicero himself remarks, Off. i. 44.) when used (as
in the text) to account for its origin. There is no reasoning
from the delicacy of the citizen to the hardihood of the savage.
Political society is merely an extension of the domestic state
(Arist. Pol. i. cs. 1 and 2, followed by Cicero, Off. i. 17.); for
the origin of the last and the derivation of the first ample provision
is made in the first feelings of man’s nature. To those
born in any given stage of civilization it becomes necessary (as
explained in the text) to enjoy, and therefore incumbent to support,
the advantages of it. The question of origin need not have
been touched on at all — far less at disadvantage — but such was
the course of the authorities they follow:
This aptitude was determined by the position of the heavenly bodies from which vitality was derived; see pages 15, 216, and end of next Section. This position always varying, so did the aptitudes; and these variations occurring without prejudice to the equipoise of forces in the celestial economy, the products were similarly balanced; so that the general demand and supply of aptitudes was sure to coincide.
↩Túsy gives it for a proverb — “If mankind were exactly on a par, they must perish altogether.”
↩In the original, tamaddan and madína.
↩See Book ii. Sect. 1. page 248.
↩ Plato makes this idea the basis of his dialogue on the magistrate,
where man is defined a pedestrian, herding, tame, animal
without horns;
According to the above origin of society (note 11), government is co-original with society, or rather pre-original; paternal authority being physically pre-existent, and conjugal authority physically pre-arranged, before the meeting of the parties. Locke’s theory of consent, though undeniable of the maintenance of society, does not explain its origin; because, without a previous government of some sort, men could not be brought so far as to contemplate, much less endure, restraint. When then does Locke’s theory begin to apply? At that point, wherever it may be, where the unsubjected descendants of a given stock cease to regard the head of the tribe in the light of a relative. The theories are both true, but realized in different times and places.
↩They hold then that life cannot be maintained without society, nor society without government, nor government without religion. It follows that they are all produced together, (and art with them, see note 89, p. 45.) “Government and religion are twins,” (p. 128.) All religion then will be a derivative, more or less perverted, of the original gift, (renewable, note 6, p. 3.) Not only life, therefore, but all that makes life tolerable, they derive from particular exertions of divine bounty. This is Platonic doctrine, (see in note 26, p. 127,) elaborated and enriched by the castern Christians. But though the doctrine is faultless, the Muhammedans made a fatal oversight in the application of it. So much of religion as is indispensable to the continuance of society, is provided for, like man’s other necessities, in his original conformation: the moral sense — the dread of future retribution. The religion of revelation has another object: to raise mankind, when sufficiently prepared by the other, to an elevation of virtue not at all times and places attainable by the mass. Any confusion of the nature and functions of the two — any unwarranted supposition of divine agency for purposes which human agency is created with a competence universally to fulfil, must end, as it has with them, in false impressions and injurious results. Of this we shall presently see an instance.
↩Túsy says this is from Plato’s 5th book on law (Siāsat), or possibly he means the Repub. Much may be found in both to resemble, but nothing to coincide. Transferred from writer to writer for 800 years, no wonder the passage had lost its identity. The Muhammedans admit, then, that the Greek law-givers (and of course all others similarly circumstanced) acted under divine inspiration; (see however note 47, p. 140.) This is a liberal admission, if not a true one: their fanaticism had begun to give way.
↩Here is the worst consequence of their erroneous views on the subject of divine agency. Authority becomes sacred, because sanctioned by heaven. Despotism, being the first form of consolidated political authority, is thus rendered unchangeable and identified in fact with government at large. Other authority, official and even domestic, receives its portion of the same undue corroboration: and hence one source of conjugal tyranny (note 19, p. 272). This may be observed of all the Asiatic systems, but is more to be regretted in the case of the Muhammedans, because they seem otherwise capable of regenerating their institutions. A panegyric on Hasán Bēg is omitted at the asterisks.
↩This subject has been anticipated in note 41, p. 136. The analogy between the eastern and western Papacy might be worked out with good effect. Here Túsy has a long and bold passage asserting the right of the Caliphat to the allegiance of the Muhammedan world. This proves the Akh.-nās. to have been composed before the invasion of Húlagú.
↩ ‘O
“Let us resort to the types by which we are wont to figure
royal rulers — the bold pilot — the physician in himself a host;”
“If each of our members were to imagine its health would be promoted by drawing to itself the health of its adjoining member, the whole frame must infallibly be weakened and destroyed; and so if each of us were to seize on the advantages of others, and convert to our own benefit all of which any other could be deprived, just as infallibly must society and fellowship be overthrown among mankind.” Cic. Off. ii. 4. Cf. in Aristot. Pol. i. 3.
↩This alludes particularly to the monachism of the Christians. In the Syrian wars both monks and nuns were scandalously abused by the Muhammedans.
↩Túsy says this art is to all other arts what metaphysics is to all other sciences, the sum and source of them — a maxim very liable to abuse, unless expounded by another — the laissons nous faire of men of business. Up to the end of the sixteenth century, it seems to have been regarded without this qualification, even by the most enlightened of the political theorists of Europe, as indisputable. Elizabeth was constantly reprimanding her parliaments for meddling with matters that were too high for them.
↩Rather clearer and better than the corresponding Sect. of Akh.-nās.
Both are counterparts of Aristotle’s 8th and 9th books of Ethics, except that they omit, in common with Cicero in his treatise on the same subject, the curious question of dissimilarity. There must be resemblance and there must be difference in the parties. This tallies very well with their views; see note 11, p. 116.
↩See it, with the words of Aristotle, p. 144, note 52. 1 John iv. 18. “Perfect love casteth out fear.”
↩Page 147; Sect. 6. Book i.
↩ “The ancient proverb, Among friends all things are in
common” —
See this, with Cicero’s enunciation of the same doctrine, note 114, p. 233. In the wide sense here given to the term it may still be maintained as a phenomenon, though not as a cause.
↩This passage, with that at the end of the Section, are those intended in note 31, p. 15.
↩ At page 234. Thus Eryximachus, in Plato’s Convivium,
without rising to the height of the previous theory, says — “Love
is not only to be found in the souls of men for the comely, but
for many other qualities — in all the bodies of all animals no less
— even in the products of the earth — in a word, in all existents.”
This whole passage is a digest of Aristotle, Ethics viii. 2 and
3. “Whatever is an object of our friendship must promote
either our good, our pleasure, or our utility. * * * When
the cause is utility, men love each other as long as the mutual
advantage lasts: the same holds with respect to affection founded
on pleasure. Neither of the two being an essential part of any
man’s character, he is himself an object of friendship only as
he is an accession to them: and when they terminate, he is so
no longer. * * * * The only perfect friendship subsists
between those who resemble each other in virtue; because those
who love their friends for their virtue, love them for what is not
a temporary appendage, but a permanent essential in their characters.
” And much more to the same effect. The germ of
this passage may be found in Plato’s 8th book of Laws (
“Friendships founded on the love of gain are of all the most unstable.” Arist. Eth. viii. 4.
↩“When pleasure combines with profit, it is naturally more durable.” Arist. Eth. viii. 8. (Gillie.)
↩“Friendship, in its highest sense, cannot extend to many. Both in friendship and in love there is an intensity which naturally limits it to one object.” Arist. Eth. viii. 6: and again, ix. 10: and Cicero, Am. v. “To two, or at least to few parties, all affection is limited.”
↩End of Section 8. Book i. p. 227.
↩“Friendships founded on utility prevail most among persons advanced in years; for interest, not pleasure, is their aim. * * * * Youthful friendships however for the most part are founded on pleasure,” &c. Aristotle, Eth. viii. 3. (Gillie.)
↩Túsy says more forcibly — “To enjoy any one pleasure, another of some sort must be sacrificed.” Again, it appears human power lies only in selection. See note 2, p. 65.
The first towards our fellow creatures, the second towards our Creator. The love of wisdom, or virtue, or good, Túsy says, arises from (as it also indicates) the presence of a portion of divinity within us. See note 19, p. 123, and end of the Section. Aristotle’s words for the next quotation (which is not quite correct) are in Eth. viii. 1. ad fin.
↩
Anacreon,
So Bacon says (Nov. Organ.), that most of men’s current
ideas are imperfectly separated from matter. Cicero says, “As
long as we are imprisoned in this tissue of body, we have a
necessary duty, and irksome office, to discharge: the celestial
spirit being degraded from its sublime abode, and plunged, as
we may say, into the earth; a place the very opposite to divine
and eternal being.” Sen. xxi. — after the celebrated allegory in
Plato’s Phædrus —
Angels were supposed to be posted on the approaches to heaven, in order to prevent the return of the fallen spirits. This they did by hurling fire-balls at them — the falling stars of our atmosphere.
↩Even this is followed (which we should not expect) upon Aristotle, Eth. viii. 9. “The peaceful communities of tribes and wards, and those mirthful assemblies which meet to feast, to drink, and to dance, depend on the same principle; for legislators have not merely temporary advantage in view; they look farther to the permanent comfort and sure enjoyment of life. * * * * * * * * * The ancient solemnities of this kind were held towards the end of autumn, the season of greatest leisure, when men, having gathered in the earth’s productions, might offer the first fruits to the Gods. Political society then comprehends all other associations,” &c. (Gillie.)
↩Friday is the Muhammedan Sabbath, differing both from Jewish and Christian, yet akin to both. They call it the Prince of days; and in fact, if Saturday is the day after the completion of creation, or Jewish Sabbath, Friday would be the day on which it was completed. (Gen. i. v. 31.) As a day of general concourse, it was regarded before the time of Muhammad; but chiefly for secular purposes. In the 62nd and 102nd chapters of the Kurān we may note the trouble it cost Muhammad to change the character of these meetings.
↩See pp. 130, 131. The festival continues two days; the first, the day of celebration, and the second, the day of sacrifice. Those unavoidably prevented from attending on either of these days might carry on some of the rites on the third day, but not after. (Hidāyat, Book of the two Eeds.)
↩This admits of argument. From Muhammad’s own expressions in the Kurān, it might be supposed that he was actuated only by a frantic fanaticism, and a blind but imperfect imitation of the Mosaic ritual. Be this as it may, the willingness of the Muhammedans to reason on the rationale of their ritual, indicates not only a most important approach to liberality and justness of sentiment, but a possibility of their in time reforming, or even altogether abandoning, their institutions. The next step to arguing upon principles is to detect what is amiss in them; and then the superstructure falls. It was no casual or temporary improvement; for the Ak.-nās. has a similar passage. A relic of the old repugnance of fanaticism to such discussions we have at page 84, on Devotion.
↩Arist. Eth. ix. 1. “Lovers complain of their beloved for not returning their affection with equal warmth. Those beloved, on the other hand, accuse the lovers of failing them in the magnificent promises formerly made. Their complaints arise from this, that the regard of one party is founded on pleasure, and that of the other on advantage, — conditions, which the first loses the power, and the second loses the will, continually to discharge. ” * * * An instance of this we have in the person who engaged to requite a musician, and being asked next day for the reward, said it had already been bestowed, since he had given one pleasure in return for another. Again, ib. viii. 8. ad fin. These passages recall the altercations and embarrassments in Terence’s Comedies.
↩ We now see the special object of introducing this subject
here, instead of in the last book, as was at first intended, (see
p. 145, note 54:) To teach their princes that regard and fidelity
was not to be expected on the subjects’ side, without some equivalent
on theirs. This it is the tendency of depotism to overlook.
Thus Xenophon’s Cyrus to his successor: “Think not that men
are created faithful: those who are so, you must severally render
such,” —
Arist. Eth. viii. 11. “The relation of a king to his subjects is that of a benefactor to those benefited by his care,” &c. (Gillie.)
↩Ibid. viii. 12. “The love of parents for their children is merely an expansion of self-love; for they still regard their children as parts of themselves.” (Gillie.)
↩Arist. Eth. viii. 10. ad fin. “When the difference of age is great, brotherly affection cannot easily subsist.” (Gillie.) Among adults fraternal discord seems the rule in Asia, and fraternal harmony the exception. The prevalence of polygamy, by so frequently abolishing connexion on the maternal side, has weakened the tie altogether. The right of primogeniture subsists no further than as the first-born has had more time and opportunity to render himself formidable: this too encourages the spirit of rivalry.
↩This is further treated and exemplified in the two next Sections. The previous passage reminds us of Solon’s celebrated law declaring neutrals to be infamous.
↩A further analogy between eastern and western history. The Muslims had not only their papacy, but their father confessors; and these little less exacting and intriguing than the Catholics. Our author himself points out, at the end of Sect. 8. Book i., the principle which refutes this sophistry. Material benefits always imply a sacrifice on the part of the bestower; spiritual ones do not, but rather a reciprocation of benefit between the two. The latter, therefore, indicate little regard and constitute little right. To a certain extent, of course, the feeling is due — and to any extent, perhaps, it is estimable — even where it may cease to be appropriate. Aristotle, as usual, is the fountain head. “Such is the friendship that ought to subsist between teacher and student of philosophy — the value of which cannot be estimated in money, and to the teachers of which no adequate honors can be assigned. The scholars must honor them as they do their parents and the Gods — not sufficiently; for that is impossible — but in the measure of their ability.” (Gillie.) Eth. ix. c. 1. And Quintilian ii. c. 9. “Scholars should love their preceptors as much as they do their studies, and hold them for the parents of the mind rather than the body.” The passages in the next paragraph seem imitated from the Gospel. Matt. x. 37. Luke xiv. 26.
↩Casual benefits, resulting from measures which have no such view, lay, of course, little obligation on the recipient. This however is a harmless piece of sophistry. There was no danger of the king’s claiming a precedence in their regard; unlike the preceding error, which is calculated to disturb all the relations of life and the order of society.
↩He does not mention conjugal affection; ranking it apparently as something of a keener sort, and belonging to the topic of love, which was discussed in Sect. 8. Book i. His apprehension is that it will be too overwhelming. See Book ii. p. 268. See too at p. 334 his distinction between the two.
↩Arist. Eth. ix. 7. “How comes it that men love those to whom they have done good, better than these love their benefactors? Most are of opinion that this happens because creditors are, for their own sakes, more concerned for their debtors’ safety, than the debtors are about theirs. * * * * Yet the question must be solved on deeper principles. * * * Those to whom we have done good are objects of our love, whether they return the obligation or not; for we are naturally disposed towards them as artists are towards their works, and particularly poets towards their poems. * * * Our own good actions are more pleasing subjects of reflection than any benefits we can have received. * * * Besides, whatever is obtained with much labour is naturally regarded with much affection. Those who have acquired their fortunes delight in them far more than those who succeed to hereditary wealth; and, for a similar reason, maternal affection is commonly of the highest order,” &c. and again, viii. 13. ad fin.
↩See (with references) pp. 223, 337, 338.
↩According to the erotic doctrines, it is this very closeness of the Deity which prevents his recognition. So in Hindu metaphysics, extreme nearness is the second on the list of causes rendering things imperceptible. (Sánkhiya Káriká. vii. by Professor Wilson; a wonderful work, and ably rendered.) The doctrine of this and the succeeding passage has been authenticated by St. Paul, Acts xvii. 27. “That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him; though he be not far from every one of us. For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”
↩From the Akh.-nās. it is here clear that the passage intended (but not very clearly preserved) is that at the end of chap. 8, book x. of the Ethics: “If the Gods (as they appear to do) concern themselves about human affairs, it is reasonable to conclude that they should most delight in the energies of intellect,” &c. &c. (Gillie.) For concern in the affairs of men, they seem to have read, concern in the affairs of a given man, taking it for individual favour instead of general interest.
↩By a different punctuation in another MS. this sentence runs, — “Him that loveth me I destroy; him that I destroy, I owe for (the price of blood), and, &c. See note 112, p. 232.
↩“In compositions endowed with life it is the province of mind to command, and of matter to obey.” — Arist. Pol. i. 3. ad fin. The previous passage seems to refer to the extract in note 92, p. 222.
↩In another MS. this couplet is not to be found.
↩ Commonly used for creation. It is taken from Genesis i. 3,
&c. The expression so much admired by Longinus, II.
Presently identified with celestial intellect, or source of production. See at p. 362.
↩Muhammedan spirit, because Prophetic spirit, of which they suppose Muhammad the quintessence: Prophetic spirit, because governing spirit: Prophet-hood, or revelation, being held to be the great instrument of social government. (Sect. 1, note 18.) Khondemir, a mere historian, begins his account of creation with the eduction of this essence, or light, as it is generally called; a similar idea (though dissimilarly justified) with that of St. John i. 1—5.
↩This contains the rationale of predestination and prophecy. The germ of all future events being always pre-existent in present ones, perfectly to know either is to know the other likewise: neither is it possible (given elements continuing the same) for the products to be other than they are. Properly considered, however, this does not contravert free agency (as we understand it), because it comprehends and allows for it. That choice and option on which we feel freedom to depend is one of the very elements given to work from.
↩There are traces of idealism throughout the passage. 1. In the introduction of it; which asserts the universality of mind. 2. In the process; which recounts only the operations of certain forms of intellect, without specifying other material. 3. In the light and casual manner in which material is here noticed; not as self-subsisting, or even as self-propertied, but almost imaginary. It is proper to add, however, that the word rendered prefigured (ainy) is one of very wide and various meaning. It is taken Platonically in the version. Idealism, as elsewhere noticed, must shortly follow upon the perfection of the Pantheistic theory. See note 50, p. 200.
↩Literally, mother of Scripture. See note 7, p. 277.
↩An opinion attributed by Cicero to all the ancient philosophers, particularly the Pythagoreans, — “That the Gods have sowed the earth with immortal souls, that emerge into mortal bodies, in order that there might be some to occupy the globe, and to learn, from the contemplation of heavenly harmony, how to imitate it in the order and consistence of their own minds.” Sen. xxi.
↩Hence the rationale of astrology, and the origin of that opinion mentioned by Tacitus, Annal. iii. 55 (and elsewhere). “Perhaps there may be a circulation in all things, and human manners revolve like the seasons.” Cf. p. 197, with note 45.
↩ Three forms: celestial, primary, and active, — the first
causing, the second containing, the last conducting, all things: the
progressive or human intellect being only one of their products.
In Plato’s Timæus, we have similar beings under different names.
The original mind or divinity (
Why limited to three? They seem to suppose the powers and properties of each being to be entirely occupied with its own peculiar product. The celestial intellect engrossed with the primary — the primary with the active — and the active with the progressive or human intellect; which, not being divine or productive, cannot generate any further, but must return to the original source. The three last of these would be successive products of the first. As to the expression here used, it may be found in Esdras II. c. iv. 40, and v. 46. “Ask the womb of a woman, If thou bringest forth children, why dost thou it not together, but one after another? And I said, She cannot, but must do it by distance of time. Then said he unto me, Even so have I given the womb of the earth to those that be sown in it in their times. * * * In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman.”
↩A reunion with the first cause is here plainly intimated; but not without the intervention of at least one stage of individual existence after terrestrial life. Ultimate reunion is a necessary part of all systems of Pantheism. These are the doctrines of the later Pythagorean, Platonic, Peripatetic, and Academic schools, &c., fairly deducible, perhaps, from the tenets of their respective founders; though none of these (certainly not Aristotle) may have been prepared to subscribe to them himself.
↩This well illustrates the great objection to Pantheism, viz., the futility of the laborious mechanism supposed. If mind or divinity ends only where it begun, it works to no purpose; or if the exertion is a condition of its existence, then it is not an independent or self-sufficient or perfect being. If we observe, however, it is not one but many seeds that come forth from a single one: on which portion of the analogy the doctrine might be further defended.
↩In the old philosophy, as here, life and all its functions were forms of motion. See at the end of note 4, p. 53.
↩ See above, at note 46. Pantheism supposes at least a two-fold
division of mind; a state to come from, and a state to go to:
besides which, the integral state, combined of both, constitutes a
third. Analytically considered, the two first are co-extensive with
the whole; and these are those indicated by the words “procession
of essence unto essence.” The three states are more generally
named together; as in the words of Antoninus, —
Abridged from Akh.-nās. 3. of the 3rd Treatise, which is clearer as well as fuller.
↩It is not clear from the text whether the classification is that of states or of classes in states, or both: this is explained in Akh.-nās. “Unrighteous states spring up in the midst of the righteous one: these will be noticed by-and-by under the name of Pests.”
↩Túsy says — “The modes of vice being infinite (see page 100), so will be the forms of vicious states;” to the elucidation of which the greatest part of his chapter is devoted: for number and nicety of distinctions, it is quite a Machiavellian performance; but too much intermingled (like all their political reasoning) with points of faith to interest the general reader.
↩See in Sect. 1. p. 320.
↩So called because resembling the celestial intellect. See end of last Section, and Introduction, pp. 14—18.
↩ The reader must bear in mind throughout this passage that
idea (
A persuasion still current from the old philosophy, though formidably assailed by Locke, Ess. Book II. c. i.
↩No doubt they mean to include the Grecian masters, whose opposition to the Polytheism of their fellow citizens entitles them in the eyes of the Muslims to rank as apostles and martyrs of the truth. As such indeed they are represented by Khondemir in his account of them.
↩Túsy says, The first class are conversant with the reality, the second with the form of reality, the third with the reflex of the form, the fourth with the representation of the reflex. When Plato compounded his Republic of wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice, they would say he worked with realities; when he applied these terms to the actual phenomena of life, he worked with forms; when he illustrated them by the arts of navigation and medicine, he worked with the reflex; and if he could have introduced national ceremonies to realize these illustrations, and beget the habits they indicated as desirable, he would have been working with the representation. Cf. Plato in Ep. vii. ad Med.
↩Literally kiblah. See p. 293, note 34.
↩Cf. pp. 102—104. Wine was prohibited in their ritual, and yet their highest meanings are generally figured by allusions drawn from its use, and here we see the reason. They held themselves above the application of the ritual; and though bound for the sake of the religion and the world practically to conform to it, they exulted in the use of a phraseology which intimated their own elevation in the scale of being. Hence Túsy demonstrates the dependence of government on religion (by which he means ritual religion). The principles of right and wrong being discernible only by the enlightened few, while a practical conformity with them on the part of all is essential to the existence of society, means must be devised for communicating equal habits of action even to those who are ignorant why they should pursue them.
↩Literally props or pillars — pillars of the state.
↩Divisions more governed by considerations of public good we have in the next Section. Here he is influenced rather by the question of excellence in the individual. In omitting the agriculturists and mechanics he seems to follow Arist. Pol. iv. 9. “Such men are not parts of the state, though they are necessary to it, any more than food is part of the animal requiring it.” In the next Section he does them justice.
↩ This Plato (whose very words seem here adopted) makes a
fundamental rule in his Republic; first, for the same reasons as
in the text; secondly, as it would be an injury to others to intrude
into their occupations.
From Akh.-nās. 4. (3rd Treatise), with the addition of panegyrics, and the story about Pharaoh.
↩Monarchy, we have seen, is identified in their minds with government at large, and hence the encomiums they bestow upon it. Indeed it is from materials supplied by empires that constitutional governments have been, and can only be, formed; because they imply a pre-existent maturity of science and social habit which are first forced into being by the strong hand of arbitrary power. The Grecian commonwealths, which have supplied the world with the opposite system, were a recast of habits and principles obtained from, or attained in, the politics of Asia. Freedom may be the end of society, but up to a certain point restraint is the indispensable process.
↩ Plato, Polit.
Reflections directed probably against the Turks, with whom Hasán Bēg either was, or was to be, at war. It is the spirit of the Asiatic system to tax only the gross produce of the land. (Adam Smith, Book IV. c. ix.) Other taxes, when introduced, were considered oppressive. Abul Fazal mentions in his letters some very heavy imposts on moveables which Akbār had given up. The same Akbār, in one of his letters to Abul Fazal, casually mentions with disapprobation the rigorous and petty taxation of Rúm (European Turkey). The Turks, it seems, adopted the European practice without abandoning their own. (Inshāi Abul Fazal.)
↩ This too is classical ground. “Let no one persuade us that
a state will sooner or more easily change its institutions by any
other means,
Literally meant. Yúsaf Hajāj, mentioned in Sect. 3 of
Book ii., is said to have fallen into a decline, and died of eating
this clay; on which D’Herbelôt remarks, that it is called by the
Arabs
The parasites (or nadíms) were personal friends and boon companions of Eastern kings. They had more license and influence than any other class, and the ministers themselves were often fain to entreat their good offices. § The five qualities first enumerated seem to be those intended in the heading of the paragraph; and then the others are suggested in pursuance of the subject.
↩This aphorism, which so often passes for a modern discovery, is only a compacter expression for general concord between the different classes, as mentioned below.
↩ Túsy mentions in his last Section (on the classes) a strong
expression of their Prophet, “The faithful shall be all as one
hand.” Plato, Rep. v.
In one MS. this is omitted as not being genuine or orthodox.
↩ A principle recognised and acted on by the Persian government
from the earliest times. In the contests between the
Grecian states relative to the constitution and dependency of
the Ionian cities, it was a maxim of the great king to encourage
democracy; which, considering it as injurious to those living
under it, he can only have done in order to prevent the consolidation
of the maritime provinces into a second Lydian empire.
On an eventful occasion his message to Agesilaus was this —
“The king decides that you are to return home, and that the
[Grecian] cities of Asia are to retain their municipal independence,
subject to the payment of their original tribute:”
In the original, Iskandar and Dāra: Ajam was the Media of the Greeks. The laws of conversion between the two languages are so intricate, and so little understood, that there is no saying at present how far the words are identical.
↩From the time of Alexander to that of Ardshír Bābak, the East was subdivided among many rulers, called by historians “the sets of kings.” These may have arisen in the way mentioned in the text; or from the division of provinces among Alexander’s officers, and the recovery of them at different times and by different leaders. This vast period of 500 years is an utter blank in history. Ardshír Bābak is the later Artaxerxes of Western writers, (though the chronologies have not been quite reconciled,) the Parthians being figured by the Arshākian (Arsacidan) dynasty which he superseded. As to the fact, see it more at length in the concluding part of the work.
↩ In the original, Dahkān, “chief of the village,” whence
perhaps the Greek
This is the fundamental idea in the system of the French economists, which, in the early part of the last century, was in vogue throughout Europe. Even Adam Smith, who restored mechanics to their due consideration, would admit, in the last resort, this distinction between their products and those of the agriculturists. See note 85, p. 219.
↩This division of classes according to the wants of society agrees with Plato’s derivation of them in Rep. ii., which he follows up by insisting on the same relative harmony between them. “You perceive then how justly I predicted that temperance would turn out to be a likeness of harmony, pervading the whole state, and establishing one concordant diapason both of extremes and means of power.” Rep. iv., — followed by Cicero; “Sic et summis et infimis et mediis interjectis ordinibus, ut sonis, moderatâ ratione civitas consensu dissimillimorum concinit: et quæ harmonia a musicis dicitur in cantu, ea est in civitate concordia.”
↩See in p. 179, note 17, the original (from Hesiod) of this classification.
↩This Hasán is better known by his title of Ruknodowlat, the second of the Bowide dynasty, which professed to be descended from the very Ardshír we have just been considering. Hasán’s reign was from 933 to 959, A. D.; and by a very slight stretch of chronology he may be made coincident with Nicephorus Phocas, whose wars with the Saracens, though not important, are matter of history. Strangely enough, they do not speak of the Byzantine commander as a Kaisar or Cæsar, but as a king; so that we are not obliged to suppose the Cæsar commanding in person. As to the matter of the message, it seems a decent apology for retreat.
↩If entirely bad throughout all his relations (of relation, citizen, subject, friend, creature), he was to be extirpated; if bad in some and good in others, he might be borne with.
↩“Just as any members are to be amputated that prove to be void in themselves of blood, or, so to speak, of life, and become hurtful to the other parts of the body; so, in this image of the individual, savage and untractable brutality must be thrown out from the body of the state.” Cic. Off. iii. 6. There cannot be a greater contrast than that prevailing between the enlightened views of the Muhammedan doctors and the sanguinary practice of their princes. See p. 200, note 49; p. 136, note 41. In the concluding portion of the work the foundation and limitation of capital punishment is set forth in an expressive allegory.
↩The well-known adage of one of the seven sages of Greece, to which, perhaps, Plato may have been indebted for the passage quoted in note 9.
↩Law which originates, as we have seen (note 23, p. 126), in revenge, ends in superseding it altogether. The Muslims are here in a state of transition between the two. It cannot be said that they are incapable of reforming their institutions when they have here partly reformed them.
↩A sturdy relic of ancient barbarity. Wherever improvement came in contact with the prince, it was forced to give way. We are not to suppose, however, that by directing taliation it is meant that he directs execution. No; but only that he urges his legal claim before the constituted tribunal. The judicial power, though lodged in the Caliphat, passed from the executive, in strict law, as the Caliphat declined. No doubt princes continued occasionally to usurp and to abuse it; but still the abuse was felt as such by their subjects and officers. Thus, in that story of the Gulistān, where a young man is about to be put to death (as infants were for Louis XI. of France), that his bile might be used as a medicine for some of their kings, it is particularly mentioned that a Fatwa, or official opinion on the legality of the proceeding, was first required from the law officer. Small as the security may have been, it gave hopes of a better one.
↩Hence Cicero derives, with some plausibility, the institution of monarchy. “Not only, I should think, with the Medes, as Herodotus tells us, but with our own forefathers, no less, well-conducted kings were originally established as a means of obtaining justice. Oppressed by those who surpassed them in resources, the needy multitude had recourse to some one person of eminent merit, who might protect the weak from injury, and, by the introduction of equity, reduce high and low to the same legal standard.” Off. ii. 12. See, however, in note 24, p. 124, their practical embarrassments, and the end they led to. This is the great difficulty of eastern government, — the want of access or means of complaint. And hence, as the lesser evil of the two, that capricious severity of punishment which shocks more equalized sympathies; the executive endeavouring to make up by aggravation of penalty for rarity of detection (a favourite principle with British legislators). A better course would be to multiply detections, and strange efforts have often been made for the purpose. The great Akbār is said to have had gongs suspended in every direction, which complainants were directed to strike.
↩ Traditions are of four sorts: 1. The Sunat, or decisions,
opinions, and intentions of Muhammad, unexpressed in the Kurān,
but embodied in a supplementary to it by his immediate successors.
2. Hadíth, the sayings of Muhammad on the debateable
points of morals and politics. 3. Āthār, “vestiges” of
revelation; that is, anecdotes from their early fathers illustrative
of the text of the Bible (Touriat), Gospel (Injíl Evangilium),
and Kurān. 4. Akbār, the
This of course is incorrect, as we may learn from Exod. cs. iii. and iv. Moses was on the opposite side of the Red Sea when the mandate was given, and we know, from what passed on the road, that he did not reach Pharaoh’s house instantaneously. In Josephus (Ant. II. xiii. 1 and 2) there is nothing to countenance our text. The fact is, the Muslims confounded the histories of Moses and Mordecai (who appears indeed to have been a year or more at the gate of Ahasuerus without seeing him, Esther ii. 11, 12, and again, iii. 7), not only in this particular, but also in introducing Haman among the adversaries of Moses: a strong specimen of the general incorrectness of their traditions. The Kurān (on this point) is not so erroneous. The best account is in c. xxviii. But the mission of Moses is referred to passim cs. ii. 48. iii. 10. vii. 104. viii. 5, &c.
↩The whiteness of Moses’ hand was one of the miracles, Exod. iv. 6: a white hand likewise signifies in the Arabic idiom pre-eminence or favour.
↩In Asia snakes were sometimes buried with concealed treasures, in order that they might deter strangers from approaching the spot. Virgil’s snake from the tomb of Anchises would be one of this sort.
↩ That is, considering all the native Persian dynasties as one
continuous line. Indeed, they always made out a pedigree, not
only before but after the Muhammedan conquest. The Sāssānian
is the dynasty of which we have just seen Ardshír Bābak the
founder. Sāssān, the father, professed to be descended from
Isfandiār the Kaianian. With regard to the chronology, it seems
indeed the universal impression in the East, that historical data
exist for framing a wider one than that now received in Europe;
not perhaps as wide as Plato’s, but something between the two.
Tò
The difference between this and the other Omar (Ibn-ul-khitāb), mentioned a few pages back, must be remarked. The latter was a companion, a relative, and a successor of Muhammad; — one of those four, whose fifth this Omar is flattered with the name of being. He was 8th of the Omian or Anti-alite dynasty, and reigned 717-719, A. D.
↩The border or neutral ground between heaven and hell, mentioned in Kurān, c. vii.; another analogy between their religion and Popery.
↩See in p. 143, where bounty appears to be not only beyond justice, but beside it.
↩According to words quoted by Gibbon (c. 1.), Abú Safiān’s observation applied not to his own feelings, but those of Muhammad’s attendants.
↩Literally, dried camel’s flesh. As to the sentiment, cf. Wis. Sol. vii. 1—6.
↩“Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.”
↩“It is good to keep close the secret of a king.” Tobit xii. 7.
↩Contrary to our law maxim, which holds writing the most accountable act of the two. Scribere est agere — and justly when the writer is aware of his responsibility. In indifferent matters the rule of the text seems generally to apply: indeed, much the same distinction is drawn by Plato (Phædrus ad fin.); the cause of it being, that the party addressed has not the means of cross-examining the writer; and the justification of it being, that he has amplest leisure for detecting inaccuracy by all other means. If deceived, at any rate he ought not to be deceived. Cf. in p. 243.
↩Túsy says, “At first sight conquest seems to resemble sovereignty; but a little attention will show that they are opposites.”
↩Contrary to the well-known and successful maxim of the Romans; which, however, is put forward a little below.
↩As when Philip of Macedon put the by-standers to the blush by his extravagances after the battle of Chæronea, &c.
↩How, then, is this to be reconciled with what was said above? The question of attack and defence applies only when the sufficiency of discipline and materiel is granted. Then, indeed, the invader has the advantage. But if not (and seldom it was or is so in the East), this will be exhausted in the preliminary effort. Xenophon prettily illustrates the idea (Cyrop. I. ii. 10), by the method of dealing with wild animals, which are to be “shunned in their charge and assailed in their recovery.” If the first assailant were sure his charge could continue unabated, he might be right to make it; but if compelled to pause in the midst, and perhaps at the most inappropriate time, the other observation would hold in turn.
↩These were not merely theoretical views of courtesy and humanity. In the wars of the Crusades the contest was one of manners as well as arms; and not discreditable to the Muhammedans in either department. Capture in war has been taken to be the sole original source of slavery. At any rate it has been the most copious one.
↩Like the expression of Burke, when speaking of the sword wreathed in myrtle.
↩
See p. 145. “I was as a treasure concealed: then I loved that I might be known.” The Section ends with another panegyric, the frequency of which is not creditable to the object. “Hæres non scribitur nisi malus Princeps.” Tac. With the concluding sentence compare Shaks. M. of V. IV. 1.
Although their idea of the kingly function was accurate, and even strict, as we have seen, the detail of kingly duty is vague and unimpressive throughout the Section: in fact, for the full discussion of it there was then neither material nor occasion. Power can only be limited by opposite power, the power of the king by the power of the subject. Where the issue had been really raised, they were ready enough to record it; as at p. 130.
↩From Akh.-nās. 5. (3rd Treatise), which has the advantage. See the notes.
↩“Curse not the king, no not in thy thought.” Ecclesiastes x. 20.
↩A very sensible and sufficient reason. Bad government is better than none at all: so important is the process, that nature pursues it through the darkest channels. Literally, as well as figuratively, we may say —
Then these and other such expressions are not, as we are apt to suppose, simply adulatory, but pregnant with the most important truths. It is not the person but the office — not the power but its effects, that they profess to intend.
↩But they are fully entitled respectfully to oppose them. See the story in Book i. Sect. 5.
↩See note 36, p. 410.
↩The cause of the characteristic and the grounds of the duty we have in Túsy. “It proceeds from the reiterated eulogy and commendation with which their ears are crammed.” It is the people who for their own purposes pervert their feelings and faculties, and therefore it is their duty to bear with them in their turn. Why then maintain the process? Because at that stage of society men’s feelings are not to be permanently impressed or restrained or governed, except by this imposing ceremonial to which themselves contribute — of course the phenomena of society must be relative to its state. In Asia, no doubt, the means have sometimes seemed to recoil against the end — but for this too nature has her remedy. A very depraved society is always a very weak one — and a very weak one is soon overthrown and supplanted by its neighbours. The expressions in the text remind us of our constitutional maxim, “The king can do no wrong.”
↩A different division of the omne ignotum pro magnifico.
↩See however the provision at the very outset — “As long as the prince’s orders are not at variance with those of God” — these latter of course comprehending and securing every department of duty. Túsy says, “He who has the misfortune to be minister to a tyrant is in a dreadful dilemma. He may act with the prince and against the people, to the violation of religion and humanity; — or with the people and against the prince, to the loss of the world and life. From this dilemma he is only to be delivered in one of two methods — death, or entire abandonment of the court.” What can be plainer or better!
↩If no nearer passage is to be found, this might be taken as a gloss on Prov. xx. 2. “The fear of a king is the roaring of a lion. Whoso provoketh him to anger sinneth against his own soul.” The object of this anger provoked is merely separated in the text into anger against others and against ourselves.
↩Ecclesiasticus xiii. 9—11. “If thou be invited of a mighty man, withdraw thyself, and so much the more will he invite thee. Press thou not upon him, lest thou be put back. Stand not far off, lest thou be forgotten. Affect not to be made equal unto him in talk,” &c.
↩See before in Sect. 4. Book ii. p. 288. “Answer not before thou hast heard the cause; neither interrupt men in the midst of their talk.” Ecclesiasticus xi. 8.
↩See in Sect. 5. Book i.
↩Pages 79, 145, 191.
↩After Akh.-nās. 6. (3d Treatise), with no essential difference.
↩Sects. 1. Book ii. and 7. Book iii.
↩“Friendship is bestowed by nature as a coadjutor of the virtues, not as an attendant upon vice; — that whereas a lonely virtue cannot attain the utmost heights above her, she may effect it in combination and co-operation with another.” Cic. Am. xxii. We have seen already, in Sect. 2, note 32, that they take love for something above and beyond affection.
↩Arist. Eth. ix. 10. “Many friends are neither to be desired nor expected — the fewer, the warmer intimacy. The most celebrated friendships have subsisted between two only. * * * Neither should those chosen for motives of mere pleasure be numerous; for too much seasoning in our diet is pernicious.” (Gillie.) “All affection is cemented between two, or at least between few.” Cic. Am. v. and vi.
↩Eth. ix. 11. “Both conditions peculiarly require them — the prosperous as objects for benevolence, the unfortunate as sources of consolation.” “Prosperity needs favourites as adversity does benefactors.” Ib. ix. 9; again, viii. 1. Hence Túsy (Akh.-nās. i. 2—11) puts forth the old idea of men being poor in proportion to their wealth and station.
↩ Tullius Cicero, whose work seems to have reached them
through a Greek translation, — the second
“Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my heart of hearts.” Hamlet. Túsy gives us this whole passage as the words of Cicero. In our text he is not even alluded to. The truth is, it is a gloss or digest of cs. x. and xvii. and xx. of the Am., which treat of the mutability of ordinary friendship. Thus wisdom passes from nation to nation, the truth endures, and the transition is forgotten. “Of some the emptiness is discovered by money, * * or, if ashamed to prefer money to friendship, where shall we find those who will not give precedence to rank and distinction?” &c. “The most ardent attachments of boys are often thrown off together with their boyish dress; or, if retained till manhood, they are then too often severed by competition for matrimonial settlement, or some other advantage not attainable by both,” &c.
↩Arist. Eth. ix. 10. “We cannot cordially sympathize with many persons at once; for while we have to rejoice with one, we shall often have to lament with another.”
↩“There is a friend, who being turned to enmity and strife, will discover thy reproach.” Ecclesiasticus vi. 9.
↩“There is no greater bane to friendship than flattery.” Cic. Am. xxv. and xxvi.
↩“Amicus certus in re incertâ cernitur.” Ennius ap. Cic. Am. xvii.
↩Cf. in Ecclesiasticus xix. “Admonish a friend: it may be he hath not done it; or, if he have, that he do it no more. Admonish thy friend: it may be he hath not said it; or, if he have, that he speak it not again. Admonish thy friend: for many times it is a slander; and believe not every tale.” And Cic. Am. xxiv. “Various and complex are the uses of friendship, and numerous the causes that arise for suspicion and offence — in shunning, repairing, enduring which it is that the man of sense is seen.”
↩“It was Scipio’s remark, that there was nothing men were not more careful of. How many goats and sheep he had, every one could tell on the instant; but not how many friends.” Cicero, Am. xvii.
↩“There is reason to fear not only that friendship may end, but that enmity may begin; whereas there is nothing more unseemly than to take up arms against one who has been your familiar.” Ibid. xxi.
↩See p. 191, note 32. Other instances we had in Sect. 4, where all the rationale of taliation, &c. was argued upon general consequences.
↩See Book i. Sect. 8. p. 242.
↩Cf. in Cic. Am. xxiv. “True it is that sincerity is offensive; but much more offensive is that smoothness, which, yielding to faults, allows a friend to throw himself away: * * * friends must often be warned, and often be chidden: all which, when offered in kindness, must be taken in friendship.”
↩Illustrated by Nathan’s well-known reproof of David.
↩See particularly p. 233, with note 114.
↩Little varied from Akh.-nās. 7. (3rd Treatise.)
↩This mode of gathering up the various topics of the work, and weaving them at the conclusion into one consistent and manageable whole, is very masterly.
↩This is more earnestly dwelt on from the apprehensions still current in the East of magic, witchcraft, evil eyes, &c.
↩Strictly speaking, war-badge, a significant metaphor: the preceding expressions seem formed upon those of St. Paul, “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Rom. xii. 21. Considering the ferocity of their early habits, and the violent tendency of their Scriptures, it must be admitted that the Muhammedans have made some progress towards correcting the errors of both.
↩And ours may be the more fragile of the two; in which consists the point of the following anecdote. Abú Muslim was the great instrument in bringing round the Caliphat from the Omian to the Abassidan line, (A. D. 749, about the period of the change of dynasty in France from the Merovingian to the Carlovinian.) Marwān was the last of the Omiades. The parasite supposed he should be furthering his patron’s wishes, by giving him a pretext for proceeding against the other party.
↩This is an oriental courtesy of expression, meaning that he satirized Muhammad himself, as was the fact: his palinodia is still extant.
↩That is, had declared by the technical expression (tahdír) that his blood might be shed with impunity.
↩It is well known how religiously the rights of refuge and hospitality are regarded by all barbarous people. 1. Home and all the offices of home have then a sanctity in them which is unavoidably extended to a suppliant. See note, p. 295. 2. Men are well pleased to respect a rule of which themselves may soon require the benefit. 3. Self-approbation and self-denial, (the natural elements of good,) driven from essentials, make their last and strongest stand upon forms.
↩This then, he means to say, is the rule of moral good; in other words, general consequences — which we must be the more careful to remark, as the rest of the Section is not rested upon any very definite grounds. The right that is assumed in the former passages is here explained. They may not be invariably exact in adhering to it; but as long as they have the rule we may hope the adjustments will follow.
↩This being the ultimate purpose, according to their Scripture, of man’s creation, and therefore the test by which his moral guidance is to be determined. See Introduction. Thus it is that they engraft their ethics on their religion. How far the two are entirely reconcilable, or, if irreconcilable, which of the two is obtaining the mastery, we have occasionally observed in passing.
↩The first, but not the second part of this conclusion, occupies the same place in the Akh.-nās. In both treatises, and especially in ours, they are added like plumes to the shaft, in order to procure readier reception for the solid matter. Túsy goes so far as to say these maxims are Plato’s own, and indeed most of them will be recognised for part of the current coin of classical writers.
↩The substratum of a political romance (so we are told in the original), called the Sir ul Asrār, and professing to have been translated from the Greek in the reign of the Caliph Māmoon.
↩The Muhammedans commonly refer to the heathen deities as angels, and maintain that the Greeks acknowledged the supreme God besides and above the others. Thus there is not so bold an inconsistency in making Aristotle speak of angels as there at first appears to be. Some obscure acquaintance with the Grecian furies and their songs seems to lie beneath this passage.
↩These are spoken of in Indian writings by the name of Bishkanya, poison-girls. Aristotle is said to have discovered her nature by observing that the flies that attempted to settle on her fell senseless in the attempt. With narcotic poisons, perhaps, the idea might be realized to a small extent. If these and other writings did not date previous to the discovery of America, we might suppose a natural poison to have suggested the story. The work winds up with a very long and turgid panegyric on Hasán Bēg.
↩