to come, and the fact that God deprived the Arabs of the power of writing anything like it. But for that, they could easily have surpassed it as literature. As a high Imamite he rejected utterly agreement and analogy. Only the divinely appointed Imam had the right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad. We pass over some of his metaphysical views, odd as they are. The Muslim writers on theological history have classified him rightly as more of a physicist than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and that fondness for playing with metaphysical paradoxes which often goes with it.

Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu'tamir. His principal contribution was the doctrine of tawlid and tawallud, begetting and deriving. It is the transmission of a single action through a series of objects; the agent meant to affect the first object only; the effect on the others followed. Thus, he moves his hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What relation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a complex of causes acting together and across one another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is worth giving at this point. God creates in the man the will to move his hand; He creates the movement of the hand and also the movement of the ring. All is by God's direct creation at the time. Further, could God punish an infant or one who had no knowledge of the faith? Bishr's reply on the first point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid saying frankly that there was anything that God could not do. His answer on the second was that

God could have made a different and much better world than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But He was not bound to make a better world—in this Bishr separates from the other Mu'tazilites—He was only bound to give man freewill and, then, either revelation to guide him to salvation or reason to show him natural law.

With Ma'mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax faster and more furious. He succeeded in reducing the conception of God to a bare, indefinable something. We could not say that God had knowledge. For it must be of something in Himself or outside of Himself. If the first, then there was a union of knower and known, and that is impossible; or a duality in the divine nature, and that was equally impossible. Here Ma'mar was evidently on the road to Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended on the existence of something other than Himself, and that did away with His absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God's Will. Nor could He be described as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evidently meant that our conceptions cannot be applied to God; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation, he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances (jisms) only were created by God, and by "substances" he seems to mean matter as a whole; all changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from its nature, as when fire burns, the sun warms; or of free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no part in these things. He has given the material and has nothing to do with the coming and going of