by a quality of knowledge, but that quality was His essence. Al-Jubba'i contented himself with safeguarding this statement. God knew in accordance with His essence, but it was neither a quality nor a state (hal) which required that He should be a knower. The orthodox had said the first; his son, Abu Hashim, said the second. He held that we know an essence and know it under different conditions. The conditions varied but the essence remained. These conditions are not thinkable by themselves, for we know them only in connection with the essence. These are states; they are different from the essence, but do not exist apart from it. Al-Jubba'i opposed to this a doctrine that these states were really subjective in the mind of the perceiver, either generalizations or relationships existing mentally but not externally. This controversy spun itself out at great length through centuries. It eventually resolved itself into the fundamental metaphysical inquiry, What is a thing? A powerful school came to a conclusion that would have delighted the soul of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Things are four, they said, entities, non-entities, states and relationships. As we have seen above, al-Jubba'i denied the reality of both states and relationships. Orthodox Islam has been of a divided opinion.

But all this time, other movements had been in progress, some of which were to be of larger future importance than this fossilizing intellectualism. In 255 al-Jahiz died. Though commonly reckoned a Mu'tazilite he was really a man of letters, free in life and thought. He was a maker of books, learned

in the writings of the philosophers and rather inclined to the doctrines of the Tabi'iyun, deistic naturalists. His confession of faith was of the utmost simplicity. He taught that whoever held that God had neither body nor form, could not be seen with the eyes, was just and willed no evil deeds, such was a Muslim in truth. And, further, if anyone was not capable of philosophical reflection, but held that Allah was his Lord and that Muhammad was the Apostle of Allah, he was blameless and nothing more should be required of him. Here we have evidently in part a reaction from the subtilties of controversy, and in part an attempt to broaden theology enough to give even the unsettled a chance to remain in the Muslim Church. Something of the same kind we shall find, later; in the case of Ibn Rushd. Finally, we have probably to see in his remark that the Qur'an was a body, turned at one time into a man and at another into a beast, a satirical comment on the great controversy of his time.

Al-Jahiz may be for us a link with the philosophers proper, the students of the wisdom of the Greeks. He represents the standpoint of the educated man of the time, and was no specialist in anything but a general scepticism. In the first generation of the philosophers of Islam, in the narrower sense, stands conspicuously al-Kindi, commonly called the Philosopher of the Arabs. The name belongs to him of right, for he is almost the only example of a student of Aristotle, sprung from the blood of the desert. But he was hardly a philosopher in any independent sense. His role was translating, and during the