there existed a connection of a kind. He had no need for analogy or opinion or for any of the workings of the vain human intelligence so long as the divine light was flooding his soul and he saw the things of the heavens with plain vision. So his books are a strange jumble of theosophy and metaphysical paradoxes, all much like the theosophy of our own day. He evidently took the system of the mutakallims and played with it by means of formal logic and a lively imagination. To what extent he was sincere in his claim of heavenly illuminings and mysterious powers it would be hard to say. The oriental mystic has little difficulty in deceiving himself. His opinions—so far as we can know them—may be briefly sketched as follows: The being of all things is God: there is nothing except Him. All things are an essential unity; every part of the world is the whole world. So man is a unity in essence but a multiplicity in individuals. His anthropology was an advance upon that of al-Ghazzali toward a more unflinching pantheism. He has the same view that the soul of man is a spiritual substance different from everything else and proceeding from God. But he obliterates the difference of God and makes souls practically emanations. At death these return into God who sent them forth. All religions to Ibn Arabi were practically indifferent; in them all the divine was working and was worshipped. Yet Islam is the more advantageous and Sufiism is its true philosophy. Further, man has no free-will; he is constrained by the will of God, which is really all that exists. Nor is there any real difference between

good and evil; the essential unity of all things makes such a division impossible.

The last of the Muwahhid circle with whom we need deal—and, perhaps, absolutely the last—is Abd al-Haqq ibn Sab'in. He was as much a mystic as Ibn Arabi, but was apparently more deeply read in philosophy and did not cast his conceptions in so theological and Qur'anic a mould. He, too, was born in Murcia about 613, and must very early have founded a school of his own, gathered disciples round him and established a wide reputation. High skill in alchemy, astrology, and magic is ascribed to him, which probably means that he claimed to be a wali, a friend of God, gifted with miraculous powers. He is accused of posing as a prophet, although in orthodox Islam Muhammad is the last and the seal of the prophets. But against this, it may be said that he had no need of the actual title, "prophet"; many mystics held—heretically, it is true—that the wali stood higher than the prophet, nabi or rasul. He had evidently besides this a more solid reputation in philosophy, as is shown by his correspondence with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen (d. 1250 A.D.). The story is told on the Muslim side only, but has varisemblance and seems to be tolerably authentic. According to it, Frederick addressed certain questions in philosophy—on the eternity of the world, the nature of the soul, the number and nature of the categories, etc.—to different Muslim princes, begging that they would submit them to their learned men. So the questions came to ar-Rashid, the Muwahhid (reg. 630-640), addressed to