ded the 'Canon' as an infallible oracle, the more so
in that the logical construction was impeccable and the premises, in
the light of contemporary conceptions, passed for incontrovertible
axioms?"(13)

(12) Withington: Medical History, London, 1894, pp. 151-152.

(13) Neuburger: History of Medicine, Vol. I, pp. 368-369.

Innumerable manuscripts of it exist: of one of the most beautiful,
a Hebrew version (Bologna Library), I give an illustration. A Latin
version was printed in 1472 and there are many later editions, the last
in 1663. Avicenna was not only a successful writer, but the prototype
of the successful physician who was at the same time statesman, teacher,
philosopher and literary man. Rumor has it that he became dissipated,
and a contemporary saying was that all his philosophy could not make him
moral, nor all his physic teach him to preserve his health. He enjoyed a
great reputation as a poet. I reproduce a page of a manuscript of one of
his poems, which we have in the Bodleian Library. Prof. A.V.W. Jackson
says that some of his verse is peculiarly Khayyamesque, though he
antedated Omar by a century. That "large Infidel" might well have
written such a stanza as

From Earth's dark centre unto Saturn's Gate
I've solved all problems of this world's Estate,
From every snare of Plot and Guile set free,
Each bond resolved, saving alone Death's Fate.

His hymn to the Deity might have been written by Plato and rivals the
famous one of Cleanthes.(14) A casual reader gets a very favorable
impression of Avicenna. The story of his dominion over the schools in
the Middle Ages is one of the most striking in our history. Perhaps we
feel that Leclerc exaggerates when he says: "Avicenna is an intellectual
phenomenon. Never perhaps has an example been seen of so precocious,
quick and wide an intellect extending and asserting itself with so
strange and indefatigable an activity." The touch of the man never
reached me until I read some of his mystical and philosophical writings
translated by Mehren.(15) It is Plato over again. The beautiful allegory
in which men are likened to birds snared and caged until set free by the
Angel of Death might be met with anywhere in the immortal Dialogues.
The tractate on Love is a commentary on the Symposium; and the essay on
Destiny is Greek in spirit without a trace of Oriental fatalism, as you
may judge from the concluding sentence, which I leave you as hi