be universal. The form animal, e.g., is
an abstract intelligible or metaphysical idea. When an act of thought
employs it as a schema to unify several species, it acquires its logical
aspect (_respectus_) of generality; and the various living beings
qualified to have the name animal applied to them constitute the natural
class or kind. Avicenna's view of the universal may be compared with
that of Abelard, which calls it "that whose nature it is to be
predicated of several," as if the generality became explicit only in the
act of predication, in the _sermo_ or proposition, and not in the
abstract, unrelated form or essence. The three modes of the universal
before things, in things, and after things, spring from Arabian
influence, but depart somewhat from his standpoint.

The place of Avicenna amongst Moslem philosophers is seen in the fact
that Shahrastani takes him as the type of all, and that Ghazali's attack
against philosophy is in reality almost entirely directed against
Avicenna. His system is in the main a codification of Aristotle modified
by fundamental views of Neo-Platonist origin, and it tends to be a
compromise with theology. In order, for example, to maintain the
necessity of creation, he taught that all things except God were
admissible or possible in their own nature, but that certain of them
were rendered necessary by the act of the creative first agent,--in
other words, that the possible could be transformed into the necessary.
Avicenna's theory of the process of knowledge is an interesting part of
his doctrine. Man has a rational soul, one face of which is turned
towards the body, and, by the help of the higher aspect, acts as
practical understanding; the other face lies open to the reception and
acquisition of the intelligible forms, and its aim is to become a
reasonable world, reproducing the forms of the universe and their
intelligible order. In man there is only the susceptibility to reason,
which is sustained and helped by the light of the active intellect. Man
may prepare himself for this influx by removing the obstacles which
prevent the union of the intellect with the human vessel destined for
its reception. The stages of this process to the acquisition of mind are
generally enumerated by Avicenna as four; in this part he follows not
Aristotle, but the Greek commentator. The first stage is that of the
hylic or material intellect, a state of mere potentiality, like that of
a child for writing, be