Moslem theologian. His restless
life was the reflex of a mental history disturbed by prolonged
agitation. Revolting, in the height of his success, against the current
creed, he began to examine the foundations of knowledge. The senses are
contradicted by one another, and disproved by reason. Reason, indeed,
professes to furnish us with necessary truths; but what assurance have
we that the verdicts of reason may not be reversed by some higher
authority? Ghazali then interrogated all the sects in succession to
learn their criterion of truth. He first applied to the theological
schoolmen, who grounded their religion on reason; but their aim was only
to preserve the faith from heresy. He turned to the philosophers, and
examined the accepted Aristotelianism in a treatise which has come down
to us--_The Destruction of the Philosophers_. He assails them on twenty
points of their mixed physical and metaphysical peripateticism, from the
statement of which, in spite of his pretended scepticism, we can deduce
some very positive metaphysical opinions of his own. He claims to have
shown that the dogmas of the eternity of matter and the permanence of
the world are false; that their description of the Deity as the
demiurgos is unspiritual; that they fail to prove the existence, the
unity, the simplicity, the incorporeality or the knowledge (both of
species and accidents) of God; that their ascription of souls to the
celestial spheres is unproved; that their theory of causation, which
attributes effects to the very natures of the causes, is false, for that
all actions and events are to be ascribed to the Deity; and, finally,
that they cannot establish the spirituality of the soul, nor prove its
mortality. These criticisms disclose nothing like a sceptical state of
mind, but rather a reversion from the metaphysical to the theological
stage of thought. He denies the intrinsic tendencies, or souls, by which
the Aristotelians explained the motion of the spheres, because he
ascribes their motion to God. The sceptic would have denied both. G.H.
Lewes censures Renan for asserting of Ghazali's theory of
causation--"_Hume n'a rien dit plus_." It is true that Ghazali maintains
that the natural law according to which effects proceed inevitably from
their causes is only custom, and that there is no _necessary_ connexion
between them. But while Hume absolutely denies the necessity, Ghazali
merely removes it one stage farther back, and plants it in th