e mind of
the Deity. This, of course, is not metaphysics, but theology. Having, as
he believed, refuted the opinions of the philosophers, he next
investigated the pretensions of the Allegorists, who derived their
doctrines from an imam. These Arabian ultramontanes had no word for the
doubter. They could not, he says, even understand the problems they
sought to resolve by the assumption of infallibility, and he turned
again, in his despair, to the instructors of his youth--the Sufis. In
their mystical intuition of the laws of life, and absorption in the
immanent Deity, he at last found peace. This shows the true character of
the treatise which, alike in medieval and modern times, has been quoted
as containing an exposition of his opinions. The work called _The
Tendencies of the Philosophers_, translated in 1506, with the title
_Logica et Philosophia Algazelis Arabis_, contains neither the logic nor
the philosophy of Ghazali. It is a mere abstract or statement of the
Peripatetic systems, and was made preliminary to that _Destruction_ of
which we have already spoken.

This indictment against liberal thought from the standpoint of the
theological school was afterwards answered in Spain by Averroes; but in
Bagdad it heralded the extinction of the light of philosophy. Moderate
and compliant with the popular religion as Alfarabius and Avicenna had
always been, as compared with their Spanish successor, they had equally
failed to conciliate the popular spirit, and were classed in the same
category with the heretic or the member of an immoral sect. The 12th
century exhibits the decay of liberal intellectual activity in the
Caliphate, and the gradual ascendancy of Turkish races animated with all
the intolerance of semi-barbarian proselytes to the Mahommedan faith.
Philosophy, which had only sprung up when the purely Arabian influences
ceased to predominate, came to an end when the sceptre of the Moslem
world passed away from the dynasty of Persia. Even in 1150 Bagdad had
seen a library of philosophical books burned by command of the caliph
Mostanjid; and in 1192 the same place might have witnessed a strange
scene, in which the books of a physician were first publicly cursed, and
then committed to the flames, while their owner was incarcerated. Thus,
while the Latin church showed a marvellous receptivity for ethnic
philosophy, and assimilated doctrines which it had at an earlier date
declared impious, in Islam the theological syste