l (q.v.) in his philosophical
romance, called _Hayy ibn-Yakdhan_ (the Living, Son of the Waking One),
best known by Pococke's Latin version, as the _Philosophus
Autodidactus_. It describes the process by which an isolated
truth-seeker detaches himself from his lower passions, and raises
himself above the material earth and the orbs of heaven to the forms
which are the source of their movement, until he arrives at a union with
the supreme intellect. The experiences of the religious mystic are
paralleled with the ecstatic vision in which the philosophical hermit
sees a world of pure intelligences, where birth and decease are unknown.
It was this theory which Averroes (1126-1198), the last and most famous
of the thinkers of Moslem Spain, carried out to his doctrine of the
unity of intellect.

Averroes.

For Aristotle the reverence of Averroes was unbounded, and to expound
him was his chosen task. The uncritical receptivity of his age, the
defects of the Arabic versions, the emphatic theism of his creed, and
the rationalizing mysticism of some Oriental thought, may have sometimes
led him astray, and given prominence to the less obvious features of
Aristotelianism. But in his conception of the relation between
philosophy and religion, Averroes had a light which the Latins were
without. The science, falsely so called, of the several theological
schools, their groundless distinctions and sophistical demonstrations,
he regarded as the great source of heresy and scepticism. The
allegorical interpretations and metaphysics which had been imported into
religion had taken men's minds away from the plain sense of the Koran.
God had declared a truth meet for all men, which needed no intellectual
superiority to understand, in a tongue which each human soul could
apprehend. Accordingly, the expositors of religious metaphysics, Ghazali
included, are the enemies of true religion, because they make it a mere
matter of syllogism. Averroes maintains that a return must be made to
the words and teaching of the prophet; that science must not expend
itself in dogmatizing on the metaphysical consequences of fragments of
doctrine for popular acceptance, but must proceed to reflect upon and
examine the existing things of the world. Averroes, at the same time,
condemns the attempts of those who tried to give demonstrative science
where the mind was not capable of more than rhetoric: they harm religion
by their mere negations, destroying an old