sensuous creed, but cannot
build up a higher and intellectual faith.

In this spirit Averroes does not allow the fancied needs of theological
reasoning to interfere with his study of Aristotle, whom he simply
interprets as a truth-seeker. The points by which he told on Europe were
all implicit in Aristotle, but Averroes set in relief what the original
had left obscure, and emphasized things which the Christian theologian
passed by or misconceived. Thus Averroes had a double effect. He was the
great interpreter of Aristotle to the later Schoolmen. On the other
hand, he came to represent those aspects of Peripateticism most alien to
the spirit of Christendom; and the deeply religious Moslem gave his name
to the anti-sacerdotal party, to the materialists, sceptics and
atheists, who defied or undermined the dominant beliefs of the church.

On three points Averroes, like other Moslem thinkers, came specially
into relation, real or supposed, with the religious creed, viz. the
creation of the world, the divine knowledge of particular things, and
the future of the human soul.

The real grandeur of Averroes is seen in his resolute prosecution of the
standpoint of science in matters of this world, and in his recognition
that religion is not a branch of knowledge to be reduced to propositions
and systems of dogma, but a personal and inward power, an individual
truth which stands distinct from, but not contradictory to, the
universalities of scientific law. In his science he followed the Greeks,
and to the Schoolmen he and his compatriots rightly seemed philosophers
of the ancient world. He maintained alike the claim of demonstrative
science with its generalities for the few who could live in that
ethereal world, and the claim of religion for all--the common life of
each soul as an individual and personal consciousness. But theology, or
the mixture of the two, he regarded as a source of evil to
both--fostering the vain belief in a hostility of philosophers to
religion, and meanwhile corrupting religion by a pseudo-science.

The latent nominalism of Aristotle only came gradually to be emphasized
through the prominence which Christianity gave to the individual life,
and, apart from passing notices as in Abelard, first found clear
enunciation in the school of Duns Scotus. The Arabians, on the contrary,
emphasized the idealist aspect which had been adopted and promoted by
the Neo-Platonist commentators. Hence, to Averroes the etern