Studies in a Mosque - The Search For Mecca

THE BROTHEEHOOD OF PURITY. 177
of Averroes is not an epitome of the philosophy of the
Arabs, for it renders no account of those neo-Platonic
elements which produced in the schools of Baghdad
those disputes which were a foretaste of the conflict
between Realists and Nominalists in the universities
of Europe. But Averroes and the little we know of
Avicenna have satisfied the students of philosophy,
and no wider view of the Arabian movement has been
sought. It is not surprising, therefore, that most
people are vague in their conception of the share of
the Arabs in helping on the development of European
culture. They know the common-places—that Grreek
philosophy was preserved by the Arabs for the school-
men's use—that Roger Bacon was a pupil of the
Arabs—that a good many scientific terms beginning
with al- are derived from the Arabic, and the like ;
but how the Arabs got that philosophy, how they pre-
served it, what they made of it, where they studied it,
whither and through what course they transmitted it
all these are unanswered questions to the most of them,
— ;
if they are so much as questions at all. And small
blame is theirs, for no specialist has taken the trouble
to bring this link in the history of thought home to
them. The only worthy book on the subject—the
work of which this chapter is meant to furnish an out-
line—contains over a thousand pages of a happy mix-
ture of German and Oriental obscurity and disorder
and the German translator's summary thereof reaches
four hundred pages ! Ordinary Englishmen of culture,
who ought to know something of the place of the Arabs
in the history of civilisation, cannot be expected to read