HINDU, ARABIAN AND MOORISH SCIENCE 169 



The tenth century was the golden age of Moorish science in 

 Spain. Another hundred years and it had gone down forever. 

 Its permanent importance, even in conserving the work of the 

 ancients, has been questioned, and a recent writer cleverly com- 

 pares the whole western movement of the Arabians to the sands 

 of their deserts, now fierce and pitiless when driven by some 

 force such as the wind, now sinking into inert, helpless, infertile 

 heaps when left to themselves. 



An Arab renaissance as early as the eighth century had revived 

 something of classic knowledge. The poetry and philosophy of Greece 

 were studied, and the taste for learning was cultivated with the en- 

 thusiasm which the Arabs infused into all their undertakings. Every 

 one knows the fascinating account of these things in the pages of 

 Gibbon. How the tide of progress flowed from Samarcand and Bo- 

 khara to Fez and Cordova. How a vizir consecrated 200,000 pieces of 

 gold to the foundation of a college. How the transport of a doctor's 

 books required four hundred camels. How a single library in Spain 

 contained 600,000 volumes, while seventy public libraries were opened 

 in Andalusia alone. How the Arabian schools of Spain and Italy 

 were resorted to by scholars from every country in Europe. . . . 



Here was a state of luxury and learning which contrasted strongly 

 enough with the barbarism of the age. But under all this show where 

 was the substantial basis? How much of all this was real? Arab 

 architecture, in so far as it was Arab, and not built for them by the 

 Greeks, was a concoction of whim and fantasy. In those nervous 

 hands every strong and simple feature was distorted into endless com- 

 plications, and, as always happens, lost in stability what it gained 

 in eccentricity. Their learning was of the same character. Though 

 they disputed interminably on the rival merits of the Greek philos- 

 ophers, they were content to receive all their knowledge of them 

 through indifferent translations. When the real revival of learning 

 came, and a genuine Renaissance set in, the six or seven centuries of 

 Arab civilization were simply ignored and passed over. . . . 



The Arab mind seems to turn by a sort of instinct to the occult, 

 the mystical, the fantastic. It is always sighing for new worlds to 

 conquer before it has made good the ground it stands on. It has the 

 curious gift of turning everything it touches from substance to shadow. 



