156 THE WORLD MACHINE 



highways of human thought. In this, if we may judge from the 

 unaffrighted impudicity of the prevalent literature and chronicles, 

 he represented perhaps better than any other the cultivated 

 Arabian spirit of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 



But if this ardent and somewhat fanatic people could pro- 

 duce genius of so high an order and sense of so rare a make, 

 if it could reach a stage wherefrom it could brook without dis- 

 quiet so candid a denial alike of morality, faith, and the 

 solemnity of life, its limitations were still sharp. 



The character of the Saracen resembled much that of the 

 faithful servant entrusted with the one talent, who carefully 

 treasured it in the earth until his master should come again. 

 If they preserved much, they added little. If they became the 

 heritors of Greek culture, in no notable degree did they imbibe 

 the Greek spirit. On the more serious side they displayed but 

 slight originality. They copied ; they transcribed ; they made, 

 as it were, copious notes. But a genius for independent inquiry, 

 for new synthesis, they nowhere displayed. They produced 

 encyclopaedic works ; but of such a type as those of Pliny 

 and Aristotle. Indeed, the formal mind of Aristotle, with its 

 extraordinary miscellany of information, its empty definitions, 

 its unfruitful classifications, represents fairly well the intel- 

 lectual level of this very remarkable race. Al-Hazen, Ibn Junis, 

 and their kind did better, did real things ; but Averrhoes, 

 Avicenna, and their like thought and wrote after the manner of 

 the Greek mind before it had developed its genius for measuring, 

 for weighing, for computation, and for daring induction. 



This characteristic was by no means insular to the Saracen. 

 It was shared equally by Bagdad and Byzantium, by Paris as 

 by Cordova. The worship of Aristotle for it was no less than 

 that was indeed one of the most curious phenomena of this 

 enigmatical time. Infallibility was attributed to his works in 

 hardly less a measure than to the Hebrew scriptures. To 

 doubt them, among the more northerly peoples at least, was 

 impious. In England and in France there were statutory 

 enactments which made it a crime. 



Moreover, in no wise did the Saracen mind ever attain to 

 that complete intellectual freedom which was the characteristic 

 of the Hellenes. They were weighted with the cult of a gloomy 

 religion as Europe was weighted. They bore it more success- 

 fully. Their cleanly and ofttimes beautiful cities, their magni- 



