67 



of clinical medicine and of public health, never 

 made its way into the general stream of Western 

 culture. Religious wars and persecutions had driven 

 Greek learning eastwards, as in the case of the 

 Nestorians from Antioch to Persia ; Hebrew and 

 Syrian sages 1 translated some classical texts, and 



1 The " Arabs " were a mixed throng of orientals ; some of 

 them were Aryans, as the Persians and Nestorians ; some were 

 Arabs, Syrians, or Hebrews. The Xestorians were eminent as 

 physicians, and it is interesting to this College to know that one 

 of the best translators of Aristotle into Arabic was Johannitius, 

 a Nestorian physician. The Eastern peoples, as the Western, 

 owed all to the Greeks except a double measure of dialectical 

 ingenuity, which was their own, and is their own to-day. By the 

 incisive methods of Aristotle the Christian neo-platonists had 

 been variously carved into heretics such as the Monophysites ; 

 and these when driven eastwards carried Greek to Edessa 

 and Bagdad : from these centres it was, and from Nisibur in 

 Persia and elsewhere, that the " Saracens " drew their culture. 

 Aristotle was first translated into Arabic in the reign of Al 

 Mansur, the son of Harun al Raschid (813 833) ; Avicenna 

 carried the Aristotelian encyclopedia to its culmination ; and 

 Cordova in the tenth century was as full of fervid disciples as 

 was Paris in the thirteenth. The Arabian medicine was Aris- 

 totle and Galen. The Arabian philosophy was originally built 

 upon the Alexandrian emanations and hypostases (the soul of 

 the universe, intelligence the first of creatures, nature and 

 mutability, and so forth). Essences and forms were produced, as 

 the ** intelligibilia " of " real " knowledge, till, as some one has 

 wittily put it, " universals became almost palpable." Avicenna 

 indeed approached understanding from the senses, and Aver- 

 roes accepted this right position ; but he taught the permanent 

 subsistence of intelligence, as a sphere in a hierarchy of 



52 



