Excerpt from The Open Court, Vol. 42: Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea; March, 1928 The close union of the two strains in each Of the traditions can be explained rather Simply. Under the encouragement of'the Mo hammedan Caliphs, particularly of the Abbasid dynasty which was founded in 750 A. D., Syrian scholars and physicians translated the writings of Greek scientists and philosophers into Syriac and Arabic. It was thus that in medicine Hippocrates and Galen, in mathematics Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy and in philosophy Aristotle, Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias became available to Arab scholars. The matter, the method and the ter minology for their philosophizing was found in Aristotle. But among the works that purported to be of Aristotle were two treat ises, The Theology of Aristotle and the Liber de Causis. The first of these is in reality a series of extracts taken from the Enneades of Plotinus (books IV - VI) and the second is borrowed from the Elementatio Theologica of Proclus.2 It was inevitable that Arab philosophy be cast on Neoplatonic lines, and what is true of the Arabs is true in the same degree of the Jews, Since they were pu pils of the Arabs and found almost an identical use for Aristotle. In fact even Ibn Daud, Maimonides and Gersonides, possibly the most Aristotelian of the Medieval Jews, preferred to appeal to Al farabi or Avicenna or Averroes for authority concerning the Aris totelian position, rather than go directly to the works of Aristotle. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.