Arabic Thought and Its Place in History

From Forward by the AuthorIt is the effort of the following pages to trace the transmission of Hellenistic thought through the medium of Muslim philosophers and Jewish thinkers who lived in Muslim surroundings, to show how this thought, modified as it passed through a period of development in the Muslim community and itself modifying Islamic ideas, was brought to bear upon the culture of mediæval Latin Christendom. So greatly had it altered in external form during the centuries of its life apart, that it seemed a new type of intellectual life and became a disturbing factor which diverted Christian philosophy into new lines and tended to disintegrate the traditional theology of the Church, directly leading up to the Renascence which gave the death-blow to mediæval culture: so little had it altered in real substance that it used the same text-books and treated very much the same problems already current in the earlier scholasticism which had developed independently in Latin Christendom..