All knowledge is according to Gabirol embraced in the following three topics, (1) Matter and Form, (2) the Active Word or Will, (3) the First Essence or God. By far the larger part of the "Fons Vitæ" is devoted to the first subject. Only brief hints are given of the second and third, and Gabirol refers us to a special work of his on the Will, which he says he wrote. There is no trace of any such treatise. At any rate it is clear from the little that is contained on the Divine Will in the "Fons Vitæ" that the Will forms an important element in Gabirol's philosophy. This is the more remarkable because it is not an essential element in Neo-Platonism, upon which Gabirol's system is based. Nay, the doctrine of a divine will scarcely has any place in the form of emanation taught by Plotinus. The cosmic process is conceived there as necessary and impersonal. And but for the introduction of the Will in the "Fons Vitæ" we should be forced to understand Gabirol in the same way. The difficulty in Neo-Platonism is that God is at the same time transcendent and, through his powers or emanations, immanent in the world. God is above all being and at the same time is the cause of and pervades all existence. Gabirol must have felt not merely this purely philosophical difficulty, but as a Jew, Pantheism as well as impersonalism must have been objectionable to him. Hence he mitigates both by introducing the divine will as mediating between God and the world. This brings God in closer and more personal touch with his creation. The cosmic process is not a necessary and impersonal flow or radiation but a voluntary activity having a purpose. The solution is unsatisfactory, as all such solutions are bound to be, because it introduces as many difficulties as it solves. The nature of this divine Will is ambiguous. If it is God's will, and God is the One in whom there can be no distinctions, we have only a new word, and nothing is solved. If on human analogy we are inclined to take the will seriously, we are endangering God's unity. This dilemma Gabirol does not succeed in removing. His system still has a strong flavor of Pantheism, and moreover his identification of the Will of God with the Wisdom and the Word of God, and his hypostatization of the latter as in a sense a being distinct from God, reminds us strongly of Philo's Logos, which became the Logos of Christianity, the second person in the Trinity. This is the reason why William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, regarded Avicebron as a Christian. And these same reasons were no doubt adequate to estrange Jewish readers, as Abraham ibn Daud expressly tells us about himself, though his terms are general (see above, p. 62).