Without going into detail as to the nature of this work of Empedocles named by Falaquera as the source of Gabirol's views--expositions of these so-called Empedoclean views and fragments from Empedocles's book have been found in Arabian and Hebrew writers[88]--it is sufficient for us to know that it has nothing to do with the real Empedocles, the ancient Greek philosopher; that it was another of the many spurious writings which circulated in the middle ages under famous names of antiquity; and that like the "Theology of Aristotle," and the "Liber de Causis," mentioned in the Introduction (p. xx), it was Neo-Platonic in character. Thus Gabirol was a Neo-Platonist. This does not mean that he did not adopt many important Aristotelian conceptions. Neo-Platonism itself could not have arisen without Aristotle. The ideas of matter and form, and potentiality and actuality, and the categories, and so on, had become the fixed elements of philosophical thinking, and no new system could do without them. In this sense Plotinus himself, the founder of Neo-Platonism, is an Aristotelian. When we speak of Gabirol as a Neo-Platonist, we mean that the essence of his system is Neo-Platonic. He is not a dualist, but a monist. God and matter are not opposed as two ultimate principles, as they are in Aristotle. Matter in Gabirol is ultimately identified with God. In this he goes even beyond Plotinus. For whereas in Plotinus matter occupies the lowest scale in the gradation of being as it flows from the One or the Good (_cf._ Introduction, p. xxxviii), and becomes equivalent to the non-existent, and is the cause of evil, in Gabirol matter is the underlying substance for all being from the highest to the lowest, with the one exception of the Creator himself.[89] It emanates from the essence of the Creator, forming the basis of all subsequent emanations.[90] Hence the spiritual substances of the celestial world, or, to use a more technical and more precise term--since spirit is not located in heaven or anywhere spatially--the intelligible world, have matter underlying their form.[91] In fact, matter itself is intelligible or spiritual, not corporeal.[92] Corporeality and materiality are two different things. There are various gradations of matter, to be sure; for the prime matter as it emerges from the essence of the Creator pervades all existence from highest to lowest, and the further it extends from its origin the less spiritual and the more corporeal it becomes until in the sublunar world we have in the matters of its particular objects, corporeal matter, _i. e._, matter affected with quantity and magnitude and figure and color.[93] Like Plotinus, Gabirol conceives of the universe as a process of a gradually descending series of existences or worlds, as the Kabbalistic writers term them; these cosmic existences radiating or flowing out of the superabundant light and goodness of the Creator. The two extremes of this graded universe are God at the one end, and the