This union was known as the _ittisal_: the supreme object of the wise man’s desire, and in connection with it emerged for the first time a distinction between Averroës and his predecessors. Ibn Badja, with whom he held the closest relation, had proposed a course of moral discipline as the best way of attaining the _ittisal_: the same ascetic practice which Ibn Tofail so remarkably illustrated and commended in his mystical romance _Hay Ibn Yokhdan_. Gazzali on the other hand, who was the sceptic of these schools, boldly declared that the _ittisal_ was only to be reached by an intellectual and spiritual confusion attained in the _zikr_, or whirling dance of the Dervishes. It was left then for Averroës to vindicate once more the validity of human reason, and this he did by proclaiming that science, rightly understood, was the true way of entering into intellectual communion with the Deity. All, however, agreed in teaching that the soul of man was but an individual and temporary manifestation of the Divine, from which it had proceeded, and into which it would again be absorbed. It is plain that the way to this consummation proposed by Averroës had much in common with the ancient theories of the Alexandrian Gnosis. The Albigenses and other sects of the time, especially that called the Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost, had already done much to familiarise the West with these essentially Eastern speculations. A taste for such flights of the mind had been formed, and, as soon as it became known that a new teacher had arisen to advocate a theory of this kind among the Moors, Christianity too was alive with curiosity to know what the doctrine of Averroës might be. In these circumstances the anathema of the Church proved powerless to restrain so strong an impulse of the human spirit. The Council of Paris in 1209 had sounded the first note of warning and of censure. In 1215 Robert de Courçon published a statute in that university by which the name of _Mauritius Hispanus_, understood by Renan to mean Averroës, was associated with those of David of Dinant and Almaric of Bena the French Pantheists of the day, and all men were warned to have nothing to do with their writings under pain of censure. In spite of these enactments five years had not passed since the date of the latter proclamation, before the commentaries of Averroës were rendered into Latin and the secrets of his remarkable philosophy laid open to the scholastic world.