The first leader of Spanish philosophy was the Jew _Abu Ayyub Sulayman b. Yahya b. Jabirul_ (d. 450 A.H. = 1058 A.D.), commonly known as Ibn Gabirol (Jabirul), and hence “Avencebrol” in the Latin scholastic writers. He is chiefly known as the author of _Maqor Chayim_, “The Fountain of Life,” a title based on the words of Psalm 36, 10, which was one of the works translated into Latin at the college of Toledo and so well known to the scholastic writers as the _Fons Vitae_ (ed. Baumer: _Avencebrolis Fons Vitae_, Münster, 1895). It was this work which really introduced neo-Platonism to the West. Ibn Jabirul teaches that God alone is pure reality, and He is the only actual substance; He has no attributes, but in Him are will and wisdom, not as possessed attributes but as aspects of His nature. The world is produced by the impress of form upon pre-existing universal matter. “Separate substances” in the sense of ideas abstracted from the things in which they exist (cf. Aristot. _de anima_. iii. 7, 8, “and so the mind when it thinks of mathematical forms thinks of them as separated, though they are not separated”) do not exist apart in reality; the abstracting is only a mental process, so the general idea exists only as a concept, not as a reality. But between the purely spiritual being of God and the crudely material observed in the bodies existing in this world are intermediate forms of existence, such as angels, souls, etc., wherein the form is not impressed upon matter. Besides this “Fountain of Life” Ibn Gabirol was the author of two ethical treatises, the _Tikkun Midwoth han-Nefesh_, “the correction of the manners of the soul,” in which man is treated as a microcosm after the kabbalistic fashion; and _Mibchar hap-Peninim_, a collection of ethical maxims collected from the Greek and Arabic philosophers. The former has been published at Luneville in 1804, the latter at Hamburg in 1844.