_Ma`mar b. Abbad as-Sulami_ (d. 220) describes God as creating substances but not accidents, so that he produced a kind of universal matter common to all existing things and to this matter or essence the accidents are added, some produced by a force inherent in the essence created, others by free will on the part of the creature. Following the neo-Platonic commentators on Aristotle he treats the attributes of God as purely negative, so that God is unknowable by man. In the case of wisdom or knowledge, that which is known must either be identical with God, or external to him: if God is the agent who knows and that which is known as object is also himself, there is a distinction between God the agent and God the object which implies two persons, and this is subversive of the divine unity: but if God is the agent and knows something external to himself, that knowledge depends on the external object, and God therefore is not absolute but in some sense dependent on something other than himself. Hence the attributes of God cannot be such as the positive qualities which exist in man, but only the negation of those which are distinctively human and dependent: we can only say that he is infinite, meaning unlimited in space, or eternal as unlimited in time, or other like terms negative of the known things which can be predicated of man. The general tendency of Ma`mar’s teaching is distinctly pantheistic: partly this is due to the logical development of a tendency already inherent in the neo-Platonic doctrine with which all Arabic thought was now becoming saturated, and partly it was due to oriental influences which were now beginning to appear in Islam. Ma´mar’s pantheism was more fully developed by _Tumameh b. al-Ashras_ (d. 213) who treats the world as indeed created by God, but created according to a law of nature so that it is the expression of a force latent in God and not due to an act of volition. Tumameh entirely deserts al-Allaf’s attempt to reconcile the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter with the teaching of the Qur´an, and quite frankly states that the universe is eternal like God. This is by no means the last word in Islamic pantheism, but its subsequent development rather belongs to the doctrines of the extremer Shi`ite sects and to Sufism.