It is perhaps in some degree to the influence of the doctrine of absorption in the Mahometan philosophy of Averroes, a commentator on Aristotle, who was the contemporary of Abélard, that we may attribute the disbelief in immortality to which we find a tendency toward the close of the thirteenth and during the fourteenth century.(294) Though it is probable that the indirect influence of the Arabic philosophy was felt earlier, in stimulating a demand for inquiry, a disposition to make dogmas submit to the test of reason, which has been shown to be the earliest form of mediæval doubt; yet it was not until the thirteenth century that the works of Averroes definitely influenced scholasticism, through the teaching of Michael Scot and Alexander Hales, and by means of the rapidity of intellectual communication which forms so singular a feature in mediæval history, spread their influence in Italy as well as in France. It was at this time that the doctrine of Averroes was attacked by Aquinas; and though the amount of its influence can hardly be estimated, we have the means of tracing the growth of dislike to its author in Christian lands, which is an incidental probability of the increasing danger to Christianity arising from it. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Franciscans study him without evincing hatred. About the end of it Dante describes him still without reproaches, though he places him in the Inferno along with other heathen philosophers:(295) but half a century later, in the pictures of the last judgment which exist in several states of Italy, each a little historic satire with its own peculiarities, we find Averroes depicted as the type of incredulity and blasphemy. In a fresco of the Campo Santo of Pisa, executed about 1335, when perhaps the recent canonization of Aquinas as an opponent of Averroes had directed attention to the influence of the Arabic philosopher, Orcagna has placed a separate _bolgia_, the lowest in his hell, for three persons,—Mahomet, Anti-christ, and Averroes.(296)