5. _Arabian Commentators of Aristotle._--The reader might perhaps have expected, that when the philosophy of the Greeks was carried among a new race of intellects, of a different national character and condition, the train of this servile tradition would have been broken; that some new thoughts would have started forth; that some new direction, some new impulse, would have been given to the search for truth. It might have been anticipated that we should have had schools among the Arabians which should rival the Peripatetic, Academic, and Stoic among the Greeks;--that they would preoccupy the ground on which Copernicus and Galileo, Lavoisier and Linnæus, won their fame;--that they would make the next great steps in the progressive sciences. Nothing of this, however, happened. The Arabians cannot claim, in science or philosophy, any really great names; they produced no men and no discoveries which have materially influenced the course and destinies of human knowledge; they tamely adopted the intellectual servitude of the nation which they conquered by their arms; they joined themselves at once to the string of slaves who were dragging the car of Aristotle and Plotinus. Nor, perhaps, on a little further reflection, shall we be surprised at this want of vigor and productive power, in this period of apparent national youth. The Arabians had not been duly prepared rightly to enjoy and use the treasures of which they became possessed. They had, like most uncivilized nations, been passionately fond of their indigenous poetry; their imagination had been awakened, but their rational powers and speculative tendencies were still torpid. They received the Greek philosophy without having passed through those gradations of ardent curiosity and keen research, of obscurity brightening into clearness, of doubt succeeded by the joy of discovery, by which the Greek mind had been enlarged and exercised. Nor had the Arabians ever enjoyed, as the Greeks had, the individual consciousness, the independent volition, the intellectual freedom, arising from the freedom of political institutions. They had not felt the contagious mental activity of a small city,--the elation arising from the general {209} sympathy in speculative pursuits diffused through an intelligent and acute audience; in short, they had not had a national education such as fitted the Greeks to be disciples of Plato and Hipparchus. Hence, their new literary wealth rather encumbered and enslaved, than enriched and strengthened them: in their want of taste for intellectual freedom, they were glad to give themselves up to the guidance of Aristotle and other dogmatists. Their military habits had accustomed them to look to a leader; their reverence for the book of their law had prepared them to accept a philosophical Koran also. Thus the Arabians, though they never translated the Greek poetry, translated, and merely translated, the Greek philosophy;