Curiously enough, the introduction of Aristotle to the doctors of the church was through the Mohammedan Arabs. These men had, during a term of centuries, been the continuers of the intellectual life of the race. While through the long night of those ages of darkness the Christian mind slept, the Arabian mind, waking, gave itself largely to the study of Aristotle. The Greek philosopher was posthumously naturalized a barbarian; for Aristotle’s writings were now translated from their original tongue into Arabic. In this Arabic version, the celebrated Ibn Roshd (chiefly famous under his latinized name A-verˈroës) knew Aristotle and commented on him. The Arabic commentaries of Averroes were translated into Latin, and the thought of Aristotle thus became once more accessible to European students. Averroes (A. D. 1149-1198) himself was of the Moors of Spain. For centuries previous to the time when the son and successor of good Haroun al Raschid,[2] known at least by name to the readers and lovers of Tennyson, collected at Bagdad all the scattered volumes of Greek letters that his agents could find in Armenia, Syria and Egypt—for centuries, we say, previous to this, Aristotle suffered an almost complete arrest and suspension of intellectual influence. That man would have been a bold prophet who should then have predicted what a resurrection to power awaited the slumbering philosopher. Still earlier, however, than this, that is, during the interval between the third Christian century and the sixth, Aristotle enjoyed a great vogue. He was studied and commented on as if all human wisdom was summed up in him. The spirit of independent and original philosophy had perished, and whatever philosophic aptitude survived was well content to exhaust itself in expounding Aristotle. Aristotle’s works became a kind of common Bible to the universal mind of the Roman empire. This was the period of the Greek scholiasts, so-called—in more ordinary language, commentators. Taking the reverse or regressive direction of history, we have thus run back to a point of time some six or seven centuries subsequent to the personal life and activity of Aristotle. During the latter half of these centuries, Aristotle’s fame was gradually growing, from total obscurity to its great culmination in splendor under the scholiasts.