Gazali’s undertaking had also a positive side. Along with the Dialectic which sought to make the doctrines of the Faith intelligible, or even to provide them with a rational basis, there were movements in Islam of a mysticism which tended to a conception of dogma, profound and full of feeling. Its wish was, not to comprehend or demonstrate the contents of the Faith, but to learn them by experience and live in them through the Spirit. The highest certitude ought to belong to the Faith. Ought it then to be in the power of any to transform it into a derived knowledge? Or must its tenets be principles of the Reason, neither capable of farther proof, nor requiring it? But the fundamental principles of the Reason, when once they are known, must be universally recognized; and universal recognition is lacking in the case of the tenets of the Faith. From what other source does unbelief arise? Thus the questioning proceeded; and it seemed to many that the only way out of these doubts was to base religious doctrine upon an inner, supra-rational illumination. At first this came about unconsciously, under a mystic impulse, whereby the contents of moral and religious teaching were often brought into neglect. Gazali took part in this movement also. That which had perhaps been typified by the Salimites and Karramites, Antimutazilite sects, he set forth completely and in a dignified style; and ever since his time Mysticism both sustains and crowns the Temple of Learning in Orthodox Islam. 2. The story of this man’s life is a remarkable one; and, in order to understand the effectiveness of his work, it is absolutely essential to examine it with a measure of detail. He was born at Tos in Khorasan in the year 1059, being thus a countryman of the great poet Firdausi. And just as the latter furnishes a proof of the old glory of the Persian nation, so Gazali was destined to be a “testimony and ornament” for all future Islam. Even his early education,—obtained after his father’s death, in the house of a Sufi friend,—was rather cosmopolitan than national in its direction. Farther, any limitation was displeasing to the youth’s restless and fanciful spirit. He did not feel at home in the hair-splitting casuistry of the teachers of Morals with their precise formulas: he regarded it as a worldly knowledge, from which he turned away, to immerse his spirit in the knowledge of Allah. Then he studied theology in Nishabur with the Imām al-Haramain, who died in 1085; and at the same time he may himself have begun to write and to teach, and, perhaps even thus early, to entertain doubts of his own science. Thereafter he was in attendance at the court of Nizam al-Mulk, the Vizir of the Seldjuk prince, until in 1091 he was appointed a Professor in Bagdad. It was during this time at all events that he busied himself most with philosophy. But it was not pure love for the science, which impelled him to that study, but the longing of his heart