After his return Gazali once more engaged in teaching for a short time in Nishabur; and he died in Tos, his native town, on the 19th of December, 1111. His closing years were chiefly devoted to pious contemplation and the study of the Traditions, which as a youth he could never remember. A beautifully complete and rounded life, in which the end comes back to the beginning! 3. Gazali passes in review the spiritual tendencies of his time. These are: the Dialectic of the Theologians; Sufi Mysticism; Pythagorean Popular Philosophy; and Neo-Platonic Aristotelianism. That which Dialectic desires to establish is also the object of his own faith; but its arguments appear to him rather weak, and many of its assertions on that account open to question. He feels most in sympathy with the Sufi Mysticism: to it he owes his dearest possession, viz., the establishment of his own faith in Personality,—so that he can postulate as an inner experience that which the Dialecticians attempt to derive by a process of reasoning. He thanks also the Popular Philosophy for the instruction it gives, particularly in Mathematics, which he fully recognizes as a science, together with its Astronomical deductions. He concedes the validity of its Physics, where that is not in conflict with the Faith. But Aristotelianism,—as it has been taught by Farabi and Ibn Sina, with as much subservience to authority as has been exhibited by the Theologians,—seems to him to be the enemy of Islam; and in the name of all the Muslim schools and tendencies of thought together, he feels bound to do battle with it, as from a catholic standpoint. And in truth he does this with Aristotle’s own weapons,—those of Logic; for the axioms of thought which Logic lays down are, in his eyes, just as firmly established as the propositions of Mathematics. Fully alive to this, he starts from the Principle of Contradiction, to which, according to his contention, God himself submits. Of the Physico-Metaphysical doctrines of Philosophy then, he attacks three in particular: 1. That the world is eternal; 2. That God takes cognizance only of the Universal, and that consequently there is no special providence; 3. That the Soul alone is immortal, and therefore a Resurrection of the Body is not to be looked for. In the refutation of these doctrines Gazali is in many respects dependent on the Christian commentator on Aristotle, Johannes Philoponus, who also has written against the doctrine of the eternity of the world maintained by Proclus. 4. (1) The world, according to the philosophers, is a sphere of finite extent but of infinite duration. From all eternity, it proceeds from God, even as the effect is in existence at the same time with the cause. Gazali, on the contrary, is of opinion that it is not admissible to put such different constructions on the notions of Space and Time respectively; and he holds that the Divine Causality should be defined as free Creative Might.