For him accordingly, God, in so far as he can be known from the world, is the Almighty Being, free in will and efficient in operation. No spatial limit may be set to his causative activity, which yet the philosophers do, when they grant only his influence in his first created work. But on the other hand He can limit his own work both in Space and Time, so that this finite world has only a finite duration. That God should call the world into existence out of nothing by an absolute act of creation—seems to the Philosophers to be absurd. They recognize only an exchange of Accidents or Forms in the one material, a passing of the actual from possibility to possibility. But does nothing new ever come then into being? Is not every apprehension of the senses,—asks Gazali,—and every spiritual perception, something entirely new, which either exists or else does not exist, but at whose coming into existence the contrary does not cease, and at whose vanishing from existence, the opposite does not make its appearance? Consider farther the numerous individual souls which, according to Ibn Sina’s system, must be in existence: have not these come into being, absolutely new? There is no end to the putting of questions. The representative process wanders about in all directions and far; and thought leads us on ad infinitum. The chain of causation can nowhere be brought to an end, any more than Space or Time. In order then that there should be a definite, final Existence,—and in postulating this, Gazali is at one with the Philosophers—, we need an Eternal Will as First Cause, different from everything else. We may at all events make this acknowledgement to Gazali, that Ibn Sina’s fantastic doctrine of Forms and Souls makes no stand against his criticism. 5. (2) We have now come to the idea of God. In the view of the Philosophers, God is the highest Being, and his essence is Thought. That which He knows, comes into existence, emanating from his abundance; but he has not positively ‘willed’ it, for all Willing presupposes a deficiency,—a need—, and is conditioned by some change in the Being that wills. Willing is movement in the material: completely real Spirit wills nothing. Therefore God beholds his creation in a contemplation which is undisturbed by any wish. He recognizes himself, or even his first Creature, or, according to Ibn Sina, the Universal, the eternal Genera and Species of all things.