In the pure philosophy of the so-called “Speakers” was expressed the principle, peculiar to the Oriental mind, of the dissolution of definite thought in all its consequences as the dissolution of all connection and relation. Maimonides says (P. I. c. 71, p. 135; c. 73, p. 149): “The ground-principle of the Medabberim is that men can have no certain knowledge of the nature of things, because in the understanding the contrary may ever exist and be thought. Besides this they in the majority of instances confound imagination with understanding, and give to the former the name of the latter. They adopted as a principle, atoms and empty space,” where all connection appears as something contingent. “Production is nothing but a connection of atoms, and decay nothing but a separation of the same; and time consists of many ‘nows.’” In this way nothing but the atom really exists. They have thus in the more advanced cultivation of thought brought to consciousness the main standpoint, then as now the standpoint of the Orientals—that of substance, the one substance. This pantheism, or Spinozism, if you like to call it so, is thus the universal view of Oriental poets, historians and philosophers. The Medabberim go on to say: “Substances, _i.e._ individuals, which,” for the rest, “are created by God, have many accidental qualities, as in snow every particle is white. But no quality can endure for two moments; as it comes, it goes again, and God creates another and yet another in its place.” All determinations are thus fleeting or perishable; the individual alone is permanent. “If it pleases God to create another quality in a substance, it continues; but if He ceases to create, the substance perishes.” Thereby all necessary connection is done away with, so that Nature has no meaning. “They therefore deny that anything exists by nature, likewise that the nature of this or that body necessitates that it should have certain qualities rather than others. But they say that God creates all qualities instantaneously, without natural means and without the help of anything else.” General permanence is substance, and the particular is altered every moment, and so exists through the substance. “According to this principle they say, for instance, that when we think we have dyed a garment red with red dye we have not dyed it red at all; for God created the red colour in the garment at the very moment at which we thought we had brought about the result with the red dye. God observes the invariable custom of not permitting that the colour black should be produced except when the garment is dyed with that hue; and the first colour which comes to pass on the occasion of the connection is not permanent, but disappears on the instant, and every moment another appears which is created in its turn. In the same way knowledge also is an accident, which is created by God at every moment that I know anything; to-day we no longer possess the knowledge which we yesterday possessed.