A man,” when writing, “does not move the pen when he thinks he moves it, but the motion is an accident of the pen, created by God at the moment.” In this way God alone is in truth the operative cause; but He might have made everything differently. “Their eighth proposition is to the effect that nothing but substance or accident exists, and natural forms are themselves accidents; substances alone are individuals. The ninth proposition is that accidents have nothing to do with one another; they have no causal connection or other relation; in every substance all accidents may exist. The tenth proposition is transition (‎‏אִפִשָׁרות‏‎, _transitus_, _possibilitas_):” “All that we can fancy may also pass over into the understanding, _i.e._ be possible. But in this way everything is possible,” since there are no laws of the understanding; this transition of thought is thus perfectly accidental. “A man as large as a mountain, a flea as large as an elephant, are possible. Everything may just as well be something else as what it is, and there is no reason at all why anything should be one way rather than another. They term it a mere habit that the earth revolves round a centre-point, that fire moves upward and that it is hot; it is just as possible, they say, that fire should be cold.”[6] We thus see an utter inconstancy of everything; and this whirl of all things is essentially Oriental. But at the same time this is certainly also a complete dissolution of all that pertains to reasonableness, in harmony of course with Eastern exaltation of spirit, which allows of nothing definite. God is in Himself the perfectly undefined, His activity is altogether abstract, and hence the particulars produced thereby are perfectly contingent; if we speak of the necessity of things, the term is meaningless and incomprehensible, and no attempt should be made to comprehend it. The activity of God is thus represented as perfectly devoid of reason. This abstract negativity, combined with the permanent unity, is thus a fundamental conception in the Oriental way of looking at things. Oriental poets are in a marked degree pantheists; the pantheistic is their ordinary point of view. Thus the Arabians developed the sciences and philosophy, without further defining the concrete Idea; their work is rather the dissolution of all that is definite in this substance, with which is associated mere changeableness as the abstract moment of negativity. B. COMMENTATORS OF ARISTOTLE.