Avempace

Inquire no further, but conceive the best." But he was a man that had good learning and was well-versed in the sciences.

What Avenpace says at the end of his discourse concerning the union is worth your observing.

There he says that 'twill appear plainly to anyone that understands the design of his book, that that degree is not attainable by the means of those sciences which were then in use, but that he attained to what he knew by being altogether abstracted from anything which he had been acquainted with before, and that he was furnished with other notions altogether independent upon matter, and of too noble a nature to be any way attributed to the natural life, but were peculiar to the blessed, and which upon that account we may call divine proprieties, which God, whose name be praised, bestows upon such of His servants as He pleases.

Now this degree which this author mentions is attainable by speculative knowledge, nor is it to be doubted but that he had reached it himself.

After them came a generation of men who applied themselves more to the art of reasoning, in which they excelled their predecessors, yet not so as to attain to true perfection.

So that one of them said, "'Tis hard the kinds of knowledge are but two, the one erroneous, the other true.

The former profits nothing when tis gained, the other's difficult to be attained." After these came others, who still advanced further and made nearer approaches to the truth, among whom there was one that had a sharper wit or truer notions of things than Avenpace, but he was too much taken up with worldly business and died before he had time to open the treasury of his knowledge, so that most of those pieces of his which are extant are imperfect, particularly his book about the soul and his Tedbirul Mot Wahid, that is, how a man ought to manage himself that leads a solitary life.

So are his logics and physics.