is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a subjectivity purely. But with the suffering matter, the active form and all causes must also go. They, too, are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for these thinkers, became mere accidents. The fleeting character of appearances drove them to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a quality planted in the nature of a thing; that the idea "nature" did not exist. Then this drove them further. Substances exist only with qualities, i.e., accidents. These qualities may be positive or they may be negative; the ascription to things of negative qualities is one of their most fruitful conceptions. When, then, the qualities fall out of existence, the substances themselves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as quality is fleeting, has only a moment's duration.

But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of matter as the possibility of receiving form, their path of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So atomists they became, and, as always, after their own fashion. Their atoms are not of space only, but also of time. The basis of all the manifestation, mental and physical, of the world in place and time, is a multitude of monads. Each has certain qualities but has extension neither in space nor time. They have simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly as to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may be permitted, are equally unextended and have also absolute void-of time-between them. Just as space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in a succession of untouching moments and leaps across

the void from one to the other with the jerk of the hand of a clock. Time, in this view, is in grains and can exist only in connection with change. The monads differ from those of Leibnitz in having no nature in themselves, no possibility of development along certain lines. The Muslim monads are, and again are not, all change and action in the world are produced by their entering into existence and dropping out again, not by any change in themselves.

But this most simple view of the world left its holders in precisely the same difficulty, only in a far higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was compelled to fall back on a pre-established harmony to bring his monads into orderly relations with one another; the Muslim theologians, on their side, fell back upon God and found in His will the ground of all things.

We here pass from their ontology to their theology, and as they were thorough-going metaphysicians, so now they are thorough-going theologians. Being was all in the one case; now it is God that is all. In truth, their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism which destroys the possibility of a philosophy in order to drive men back to God and His revelations and compel them to see in Him the one grand fact of the universe. So, when a darwish shouts in his ecstasy, "Huwa-l-haqq," he does not mean, "He is the Truth," in our Western sense of Verity, or our New Testament sense of "The Way, the Truth, and the Life," but simply, " He is the Fact "—the one Reality.

To return: from their ontology they derived an