Iqbals The Development of Metaphysics in Persia [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

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necessity of a higher
source of knowledge, yet calmly moves from experience to experience, mercilessly
dissecting them, and forcing them to yield their underlying universality. In
fact the Persian is only half-conscious of Metaphysics .as a system of thought;
his Brahman brother, on the other hand, is fully alive to the need of presenting
his theory in the form of a thoroughly reasoned out system. And the result of
this mental difference between the two nations is clear. In the one case we have
only partially worked out systems of thought; in the other case, the awful
sublimity of the searching Vedanta. The student of Islamic Mysticism who is
anxious to see an all-embracing exposition of the principle of Unity, must look
up the heavy volumes of the Andalusian Ibn al-`Arabi, whose profound teaching
stands in strange contrast with the dry-as-dust Islam of his countrymen.

The results, however, of the intellectual activity of the
different branches of the great Aryan family are strikingly similar. The outcome
of all Idealistic speculation in India is Buddha, in Persia Bahaullah, and in
the west Schopenhauer whose system, in Hegelian language, is the marriage of
free oriental universality with occidental determinateness.

But the history of Persian thought presents a phenomenon peculiar to
itself. In Persia, due perhaps to Semitic influences, philosophical speculation
has indissolubly associated itself with religion, and thinkers in new lines of
thought have almost always been founders of new religious movements. After