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42the eternal principle; and the word of God - Jesus Christ - the contingent principle. But more fully to bring out the element of truth in the second alternative suggested by Mu`ammar, was reserved, as we shall see, for later Sufi thinkers of Persia. It is, therefore, clear that some of the rationalists almost unconsciously touched - the outer fringe of later pantheism for which, in a sense, they prepared the way, not only by their definition of God, but also by their common effort to internalise the rigid externality of absolute law. But the most important contribution of the advocates of Rationalism to purely metaphysical speculation, is their explanation of matter, which their opponents - the Ash`arite - afterwards modified to fit in with their own views of the nature of God. The interest of Nazzam chiefly consisted in the exclusion of all arbitrariness from the orderly course of nature (1). The same interest in naturalism led Al-Jahiz to define Will in a purely negative manner(2). Though the Rationalist thinkers did not want to abandon the idea of a Personal Will, yet they endeavoured to find - a deeper ground for the independence of individual natural phenomena. And this ground they found in matter itself. Nazzam taught the infinite divisibility of matter, and obliterated the distinction between substance and accident (3). Existence was regarded as a quality super-imposed by God on the pre-existing material atoms which would have been incapable 1 Steiner - Die Mu`taziliten ; Leipzig, 1865, p. 57. 2 Ibid. p. 59. 3 Shahrastani,: Cureton's ed., p. 38.
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