It has become quite a fashion with modern, oriental scholarship to trace the chain of influences. Such a procedure has certainly great historical value, provided it does not make us ignore the fundamental fact, that the human mind possesses an independent individuality, and, acting on its own initiative, can gradually evolve out of itself, truths which may have been anticipated by other minds ages ago. No idea can seize a people's soul unless, in some sense, it is the people's own. External influences may wake it up from its deep unconscious slumber; but they cannot - , so to speak, create it out of nothing.
Much has been written about the origin of Persian Suifiism; and, in almost all cases, explorers of this .most interesting field of research have exercised their ingenuity in discovering the various channels through which the basic ideas of Sufiism might have travelled - from one place to another. They seem completely to have ignored the principle, that the full significance of a phenomenon in the intellectual evolution of a people, can only be comprehended in the light of those preexisting intellectual, political, and social conditions