In our volume we give some of Averroes' most celebrated commentaries, as typifying the culmination of Moorish culture. We give also, as its opening note, the speech with which Tarik, the first conqueror of Spain, in the year A.D. 711 led his army to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and began the attack upon the earlier Christian inhabitants. This speech does not, however, preserve the actual words of Tarik; it only presents the tradition of them as preserved by the Moorish historian Al Maggari, who wrote in Africa long after the last of the Moors had been driven out of Spain. In Al Maggari's day the older Arabic traditions of exact service had quite faded. The Moors had become poets and dreamers instead of scientists and critical historians. The very name of Al Maggari's history may be accepted as typifying its character. He called it "Breath of Perfumes."
The first to preach the resurrection were the prophets of Israel after Moses, then the Evangelical Christians, then the Sabians, whose religion has been called by Ibn-Hazm the oldest in the world. The reason so many founders of religion established this dogma was because they supposed this belief would moralize men and induce them to be virtuous in their own interests. I do not quarrel with Al Ghazali or Motecallemin for saying that the soul is immortal, but I object to the idea that the soul is a mere accident, and that a man can take again the body which has fallen into decay. No, he may take another, similar to the first, but that which has been dead can not return to life. These two bodies are only one, viewed as a species, but they are two in number. Aristotle has said in the last lines of his "Generation and Corruption": "A body once corrupted can never become the same again; it can never return as an individual whole, but it can return to the specific variety of which it is a part. When air separates from water or water separates from air, each of these substances can not become again the thing it was, but must return to its own species."
How have we come to adopt these tales of the creation? Through habit. Just as a man inured to poison can take it with impunity, so a man used to them from childhood can accept the most unbelievable opinions. Therefore the opinions of the masses are only formed through habit. The people believe that which they hear incessantly repeated. And that is why the power of religion is so much stronger than that of philosophy, for it is not accustomed to hearing the opposite of its belief, a thing which happens very often to philosophy: So one sees frequently, nowadays, men who, having entered suddenly into the study of the speculative sciences, lose the religious beliefs which they have only held through habit, and become _zendihs_ (infidels).