Texts of Islam

Oriental Mysticism: Part V. The Study of Man: Chapter II. Of the Origin and Animal Development of Man

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is a 19th-century scholarly exposition of Islamic Sufi cosmology and philosophical anthropology, drawn from E.H. Palmer's translation and analysis of medieval Islamic mystical thought. The text argues that the human being ("Lesser World") is a microcosmic mirror of the universe ("Greater World"), with both structured around four sources — in the cosmos these are God's nature, the Constructive Spirit, and the invisible and sensible worlds; in humans, male and female generation, and body and soul. A central claim is that Primal Intelligence and the Constructive Spirit are identical, meaning human intellectual development is literally a return to divine origin — the circle from God back to God — which Palmer uses to explain the Hadith attributing a vision of God to a vision of Mohammed. The text then applies this macrocosm-microcosm framework concretely to embryology, tracing fetal development month by month through mineral, vegetable, and animal stages that recapitulate the three kingdoms of nature, with astrology (the Sun and Jupiter) marking developmental thresholds. It closes with a faculty psychology enumerating ten senses — five external and five internal (including imagination, memory, and reflection) — and two classes of motive power (lust and indignation), framing these as the animal faculties humans share with other creatures before a promised chapter on distinctly spiritual and intellectual capacities. The work is notable for treating Islamic mystical and scientific thought as a coherent philosophical system worthy of serious comparative analysis, rather than as exotic curiosity.

Oriental Mysticism: Part V. The Study of Man: Chapter II. Of the Origin and Animal Development of Man

Related pages View as graph →