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I asked cautiously, not wishing to make too evident the fact that my principal had given me no information respecting his case. "A week to-day," he replied. "The fons et origo mali was a hansom-cab which upset me opposite the Law Courts sent me sprawling in the middle of the road. My own fault, of course at least, the cabby said so, and I suppose he knew. But that was no consolation to me."
If truth be the universal fons et origo, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth, he concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very entrance of the harbor. Yet in spite of this rather bad form of irrationality, Mr.
Gabirol nowhere betrays his Jewishness in the "Fons Vitæ." He never quotes a Biblical verse or a Talmudic dictum. He does not make any overt attempt to reconcile his philosophical views with religious faith. The treatise is purely speculative as if religious dogma nowhere existed to block one's way or direct one's search.
'You are indebted to him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Fons, on your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you pay double for the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more than three livres two sous. "'But I don't go by land, said I. "'You may if you please, replied the commissary.
The fons errorum in M. Comte's later speculations is this inordinate demand for "unity" and "systematization."
That Bahya did not borrow more from the "Fons Vitæ" than he did is due no doubt to the difference in temperament between the two men. Bahya is not a mystic.
This peculiar circumstance will help us to get an inkling of the reason for the neglect of Gabirol's philosophy in the Jewish community. It is clear that a work which, like the "Fons Vitæ," made it possible for its author to be regarded as a Mohammedan or even a Christian, cannot have had the Jewish imprint very deeply stamped upon its face.
Gabirol's high flights in the "Fons Vitæ" have little in common with Bahya's modest and brief outline of the familiar doctrines of the existence, unity and attributes of God, for which he claims no originality, and which serve merely as the background for his contribution to religious ethics.
The very foundation of poetry is good sense, if we may allow Horace to be a judge of the art. "Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons." "Such judgment is the ground of writing well." And if so, we have reason to believe that the same man who writes well can prescribe well, if he has applied himself to the study of both.
To judge from the extant fragments of the correspondence between Samuel ibn Tibbon and Maimonides, it would seem that both were true; that is that Samuel ibn Tibbon had no access to Gabirol's "Fons Vitæ," and that if he had had such access, Maimonides would have dissuaded him from translating it.
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