of all people when it comes to prophethood. They formed their ideas not from any verified knowledge of the prophets’ truthfulness, the signs and proofs they produced, or the qualities that mark them out, but only by drawing an analogy with dreams. Hence they treated prophethood as subject to the same possibilities that befall a sleeper—dreams, fanciful images, and the hallucinations that visit people of a melancholic temperament.

This outlook is found in the great majority of Aristotle’s followers. The later ones among them—such as Ibn Sina—went further, adding the prophet’s ability to act upon the very matter of the universe, prompted by reports of actual extraordinary feats that had reached him, feats unknown to the earlier philosophers. For Aristotle’s knowledge was confined to what his own people, the Greeks, possessed; and they are a nation descended from Japheth who had not