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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
himself before man is indicative of the divinity of the soul to whom the human incarnation furnishes the coveted opportunity to become like Gods.
As pointed out earlier, the cause of bondage, suffering and hell is the pursuit of good and evil of things; hence the kingdom of hell and evil is said to have been conferred on Satan as the custodian of that kind of knowledge. Again, since the tendency of intellect is in the direction of doubt, in the first instance, and not in that of faith, the Evil One is said to be the enemy of the faithful. For the same reason, he is said to 'go to and fro,' and walk up and down' in the earth (Job, I. 7). The emphasis is on doubt which sways the Will now in one direction, and again in another. Dhu'l-karnein, the mythical person about whom Mahomedan commentators have ventured all sorts of fanciful speculations, is simply the intellect personified as an incarnated embodiment of Evil and Power. He is a wanderer, belongs to the class of horned beings, and reaches the con fines of the Eust and the West. He is also said to have reached the place where the sun sets, and to bave found it to set in a spring of black mud. Here, the horns are indicative of the evil tendency, the confines of the East and the West' refer to the entirety of the field of knowledge of good and evil, and 'wandering' suggests search for experience. The end of intellectualism is the discovery of the fact that 'the sun sets in a pool of black mud.' As the Sun is the symbol of Spirit and the pool of black mud of matter, the discovery of Dhu'l-karnein is indicative of the nature of the two kinds of substance, the jiva and ajiva, which are the final causes of the universe.
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