By a “transcendental dialectic” as subtle as Kant’s, the Moslem mystic argued that reason leads to universal doubt, intellectual bankruptcy, moral deterioration, and social collapse. Seven centuries before Hume, al-Ghazali reduced reason to the principle of causality, and causality to mere sequence: all that we perceive is that B regularly follows A, not that A causes B. Philosophy, logic, science, cannot prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul; only direct intuition can assure us of these beliefs, without which no moral order, and therefore no civilization, can survive.
