They had torn men loose from the ancestral custom of home to walk in new ways and see new things and hear new thoughts; and some broadening of view, some lessening in the intensity of the old one-sidedness, was the inevitable result.
The fundamental thought is with him the unsatisfactoriness of abstraction or one-sidedness.
Without forgetting that Augustine was partly a symptom and only in part a cause - without committing ourselves to the one-sidedness of the great-man method of construing history - we must do justice to his supreme greatness.
In all that he said and did he was the son of the people, who had not been broken to the usual social and academic discipline; hence his roughness, his one-sidedness, and his exaggerations; but he is always vigorous, and often brilliant and original.
Thus, alike at Bagdad and at Cordova, Arabian philosophy represents the temporary victory of exotic ideas and of subject races over the theological one-sidedness of Islam, and the illiterate simplicity of the early Saracens.