Machine summary:
In the first penod, which extends from 1901 to about 1908, Iqbal conceives of God as Eternal Beauty, existing in independence of, and prior to, particulars and yet being revealed in them all.
This Platonic conception, as interpreted by Plotinus, · adopted, by the early Muslim scholastics and adapted to pantheism by the pantheistic mystics, came down to Iqbal as a long tradition in Persian and Urdu poetry, and was supplemented by his study of the English romantic poets.
To begin with, as we have noted, he regards beauty as eternal and ~s the efficient and final cause of all love, all desire and all movement But in the second period there is a change in this position.
God, the ultimate reality, is the Absolute Self, the Supreme Ego. H1 is no longer to be conceived as Eternal Beauty-as block reality.
He is to e regarded as an ego, because like the human self, He is " an organising rinciple of unity, a synthesis which holds together and focalises the ~pensing dispositions of His living organism for a constructive purpose.
and perfectly creative, all-powerful movement, are we to say, with Brown ing, that he is also all-good, or, with Schopenhauer, that He is all-evil " The issue, " says Iqbal, 11 cannot be finally decided at the present stag of our knowledge of the Universe.
and object to regarding omniscience as fore-knowledge of a reorczined reality and to applying the idea of serial time both to God id to the finite self-and all this for exactly the same reasons.