 Avicenna lived his philosophy, and his desire to communicate it beyond what his personal circumstances required, as an intellectual in the public eye, is manifest in the various compositional styles and different registers of language that he used. He wrote with the purpose of reaching all layers of (literate) society, but also with an eye to posterity. His reach was as global in its aspirations as his system was all-encompassing in its comprehensiveness; and history bore him out. 