  That Maimonides is influenced by earlier Islamic writings on overflow and active intellect is certain. What is uncertain, though, is how all the details of these ideas play out exactly in his own ultimate view of creation. Maimonides' own views on the issues related to creation—the necessitation of creation, the role of will, and the possibility of eternality—are, as we have already said, subject to much debate, and for good reason given how many different things he says about these subjects. Given the complexity of Maimonides' view of creation one must be careful not to make too many assumptions about what exactly is entailed by the Maimonidean “overflow” view. Not only can one not take Maimonides' talk of “overflow” as automatically committing him to the eternal emanation view espoused by Avicenna, but, one can't, it seems, be too sure of what it means at all—even in Avicenna. In this spirit, we might cite al-Farabi's own reminder of the vicissitudes of language in trying to explain the nature of the world's deepest underpinnings. Al-Farabi warns of taking cosmological spatial languages of “higher and lower ” too literally, and offers the same warning for the language of “overflow”: