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The Second Discussion

Their impotence to show by demonstrative proof that the human soul is a spiritual substance which exists by itself and does not fill space, is neither body nor impressed on a body, is neither continuous with the body nor separated from the body, just as neither God nor the angels according to them is outside or inside the world

Ghazali says:

The discussion of this question demands the exposition of their theory about the animal and human faculties. s The animal faculties are divided according to them into motive and apprehensive, and the apprehensive are of two classes, the external and the internal. The external are the five senses, and these faculties are entities impressed on the bodies. b The internal are three in number. ? The first is the representative faculty in the foremost part of the brain behind the faculty of sight; in it the forms of the things seen remain after the closing of the eye, and in this faculty there is impressed and collected what the five senses bring to it, and it is therefore called the common sense. If it did not exist, a man who saw white honey and perceives its sweetness by taste could not, when he saw it a second time, apprehend its sweetness as long as he had not tasted it as he did the first time, but in the common sense there is something which judges that this white is the sweetness, and there is in it, no doubt, a judging element for which both these things, colour and sweetness, are brought together and which determines then that when the one is present the other must be there too. ‘

The second is the estimative faculty which is that which apprehends the intentions’ whereas the first apprehends the forms;^ and the meaning of ‘forms’ is ‘that which cannot be without matter, i. e. body’, whereas the meaning of ‘intentions’ is ‘that which does not require a body for its existence, although it can happen that it occurs in a body’-like enmity and concord. The sheep perceives the colour, shape, and appearance of the wolf, which are only found in body, but it perceives also that the wolf is its enemy, and the lamb perceives the shape and colour of its mother and then perceives its love and tenderness, and for this reason it flees from the wolf while it walks behind the mother. Discord and concord need not be in bodies like colour and shape, but it sometimes happens that they occur in bodies. This faculty differs from the first, and is located in the posterior ventricle of the brains

The third faculty is called in animals the imaginative and in man the cogitative, b and its nature is to combine the sensible forms and to compose the intentions with the farms:’ it is located in the middle ventricle between the place where the forms are kept and that where the intentions are retained. s Because of this man can imagine a horse that flies and a being with the head of a man and the body of a horse, and other combinations, although he has never seen such things. It is more appropriate, as will be shown, to join this faculty with the motive faculties than with the apprehensive. ‘ The places where these faculties are located are known only through medicine, for if a lesion occurs to one of these ventricles the faculties become defective.

Further, the philosophers affirm that the faculty on which the forms of sensible things are impressed through the five senses retains these forms so that they do not disappear after their reception, for one thing does not retain another through the faculty by which it receives it, for water receives without retaining, while wax receives through its wetness and retains through its dryness, by contrast with water. “ Through this consideration that which retains is different from that which receives, and this is called the retentive faculty. And in the same way intentions are impressed on the estimative faculty, and a faculty retains them, which is called the memorative. ‘ Through this consideration, these internal perceptions, when the imaginative faculty is joined to them, become five in number, like the external faculties.

The motive faculties’ form two classes, in so far as they are only stimulating motion or executing motion and acting; the stimulating motive faculty is the impulsive and appetitive faculty; this is the faculty which stimulates the acting motive power to move when, in the representative faculty which we have mentioned, ‘ there is inscribed the form of something to be sought or avoided. The stimulating faculty has two branches, one called concupiscent which excites to a movement, through which there is an approach to the things represented as necessary or useful in a search for pleasure, and the irascible which excites to a movement through which the thing represented as injurious or mischievous is removed as one seeks to master it. Through this faculty the complete determination to act is effected, which is called will.

The motive faculty which itself executes movement is a faculty which is diffused in the nerves and muscles and has the function of contracting the muscles and drawing the tendons and ligaments which are in contact with the limbs in the direction where this faculty resides, or of relaxing and extending them so that the ligaments and tendons move in the opposite direction . These are the animal faculties of the soul as described in a summary way, without the details.

And as regards the soul which thinks things and is called the rational or discursive soul by the philosophers (and by ‘discursive’ is meant ‘rational’, because discourse is the most typical external operation of reason and therefore the intellective soul takes its name from it), it has two faculties, a knowing and an acting, and both are called intellect, though equivocally. b And the acting faculty is one which is a principle moving man’s body towards the well-ordered human arts, whose order derives from the deliberation proper to man. The knowing faculty, which is called the speculative, is one which has the function of perceiving the real natures of the intelligibles in abstraction from matter, place, and position; and these are the universal concepts which the theologians call sometimes conditions and sometimes modes, ‘ and which the philosophers call abstract universals.

The soul has therefore two faculties on two sides: the speculative faculty on the side of the angels, since through it it receives from the angels knowledge of realities (and this faculty must always be receptive for the things coming from above); and the practical faculty on the inferior side, which is the side of the body which it directs and whose morals it improves. This faculty must rule over all the other bodily faculties, and all the others must be trained by it and subjected to it. It must not itself be affected or influenced by them, but they must be influenced by it, in such a way that there will not through the bodily attributes occur in the soul subservient dispositions, called vices, but that this faculty may remain predominant and arouse in the soul dispositions called virtues.

This is a summary of the human vital faculties, which they distinguished and about which they spoke at great length, and we have omitted the vegetative faculties, since there is no need to mention them as they are not connected with our subject. Nothing of what we have mentioned need be denied on religious grounds, for all these things are observable facts whose habitual course has been provided by God. We only want now to refute their claim that the soul being an essence subsistent by itself, can be known by demonstrative rational proofs, and we do not seek to refute those who say that it is impossible that this knowledge should derive from God’s power or who believe that the religious law is opposed to this; for perhaps it will be clear at the dividing on the Day of Judgement that the Holy Law regards it as true. However, we reject their claim that this can be known by mere reason and that the religious law is not necessary for its knowledge, and we shall ask them to produce their proofs and indeed they have many.

I say:

All this is nothing but an account of the theory of the philosophers about these faculties and his conception of them; only he followed Avicenna, who distinguished himself from the rest of the philosophers by assuming in the animal another faculty than the imaginative; which he calls the estimative faculty and which replaces the cogitative faculty in man, and he says that the ancients applied the term ‘imaginative faculty’ to the estimative, and when they do this then the imaginative faculty in the animal is a substitute for the cogitative faculty in man and will be located in the middle ventricle of the brain. And when the term ‘imaginative’ is applied to the faculty which apprehends shape, this is said to reside in the foremost part of the brain. There is no contradiction in the fact that the retentive and memorative faculties should both be in the posterior part of the brain, for retaining and memory are two in function, but one in their substratum. And what appears from the theory of the ancients is that the imaginative faculty in the animal is that which determines that the wolf should be an enemy of the sheep and that the sheep should be a friend of the lamb, for the imaginative faculty is a perceptive ones and it necessarily possesses judgement, and there is no need to introduce another faculty. What Avicenna says would only be possible if the imaginative faculty were not perceptive; and there is no sense in adding another faculty to the imaginative in the animal, especially in an animal which possesses many arts by nature, for its representations are not derived from the senses and seem to be perceptions intermediary between the intellectual and the sensible forms, and the question of these forms is concisely treated in De sensu et sensato, and we shall leave this subject here and return to Ghazali’s objections against the philosophers.

Ghazali says:

The first proof is that they say that intellectual cognitions inhere in human souls, and are limited and have units which cannot be divided, and therefore their substratum must also be indivisible and every body is divisible, and this proves that the substratum of the cognitions is something incorporeal. ‘ One can put this into a logical form according to the figures of logic, but the easiest way is to say that if the substratum of knowledge is a divisible body, then the knowledge which inheres in it must be divisible too; but the inherent knowledge is not divisible, and therefore the substratum is not a body: and this is a mixed hypothetical syllogism in which the consequent is denied, from which there follows the denial of the antecedent in all cases; and there is no doubt about the validity of this figure of the syllogism, nor again about its premisses, for the major is that everything inherent in something divisible is necessarily divisible, the divisibility of its substratum being assumed, and this is a major about which one cannot have any doubt. The minor is that knowledge as a unity inheres in man and is not divided, for its infinite division is impossible, and if it is limited, then it comprises no doubt units which cannot be divided; and in short, when we know a thing, we cannot assume that a part can cease and a part remain, because it has no parts.

The objection rests on two points. It may be said:

‘How will you refute those who say that the substratum of knowledge is an atom in space which cannot be divided, as is known from the theory of the theologians? ‘ And then there remains nothing to be said against it but to question its possibility, and to ask how all that is known can exist in one atom, whereas all the atoms which surround this one are deprived of it although they are near to it. But to question its possibility has no value, as one can also turn it against the doctrine of the philosophers, by asking how the soul can be one single thing which is not in space or outside the body, either continuous with it or separated from it. However, we should not stress this first point, for the discussion of the problem of the atom is lengthy, ‘ and the philosophers have geometrical proofs against it whose discussion is intricate, and one of their many arguments is to ask: ‘Does one of the sides of an atom between two atoms touch the identical spot the other side touches or not? ‘ The former is impossible, because its consequence would be that the two sides coincided, whereas a thing that is in contact with another is in contact, and the latter implies the affirmation of a plurality and divisibility, and the solution of this difficulty is long and we need not go deeper into it and will now turn to the other point.

Your affirmation that everything which inheres in a body must be divisible is contradicted by what you say of the estimative faculty of the sheep where the hostility of the wolf is concerned, for in the judgement of one single thing no division can be imagined, since hostility has no part, so that one part of it might be perceived and another neglected. Still, according to you this perception takes place in a bodily faculty, and the souls of animals are impressed on their bodies and do not survive death, and all the philosophers agree about this. And if it is possible for you to regard as divisible that which is perceived by the five senses, by the common sense and by the faculty which retains the forms, this is not possible for you in the case of those intentions which are not supposed to be in matter.

And if it be said: ‘Absolute hostility, abstracted from matter, is not perceived by the sheep, but only the hostility of the definite individual wolf connected with its bodily individuality and shape, and only the rational faculty perceives universal realities abstracted from matter’-we answer that the sheep perceives, indeed, the colour and shape of the wolf and then its hostility, and if the colour is impressed on the faculty of sight and the same happens to the shape, and it is divided through the division of the substratum of sight, I ask, ‘through what does the sheep perceive the hostility? If through a body, hostility is divided, and I should like to know what this perception is when it is divided, whether it is a perception of a part of the hostility-and how can it have a part? -or whether every part is a perception of the hostility and the hostility is known many times as its perception is fixed in every part of the substratum. “ And thus this problem is a difficulty for their proof and must be solved.

And if it is said: ‘This is an argument against the intelligibles, but the intelligibles cannot be denied, ‘ and as long as you cannot call in question the premisses that knowledge cannot be divided and that what cannot be divided cannot be in a divisible body, you can have no doubt about the consequence’--the answer is: ‘We have only written this book to show the incoherence and contradictions in the doctrine of the philosophers, and such a contradiction arises over this question, since through it either your theory about the rational soul is refuted or your theory about the estimative faculty. ‘

Further we say that this contradiction shows that they are not conscious of the point, which confounds their syllogism, and it may well be that the origin of their confusion lies in their statement that knowledge is impressed on a body in the way colour is impressed on a coloured thing, the colour being divided with the division of the coloured thing, so that knowledge must be divided by the division of its substratum. The mistake lies in the term ‘impression’, since it may well be that the relation of knowledge to its substratum is not like that of colour to the coloured object so that it could be regarded as being spread over it, diffused over its sides and divisible with it; knowledge might well be related to its substratum in another way which would not allow its divisibility although its substratum was divisible; yes, its relation to it might be like that of perception of the hostility to the body, ; and the relations of the attributes to their substrata do not all follow the same pattern and they are not all known to us with all their details so that we could rely on our knowledge, and to judge such a question without a perfect comprehension of all the details of the relation is an unreliable judgement. In short, we do not deny that what the philosophers say gives reasonable and predominant reasons for belief, but we deny that it is known by an evidence which excludes error and doubt. And it is in this way that a doubt about it may be raised.

I say:

When the premisses which the philosophers use are taken in an indefinite way the consequence Ghazali draws is valid. For our assertion that every attribute inhering in a body which is divisible is divisible through the divisibility of the body can be understood in two ways. First it may be meant that the definition of every part of this attribute which inheres in the particular body is identical with the definition of the whole: for instance the white inhering in the white body, for every part of whiteness which inheres in the individual body has one and the same definition as the whole of whiteness in this body. ‘ Secondly, it may be meant that the attribute is attached to the body without a specific shape, ‘ and this attribute again is divided through the division of the body not in such a way that the intension of the definition of the whole is identical with the intension of the definition of every part-for instance, the faculty of sight which exists in one who sees-but in such a way that it is subject to a difference in intensity according to the greater and lesser receptivity of the substratum, and therefore the power of sight is stronger in the healthy and the young than in the sick and the old. What is common to those two classes is that they are composed of individuals, i. e. that they are divided by quantity and not by quiddity, i. e. that either the uniqueness of the definition and the quiddity remains or that they are annulled. < Those which can be divided quantitatively into any particular part are one by definition and quiddity and those which cannot be divided into any individual part whatevers only differ from the first class in a degree of intensity, for the action of the part which has vanished is not identical with that of the part which remains, since the action of the part which has vanished in weak sight does not act in the same way as the weak sight. b Those two classes have it in common that colour also cannot be divided by the division of its substratum into any particular part whatever and keep its definition absolutely intact, but the division terminates in a particular part in which the colour, when it is distributed to it, disappears. ? The only thing which keeps its distribution always intact is the nature of the continuous in so far as it is continuous, i. e. the form of continuity.

When this premiss is assumed in this way, namely by holding that everything which is divisible in either of these two classes has a body as its substratum, it is self-evident, and the converse, that everything which is in a body is divisible according to one of these two classes, is evident too; and when this is verified, then the converse of its opposite is true also, namely that what is not divisible according to one of these two classes cannot be in a body. If to these premisses there is added further what is evident in the case of the universal intelligibles, namely that they are not divisible in either of the two ways, since they are not individual forms, it is clear that there follows from this that neither is the substratum of these intelligibles a body, nor is the faculty which has the power to produce them a faculty in a body; and it follows that their substratum is a spiritual faculty which perceives itself and other things.

But Ghazali took first the one of these two classes and denied that the universal intelligibles belong to it, and then made his objection by means of the second class, which exists in the faculty of sight and in the imaginative faculty, and in doing this he committed a sophism; but the science of the soul is too profound and too elevated to be apprehended by dialectics. ‘

Besides, Ghazali has not adduced the argument in the manner in which Avicenna brought it out, for Avicenna built his argument only on the following: If the intelligibles inhered in a body, they would have to be either in an indivisible part of it, or in a divisible part. Then he refuted the possibility of their being in an indivisible part of the body, and after this refutation he denied that, if the intellect inhered in a body, it could inhere in an indivisible part of it. Then he denied that it could inhere in a divisible part of it and so he denied that it could inhere in body at all.

And when Ghazali denied one of these two divisions he said it was not impossible that there might be another form of relation between the intellect and the body than this, but it is quite clear that if the intellect is related to the body there can exist only two kinds of relation, either to a divisible or to an indivisible substratum.

This proof can be completed; by saying that the intellect is not attached to any animal faculty in the way the form is attached to its substratum, for the denial of its being attached to the body implies necessarily the denial of its being attached to any animal faculty which is attached to the body. For, if the intellect were attached to any of the animal faculties, it would as Aristotle says be unable to act except through this faculty, but then this faculty would not perceive the intellect. This is the argument on which Aristotle himself bases his proof that the intellect is separate. ‘

We shall now mention the second objection which Ghazali raises against the second proof of the philosophers, but we must first observe that their proofs, when they are taken out of their context in those sciences to which they belong, can have at the most the value of dialectical arguments. The only aim of this book of ours is therefore to ascertain the value of the arguments in it which are ascribed to the two parties, and to show to which of the two disputants the terms ‘incoherence’ and ‘contradiction’ would be applied with greater justification.

Ghazali says:

The second proof is that the philosophers say:

‘If the knowledge of one single intellectual notion, i. e. a notion abstracted from matter, were impressed on matter as accidents are impressed on bodily substances, their division would necessarily follow the division of the body, as has been shown before. And if it is not impressed on matter nor spread out over it, and the term ‘impression’ is rejected, let us then use another term and say, ‘Is there a relation between knowledge and the knower? ‘

It is absurd to deny the relation, for if there did not exist a relation, why would it be better to know something than not to know it ? And if there is a relation, this relation can take place in three ways; either there will be a relation to every part of the substratum, or to some parts to the exclusion of others, or to no part whatever. It is false to say that the notion has no relation to any individual part of the substratum; for if there is no relation to the units, there can be no relation to the aggregate, since a collection of disconnected units is not an aggregate, but itself disconnected. It is false to say that there might be a relation to some part, for the part that was not related would have nothing to do with this notion and therefore would not come into the present discussion. And it is false to say that every part of the substratum might be related to it, for if it were related in all its parts to this notion in its totality, then each single part of the substratum would possess not a part of the notion but the notion in its totality, and this notion would therefore be repeated infinitely in act; on the other hand, if every part were related to this notion in a special way, different from the relation of another part, then this notion would be divided in its content; and we have shown that the content of a notion, one and the same in every respect, is indivisible; if the relation, however, of each part were related to another part of the notion, then this notion would clearly be divided, and this is impossible. And from this it is clear that the things perceived which are in the five senses are only images of the particular divided forms, and that the meaning of perception is the arrival of the image of the thing perceived in the soul of the perceiver, so that every part of the image of the thing perceived is related to a part of the bodily organ.

And the objection against this is what has been said before. For by replacing the term ‘impression’ by ‘relation’ the difficulty is not removed which arises over the question what of the hostility of the wolf is impressed on the estimative faculty of the sheep, as we have mentioned; for the perception is no doubt related to it, and with this relation there must occur what you have said, and hostility is not a measurable thing possessing a measurable quantity, so that its image could be impressed on a measurable body and its parts related to the parts of that body, and the fact that the shape of the wolf is measurable does not remove the difficulty, for the sheep perceives something else as well as the shape, namely the adversity, opposition, and hostility, and this hostility, added to the shape through the hostility, has no magnitude, and still the sheep perceives it through a body having magnitude; and that is necessarily a difficulty in this proof as well as in the first.

And if someone says: ‘Do you not refute these proofs by asserting that knowledge inheres in a spatial indivisible body, namely the atom? We answer: "No, for the discussion of the atom is connected with geometrical questions the solution and discussion of which is long and arduous. Further, such a theory would not remove the difficulty, for the power and the will ought then also to be in this atom. For man acts, and this acting cannot be imagined without power and will, which would also be in this atom; and the power to write resides in the hand and the fingers, but knowledge of it does not reside in the hand, for it does not cease when the hand is cut off; nor is the will in the hand, for often a man wants to write, when his hand has withered and he is not able to do so, not because his will has gone, but because his power has."

I say:

This discussion is not an independent one, but only a complement to the first, for in the first discussion it was merely assumed that knowledge is not divided by the division of its substratum, and here an attempt is made to prove this by making use of a division into three categories. And he repeats the same objection, which presented itself to him because he did not carry out the division of matter in the two senses in which it can be taken. For when the philosophers denied that the intellect could be divided through the division of its substratum in the way in which accidents are divided through the division of their substratum, and there exists another way of division in body which must be applied to the bodily functions of perception, they had a doubt about these faculties. The proof is only completed by denying that the intellect can be divided in either of these ways, and by showing that everything which exists in a body is necessarily divisible in one of them.

For of those things in the body which are divided in this second way, i. e. which are not by definition divisible through the division of their substratum’ it was sometimes doubted whether they are separable from their substratum or not. For we see it happen that most parts of the substratum decay and still this kind of existence, i. e. the individual perception, does not decay; and it was thought that it might happen that, just as the form does not disappear through the disappearance of one or more parts of its substratum, in the same way the form might not disappear when the whole was destroyed, and that the decay of the act of the form through its substratum was similar to the decay of the act of the artisan through the deterioration of his tools. And therefore Aristotle says that if an old man had the eye of a young man, he would see as well as the young one, meaning that it is thought that the decrepitude which occurs to the sight of the old man does not happen because of the decay of the faculty but because of the decay of the organs. And he tries to prove this by the inactivity of the organ or the greater part of it in sleep, fainting, drunkenness, and the illnesses through which the perceptions of the senses decay, whereas it is quite certain that the faculties are not destroyed in these conditions. And this is still more evident in those animals which live when they are cut in two; and most plants have this peculiarity, although they do not possess the faculty of perceptions

But the discussion of the soul is very obscure, and therefore God has only given knowledge of it to those who are deeply learned; and therefore God, answering the question of the masses about this problem, says that this kind of question is not their concern, saying: ‘They will ask thee of the spirit. Say: “The spirit comes at the bidding of my Lord, and ye are given but a little knowledge thereof. “ ‘And the comparison of death with sleep in this question is an evident proof that the soul survives, since the activity of the soul ceases in sleep through the inactivity of its organ, but the existence of the soul does not cease, and therefore it is necessary that its condition in death should be like its condition in sleep, for the parts follow the same rule? And this is a proof which all can understand and which is suitable to be believed by the masses, and will show the learned the way in which the survival of the soul is ascertained. And this is evident from the Divine Words: ‘God takes to Himself souls at the time of their death; and those who do not die in their sleep.

Ghazali says:

The third proof is that they say that, if knowledge resided in a part of the body, the knower would be this part to the exclusion of all the other parts of man, but it is said of man that it is he who knows, and knowledge is an attribute of man in his totality without reference to any specified place. ‘ But this is nonsense, for he is spoken of as seeing and hearing and tasting, and the animals also are described in this way; but this does not mean that the perception of the senses is not in the body, it is only a metaphorical expression like the expression that someone is in Baghdad although he is in a part of the whole of Baghdad, not in the whole of Baghdad, the reference however being made to the whole.

I say:

When it is conceded that the intellect is not related to one of man’s organs-and this has already been proved, since it is not self-evident -it follows that its substratum is not a body, and that our assertion that man knows is not analogous to our assertion that he sees. For since it is self-evident that he sees through a particular organ, it is clear that when we refer sight to man absolutely, the expression is allowed according to the custom of the Arabs and other people. ; And since there is no particular organ for the intellect, it is clear that, when we say of him that he knows, this does not mean that a part of him knows. However, how he knows is not clear by itself, for it does not appear that there is an organ or a special place in an organ which possesses this special faculty, as is the case with the imaginative faculty and the cogitative and memorative faculties, the localization of which in parts of the brain is known.

Ghazali says:

The fourth proof is that, if knowledge inhered for instance in a part of the heart or the brain, then necessarily ignorance, its opposite, might reside in another part of the heart or the brain, and it would then be possible that a man should both know and not know one and the same thing at the same time. And since this is impossible, it is proved that the place of ignorance and the place of knowledge are identical, and that this place is one single place in which it is impossible to bring opposites together. But if this place were divisible, it would not be impossible that ignorance should reside in one part of it and knowledge in another, for a thing’s being in one place is not contradicted by its opposite’s being in another, just as there may be pie baldness in one and the same horse, and black and white in a single eye, but in two spots. This, however, does not follow for the senses, as there is no opposite to their perception; but sometimes they perceive and sometimes not, and there exists between them the sole opposition of being and not-being, and we can surely say that someone perceives through some parts, for instance the eye and the ear, and not through the other parts of his body; and there is no contradiction in this. And you cannot evade this difficulty by saying that knowing is the opposite of not-knowing, and that judgment is something common to the whole body; for it is impossible that the judgment should be in any other place but in the place of its cause, and the knower is the place in which the knowledge resides; and if the term is applied to the whole, this is a metaphor, as when we say that a man is in Baghdad, although he is in a part of it, and when we say that a man sees although we know with certainty that the judgment of his sight’ does not reside in his foot and hand but is peculiar to his eye. The judgments are opposed to each other in the same way as their causes, and the judgments are limited to the place where the causes reside. And one cannot evade the difficulty by saying that the place disposed to receive the knowledge and the ignorance of man is one single place in which they can oppose each other, for according to you theologians every body which possesses life can receive knowledge and ignorance, and no other condition but life is imposed, and all the parts of the body are according to you equivalent so far as the reception of knowledge is concerned.

The objection to this is that it can be turned against you philosophers in the matter of desire, longing, and will; these things exist in animals as well as in men, and are things impressed on the body, but it is impossible that one should flee from the object one longs for and that repugnance and craving in regard to one and the same thing should exist in him together, the desire being in one place and the repugnance in another. Still, that does not prove that they do not inhere in bodies, for these potencies, although they are many and distributed over different organs, have one thing that joins them together, namely the sou1, which is common both to animal and to man; and since this cohesive entity forms a unity, the mutually contradictory relations enter into relation with it in turns. This does not prove that the soul is not impressed upon the body, as is quite clear in the case of animals.

I say:

The only logical consequence of what he says here in the name of the philosophers is that knowledge does not inhere in the body in the way colour and in general all accidents do; it does not, however, follow that it does not inhere in body at all. For the impossibility that the place of knowledge should receive the knowledge and want of knowledge of a thing necessarily demonstrates its identity, since opposites cannot inhere in one and the same place, and this kind of impossibility is common to all attributes, whether perceptive or nonperceptive. But what is peculiar to the receptivity of knowledge is that it can perceive opposites together; and this can only happen through an indivisible apprehension in an indivisible substratum, for he who judges is of necessity one, and therefore it is said that knowledge of opposites is one and the same. ‘ And this kind of receptivity is of necessity proper to the soul alone. What is indeed proved by the philosophers is that this is the condition of the common sense when it exercises its judgement over the five senses, and this common sense is according to the philosophers something bodily. And therefore there is in this argument no proof that the intellect does not inhere in a body, for we have already said that there are two kinds of inherence, the inherence of non-perceptive attributes and that of perceptive.

And the objection Ghazali makes here is true, namely that the appetitive soul does not tend to opposites at the same time although it resides in the body. I do not know of any philosopher who has used this argument’ to establish the survival of the soul, unless he paid no attention to the philosophical doctrine that it is the characteristic of every perceptive faculty that in its perception two opposites cannot be joined, just as it is the peculiarity of contraries outside the soul that they cannot be together in one and the same substratum; and this is what the perceptive potencies have in common with the non-perceptive. It is proper to the perceptive faculties to judge coexisting contraries, one of them being known through knowledge of the others and it is proper to non-psychical potencies to be divided through the division of the body so that contraries can be in one body at the same time, though not in the same part. And since the soul is a substratum that cannot be divided in this way, contraries cannot be in it together, i. e. in two parts of the substratum.

Such arguments are all arguments of people who have not grasped the views of the philosophers about this problem. How little does a man understand, who gives it as a proof of the soul’s survival that it does not judge two opposites at the same time, for from this it follows only that the substratum of the soul is one, and not divided in the way the substratum of the accidents is divided; and it does not follow from the proof that the substratum is not divided in the way the substratum of the accidents is divided that the substratum is not divided at all.

Ghazali says:

The fifth proof is: If the intellect perceived the intelligibles through a bodily organ, it would not know its own self. But the consequent is impossible; therefore it knows its own self and the antecedent is impossible. We answer: It is conceded that from the exclusion of the contrary of the consequent the contrary of the antecedent follows, ‘ but only when the consequence of the antecedent has been previously established, and we say we do not concede the necessity of the consequence; and what is your proof?

And if it is said that the proof is that, because sight is in the body, sight does not attach itself to sight, and the seeing is not seen nor the hearing heard, and so on with respect to the other senses; and if the intellect, too, could only perceive through body it could not perceive itself, but the intellect thinks itself just as it thinks other things, and it thinks that it thinks itself and that it thinks other things-we answer: What you assert is wrong on two points. The first is that according to us sight could be attached to itself, just as one and the same knowledge can be knowledge of other things and of itself, only in the usual course of events this does not happen; but according to us the interruption of the usual course of events is possible. The second, and this is the stronger argument, is for us to say that we concede this for the senses; but why, if this is impossible for some senses, is it impossible for others, and why is it impossible that there should be a difference in the behaviour of the senses with respect to perception although they are all in the body? just as sight differs from touch through the fact that touch, like taste, can only come to perceive by being in contact with the object touched, whereas separation from the object is a condition of sight, so that when the eyelids cover the eye it does not see the colour of the eyelid, ‘ not being at a distance from it. , But this difference does not necessitate that they should differ in their need to be in a body, and it is not impossible that there should be among the senses something called intellect that differs from the others in that it perceives itself.

I say:

The first objection, that the usual course of events might be interrupted so that sight might see itself, is an argument of the utmost sophistry and imposture, and we have discussed it already. As to the second objection, that it is not impossible that a bodily perception should perceive itself, this has a certain plausibility, but when the motive is known which led the philosophers to their assertion, then the impossibility of this supposition becomes clear, for perception is something which exists between the agent and the patient, and it consists of the perceiver and the perceived. It is impossible that a sense should be in one and the same respect its own agent and patient, and the duality of agent and patient in sense arises, as concerns its act, from the side of the form and, as concerns its passivity, from the side of the matter. But no composite can think itself, because if this were so, its essence would be different from that by which it thinks, for it would think only with a part of its essence; and since intellect and intelligible are identical, I if the composite thought its essence, the composite would become a simple, and the whole the part, and all this is impossible. When this is established here in this way, it is only a dialectical proof; but in the proper demonstrative order, i. e. preceded by the conclusions which ought to precede it, it can become a necessary one.

Ghazali says:

The sixth proof is that they say that, if the intellect perceived through a bodily organ like sight, it would be just as incapable of perceiving its own organ as the other senses; but it perceives the brain and the heart and what is claimed to be its organ, so that it is proved that it has no organ or substratum, for otherwise it would not perceive the brain and the heart.

We have the same kind of objection against this as against the preceding proof. We say it is not inconceivable that sight should perceive its subject, for that it does not perceive it is only what happens in the usual course of events. Or shall we rather say it is not impossible that the senses should differ individually in this respect, although it is common to them all to be impressed on bodies, as has been said before? And why do you say that what exists in a body cannot perceive the body, and how do you know its impossibility in all cases, since to make an infinite generalization from a finite number of individual cases has no logical validity? In logic it is stated, as an example of an inference made from one particular cause or many particular causes to all causes, that when we say, after learning it by induction through observing all the animals, ‘all animals move the lower jaw in masticating’, the crocodile has been neglected, since it moves the upper. ‘ The philosophers have only made the induction from the five senses, and found this known common feature in them and then judged that all the senses must be like this. But perhaps the intellect is another type of sense which stands in regard to the other senses as the crocodile stands to the other animals, and in this case there would be some senses which could perceive their substratum although they were corporeal and divisible, and other senses which could not do this; just as the senses can be divided into those which perceive the thing perceived without contact, like sight, and those which cannot perceive without contact, like taste and touch. Although, therefore, what the philosophers affirm creates a certain presumption, it does not afford reliable evidence.

But it may be said by the philosophers: We do not merely point to the enumeration of the senses but lay stress on a proof, and say that if the heart or the brain were the soul of man, he could never be unaware of them, and never for a moment not think of them, just as he is never unconscious of himself; for nobody’s self is ever unaware of itself, but it is always affirming itself in its soul, but as long as man has not heard any one speaking about the heart and the brain or has not observed them through the dissection of another man, he does not perceive them and does not believe in their existence. But if the intellect inhered in the body, it would necessarily either think or not think of this body continually; neither the one nor the other is the case, but it sometimes thinks of its body and sometimes does not. This can be proved by the fact that the perception which inheres in the substratum perceives that substratum either because of a relation between itself and the substratum-and one cannot imagine another relation between them than that of inherence-and then the perception must perceive its substratum continually, or this relation will not suffice; and in this case the perception can never perceive its substratum, since there can never occur another relation between them; just as because of the fact that it thinks itself, it thinks itself always and is not sometimes aware, sometimes unaware of itself.

But we answer: As long as a man is conscious of himself and aware of his soul, he is also aware of his body; indeed, the name, form, and shape of the heart are not well defined for him, but he regards his soul and self as a body to such an extent that he regards even his clothes and his house as belonging to his self, ‘ but the soul or the self which the philosophers mention has no relation to the house or the clothes. This primary attribution of the soul to the body is necessary for man, and his unconsciousness of the form and name of his soul is like his unconsciousness of the seat of smell, which is two excrescences in the foremost part of the brain resembling the nipples of the breast; still, everyone knows that he perceives smell with his body, but he does not represent the shape of the seat of this perception, nor does he define this seat, although he perceives that it is nearer to his head than to his heels, and, in relation to the whole of his head, nearer to the inside of his nose than to the inside of his ear. Man knows his soul in the same way, and he knows that the essence through which the soul exists is nearer to his heart and breast than to his foot, and he supposes that his soul will persist when he loses his foot, but he does not regard it as possible that his soul should persist when his heart is taken away. But what the philosophers say about his being sometimes aware of his body, sometimes not, is not true.

I say:

As to his objection against the assertion that a body or a bodily faculty cannot know itself, because the senses are perceptive faculties in bodies and do not know themselves, this assertion indeed is based on induction, and induction does not provide absolute evidence. ; As to Ghazali’s comparison of this to the induction which establishes that all animals move their lower jaw, this comparison is only valid in part. For the induction that all animals move their lower jaw is an imperfect one, because not all animals have been enumerated; whereas the man who assumes that no sense perceives itself has certainly made a complete induction, for there are no other senses than the five. ‘ But the judgement based on the observation of the senses that no perceptive faculty is in a body resembles the induction by which it is judged that all animals move their lower jaw; for, just as in the latter case not all the animals, in the former not all the perceptive faculties are enumerated?

As to his saying in the name of the philosophers that if the intellect were in the body, it would, when it perceives, perceive the body in which it is, this is a silly and inane assertion which is not made by the philosophers. It would only follow if everyone who perceived a thing had to perceive it together with its definition; but that is not so, for we perceive the soul and many other things without perceiving their definition. If, indeed, we perceived the definition of the soul together with its existence, we should of necessity know through its definition that it was in the body or that it was incorporeal; for, if it were in the body, the body would be necessarily included in its definition, and if it were not in the body, the body would not be included in the definition. And this is what one must believe about this problem.

As for Ghazali’s objection, that a man knows of his soul that it is in his body although he cannot specify in which part-this indeed is true, for the ancients had different opinions about its seat, but our knowledge that the soul is in the body does not mean that we know that it receives its existence through being in the body; this is not self-evident, and is a question about which the philosophers ancient as well as modern differ, for if the body serves as an instrument for the soul, the soul does not receive its existence through the body; but if the body is like a substratum for its accident; then the soul can only exist through the body.

Ghazali says:

The seventh proof. The philosophers say that the faculties which perceive through the bodily organs become tired through the long-continued performance of the act of perception, since the continuation of their action destroys the mixture of their elements and tires them, and in the same way excessive stimulation of the perceptive faculties makes them weak and often even corrupts them, so that afterwards they are not able to perceive something lighter and more delicate; so for instance a loud voice and a strong light hinder or corrupt the perception of a low voice and delicate objects of sight afterwards; and in fact the man who tastes something extremely sweet does not afterwards taste something less sweet. But the intellectual faculty behaves in the opposite way; a long observation of intelligibles does not tire it, and the perception of important necessary truths gives it strength for the perception of easy observations and does not weaken it, and if sometimes tiredness may befall it, this happens because it makes use of and gets assistance from the imaginative faculty, so that the organ of the imaginative faculty becomes weary and no longer serves the intellect.

Our objection to this follows the same line as before, and we say that it may well be that the bodily senses differ in this; and what is true for some of them need not be true for others-yes, it may be that the bodies themselves may differ and that some of them may grow weak through a certain type of movement, whereas others may grow strong through a certain type of movement, not weak, and that when this type of movement has made an impression on them, it causes a renewal of strength in them so that they do not perceive any new impression made on them. And all this is possible, since a judgement valid for some is not valid for all.

I say:

This is an old proof of the philosophers, and it amounts to this: that when the intellect perceives a strong intelligible and afterwards turns to the perception of a slighter, it perceives it more easily, and this shows that it does not perceive through the body, since we find that the bodily perceptive faculties are impressed by strong sensations in a way which lessens their power of perception, so that after strong sensations they cannot perceive things of slight intensity. The reason is that through every form which inheres in a body the body receives an impression, because this form is necessarily mixed with it; for otherwise this form would not be a form in a body. Now since the philosophers found that the receptacle of the intelligibles was not impressed by the intelligibles, they decided that this receptacle was not a body.

And against this there is no objection. For every substratum which is impressed congruously or incongruously by the inherence of the form in it, be it little or much, is necessarily corporeal, and the reverse is also true, namely that everything corporeal is impressed by the form which is realized in it, and the magnitude of the impression depends on the magnitude of the mixing of the form and the body. And the cause of this is that every becoming is the consequence of a change, and if a form could inhere in a body without a change it might happen that, there could be a form whose realization did not impress its substratum.

Ghazali says:

The eighth proof is that the philosophers say: ‘All the faculties of parts of the body become weaker, when they have reached the end of their growth at forty years and later; so sight and hearing and the other faculties become weaker, but the intellectual faculty becomes strong in most cases only after this age. ‘ And the loss of insight in the intelligibles, through illness in the body and through dotage in old age, does not argue against this, for as long as it is proved that at certain times the intellect is strong notwithstanding the weakness of the body, it is clear that it exists by itself, and its decline at the time of the declining of the body does not imply that it exists through the body, for from a negative consequent alternating with a positive consequent there is no inference. For we say that, if the intellectual faculty exists through the body, then the weakness of the body will weaken it at all times, but the consequent is false and therefore the antecedent is false; but, when we say the consequent is true, sometimes it does not follow that the antecedent is true. Further, the cause of this is that the soul has an activity through itself, when nothing hinders it and it is not preoccupied with something. For the soul has two kinds of action, one in relation to the body, namely to govern and rule it, and one in relation to its principles and essence, and this is to perceive the intelligibles, and these two kinds of action hinder each other and are opposed to each other, and when it is occupied with the one action, it turns away from the other and it cannot combine both. And its occupations through the body are sense-perception and imagination and the passions, anger, fear, grief, and pain, but when it sets out to think the intelligible it neglects all these other things. Yes, sense-perception by itself sometimes hinders the apprehension and contemplation of the intellect without the occurrence of any damage to the organ of the intellect or to the intellect itself, and the reason for this is that the soul is prevented from one action through being occupied with another, and therefore during pain, disease, and fear-for this also is a disease of the brain-intellectual speculation leaves off. And why should it be impossible that through this difference in these two kinds of action in the soul they should hinder each other, since even two acts of the same kind may impede each other, for fear is stunned by pain and desire by anger and the observation of one intelligible by that of another? And a sign that the illness which enters the body does not occur in the substratum of the sciences is that, when the sick man recovers, he does not need to learn the sciences anew, but the disposition of his soul becomes the same as it was before, and those sciences come back to him exactly as they were without any new learning.

The objection is that we say that there may be innumerable causes for the increase and the decrease of the faculties, for some of the faculties increase in power at the beginning of life, some in middle life, some at the end, and the same is the case with the intellect and only a topical proof can be claimed. And it is not impossible that smell and sight should differ in this, that smell becomes stronger after forty years and sight weaker, although they both inhere in the body, just as those faculties differ in animals; for in some animals smell is stronger, in others hearing and sight because of the difference in their temperaments, and it is not possible to ascertain these facts absolutely. Nor is it impossible that the temperament of the organs also should differ with individual persons and conditions. One of the reasons why the decay of sight is earlier than the decay of the intellect is that sight is earlier, for a man sees when he is first created, Whereas his intellect is not mature before fifteen years or more, ‘ according to the different opinions we find people to have about this problem; and it is even said that greyness comes earlier to the hair on the head than to that on the beard, because the hair on the head grows earlier. If one goes deeper into these causes and does not simply refer them to the usual course of nature, one cannot base any sure knowledge thereon, because the possibilities for certain faculties to become stronger and others weaker are unlimited, and nothing evident results from this.

I say:

When it is assumed that the substratum of the perceptive faculties is the natural heat, and that natural heat suffers diminution after forty years, then intellect must behave in the same way in this respect; that is, if its substratum is natural heat, then it is necessary that the intellect should become old as the natural heat becomes old. If, however, it is thought that the substrata for the intellect and the senses are different, then it is not necessary that both should be similar in their lifetimes.

Ghazali says:

The ninth proof is that the philosophers say: How can man be attributed to body with its accidents, for those bodies are continually in dissolution, and nutrition replaces what is dissolved, so that when we see a child after its separation from its mother’s womb fall ill a few times and become thin and then fat again and grow up, we may safely say that after forty years no particle remains of what was there when his mother was delivered of it. Indeed, the child began its existence out of the parts of the sperm alone, but nothing of the particles of the sperm remains in it; no, all this is dissolved and has changed into something else, and then this body has become another. Still we say that the identical man remains and his notions remain with him from the beginning of his youth, although all the bodily parts have changed. And this shows that the soul has an existence outside the body and that the body is its organ!

The objection is that this is contradicted by what happens to animals and plants, for when the condition of their being small is compared to the condition of their being big, their identity is asserted equally with the identity of man; still, it does not prove that they have an incorporeal existence. ‘ And what is said about knowledge is refuted by the retention of imaginative forms, for they remain in the boy from youth -to old age, although the particles of his brain change.

I say

None of the ancient philosophers used this proof for the survival of the soul; they only used it to show that in individuals there is an essence which remains from birth to death and that things are not in an eternal flux, as was believed by many ancients who denied necessary knowledge, so that Plato was forced to introduce the forms. There is no sense in occupying ourselves with this, and the objection of Ghazali against this proof is valid.

Ghazali says:

The tenth proof is that they say that the intellectual faculty perceives the general intellectual universals which the theologians call modes, so that man in general is apprehended (whereas the senses perceive the individuality of a definite man), and this universal differs from the man who is perceived by the senses, for what is perceived by the senses is in a particular place, and his colour, size, and position are particular, but the intelligible absolute man is abstracted from all these things; however, in him there is everything to which the term ‘man’ is applied, although he has not the colour, size, position, or place, of the man perceived by the senses, and even a man who may exist in the future is subsumed under him; indeed, if man disappeared there would remain this reality of man in the intellect, in abstraction from all these particular things.

And in this way, from everything perceived by the senses as an individual, there results for the intellect a reality, universal and abstracted from matters and from positions, so that its attributes can be divided into, what is essential (as, for example, corporeity for plants and animals, and animality for man) and into what is accidental (like whiteness and length for man), and this reality is judged as being essential or accidental for the genus of man and plant and ofeverything not apprehended as an individual perceived by the senses, and so it is shown that the universal, in abstraction from sensible attachments, is intelligible and invariable in the mind of man.

This intelligible universal cannot be pointed at, , nor has it a position or size, and in its abstraction from position and matter it is either related to its object (which is impossible, for its object has position and place and size) or to its subject (which is the rational soul), and therefore the soul cannot have a position or be pointed at or have a size, for if it had all these things what inheres in it would also possess them. z

And the objection is that the idea of a universal which you philosophers assume as existing in the intellect is not accepted by us. ; According to us nothing inheres in the intellect but what inheres in the senses, only it inheres in the senses as an aggregate which they cannot separate, whereas the intellect is able to do so. Further, when it is separated, the single part separated from its attachments is just as much an individual in the intellect as the aggregate with its attachments, only this invariable part’ in the mind is related to the thing thought oft and to similar things by one single relation, and in this way it is said to be a universal. For there is in the intellect the forma of the individual thing thought of which is first perceived by the senses, and the relation of this form to all the individuals of this genus which the senses perceive is one and the same. If, after seeing one man, someone sees another, no new form occurs to him, as happens when he sees a horse after seeing a man, for then two different forms occur in him. A similar thing happens to the senses themselves, for when a man sees water, one form occurs in his imagination, and if he sees blood afterwards, another form occurs, but if he sees another water, no other form occurs, but the form of the water which is impressed on his imagination is an image for all individual stretches of water, and for this reason it is often thought to be a universal.

And in the same way, when for instance he sees a hand, there occurs in his imagination and in his intellect the natural position of its parts, namely the surface of the hand and the division of the fingers in it and the ending of the fingers in the nails, and besides this there occur to him the smallness or bigness of the hand and its colour, and if he sees another hand which resembles the first in everything, no other new form occurs to him; no, this second observation, when a new thing occurs, does not produce an impression on his imagination, just as, when he sees the water after having previously seen it in one and the same vessel and in the same quantity, no new impression is produced. And he may see another hand, different in colour and size, and then there occurs to him another colour and another size, but there does not happen to him a new form of hand, for the small black hand has in common with the big white hand the position of its parts, differing from it in colour, and of that in which the second hand agrees with the first no new form is produced, since both forms are identical, but the form of the things in which they differ is renewed. And this is the meaning of the universal both in sensation and in intellect, for when the intellect apprehends the form of the body of an animal, then it does not acquire a new form of corporeity from a plant, just as in imagination the form of two stretches of water perceived at two different times need not be renewed; and the same happens with all things that have something in common.

But this does not permit one to assert the existence of a universal which has no position whatever, although the intellect can judge that there exists something that cannot be pointed at and has no spatial position; for instance, it can assert the existence of the creator of the universe, with the understanding, however, that such a creator cannot be imagined to exist in matter, and in this kind of reality the abstraction from matter is in the intelligible itself and is not caused by the intellect and by thinking. But as to the forms acquired from material things, this happens in the way we have mentioned.

I say:

The meaning of the philosophical theory he relates is that the intellect apprehends, in relation to the individuals which have a common species, a single entity, in which they participate and which is the quiddity of this species without this entity’s being divided into the things in which the individuals qua individuals are divided, like space and position and the matters through which they receive their plurality. This entity must be ingenerable and incorruptible’ and is not destroyed by the disappearance of one of the individuals in which it exists, and the sciences therefore are eternal and not corruptible except by accident, that is to say by their connexion with Zaid and Amr; that is, only through this connexion are they corruptible, and not in themselves, since if they were transitory in themselves this connexion would exist in their essence and they could not constitute an identity. And the philosophers say that, if this is established for the intellect and the intellect is in the soul, it is necessary that the soul should not be. divisible in the way in which individuals are divisible, and that the soul in Amr and in Zaid should be one single entity. And this proof is strong in the case of the intellect, because in the intellect there is no individuality whatever; the soul, however, although it is free from the matters’ through which the individuals receive their plurality, is said by the most famous philosophers not to abandon the nature of the individual, although it is an apprehending entity. This is a point which has to be considered.

As for Ghazali’s objection, it amounts to saying that the intellect is something individual and that universality is an accident of it, and therefore Ghazali compares the way in which the intellect observes a common feature in individuals to the way in which the senses perceive the same thing many times, since for Ghazali the intelligible is a unity, but not something universal, and for him the animality of Zaid is numerically identical with the animality which he observes in Khalid And this is false, and if it were true, there would be no difference between sense-perception and the apprehension of the intellect.