Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/223

Rh of superiority to other languages in its system of accents which shows the proper expression in reading, and in its wonderful system of vowel changes producing euphony in expression and variation in meaning. ^^^

The highest type of man, we have seen, is the Prophet, for whose sake Israel and the whole of humanity exists. He is the highest type because he alone has an immediate knowledge of Jhvh as distinguished from "Elohim," the concept of universal cause and power, which the philosopher also is able to attain. Jhvh signifies, as we have seen, the personal God who performs miracles and reveals himself to mankind through the prophet. We wish to know therefore how Judah Halevi conceives of the essence and process of prophetic inspiration. We are already aware that he is opposed to the philosophers who regard the power of prophecy as a natural gift possessed by the man of pure intellect and perfect power of imagination. To these Aristotelians, as we shall have occasion to see more clearly later, the human intellect is nothing more than an individualized reflection, if we may so term it, of the one universal intellect, which is — not God, but an intellectual substance wholly immaterial, some nine or ten degrees removed from the Godhead. It is called the Active Intellect, and its business is to govern the sublunar world of generation and decay. As pure thought the Active Intellect embraces as its content the entire sublunar world in essence. In fact it bestows the forms (in the Aristotelian sense) upon the things of this world, and hence has a timeless knowledge of all the world and its happenings. The individualized reflection of it in the human soul is held there so long as the person is alive, somewhat as a drop of water may hold the moon until it evaporates, and the reflection is reabsorbed in the one real moon. So it is the Active Intellect which is the cause of all conceptual knowledge in man through its individualizations, and into it every human intellect is reabsorbed when the individual dies. Some men share more, some less in the Active Intellect; and it is in everyone's power, within limits, to increase and purify his participation in the influence of the Active Intellect by study and rigorous ethical discipline. The prophet differs from the ordinary man and the philosopher in degree only, not in kind. His knowledge comes from the influence of the Active Intellect as does the knowledge of the philosopher. The difference is that in the prophet's case the imagination plays an important role