Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/163

 Islam or in the Catholic Church, to admit the "rights" of animals, although ready to regard benevolent action towards them as a duty. But more, the highly abstract rational soul or spirit of the Aristotelian doctrine, void of all that could be shared with the lower creatures, and even of all that could be developed from anything that an animal is capable of possessing, is the only part of man which is capable of immortality, and such a spirit separated from its body and the lower functions of the animal soul can hardly fit in with the picture of the future life as portrayed in the Qur'an. Further, the Qur'an regards that future life as incomplete until the spirit is re-united with the body, a possibility which the Aristotelians could hardly contemplate. The Aristotelian doctrine showed the animal soul not as an invisible being but merely as a form of energy in the body: so far as it was concerned, death did not mean the going away of this soul, but the cessation of the functions of the bodily faculties, just as combustion ceases when a candle is blown out, the flame not going away and continuing to exist apart; or as the impression of a seal on wax which disappears when the wax is melted and does not continue a ghostly existence on its own account. The only immortal part of man, therefore, was the part which came to him as an emanation from the Agent Intellect, and when this emanation was set free from its association with the human body and lower soul it became inevitable to suggest its re-absorption in the