Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/270

 at least according to Alexander Aph.'s interpretation, is the highest faculty of the reason due to the operation of the external one Agent Intellect, but the passive intellect on which this agent acts is itself part of a great universal soul, which is the one source of all life and the reservoir to which the soul returns when the transitory experience of what we call life is finished.

Ibn Rushd's views do not receive much attention or criticism from Muslim scholars, but the Christian scholastics brought two main arguments against this theory, one psychological, the other theological. The psychological objection is that it is entirely subversive of individuality: if the conscious life of each is only part of the conscious life of a universal soul there can be no real ego in any one of us; but there is no fact to which consciousness bears clearer witness than the reality and individuality of the ego. This did not touch the possibility that the individual soul might be drawn from a universal soul as its source, nor did it disprove that the individual soul might be reabsorbed again in the universal soul, but in so far as Ibn Rushd's view represented the soul as throughout a part of the universal soul it was argued that this is contrary to experience, which makes it clear that in this present life the ego is very distinctly individual. The theological argument was that Ibn Rushd's view denied the immortality of the soul, and so was contrary to the Christian faith. This objection deals more specifically with the reabsorption of the