Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/271

 soul of the individual in the universal soul; such cessation of separate and individual existence, it was argued, meant that the soul as such no longer existed.

As we have already noted, Aristotle gives a rather narrow range to the highest faculty of reason, confining its activity to the perception of abstract ideas; "as to the things spoken of as abstract (the mind) thinks of them as it would of the being snub-nosed, if by an effort of thought it thinks of it qua snub-nosed, not separately, but qua hollow, without the flesh in which the hollowness is adherent: so when it thinks of mathematical forms, it thinks of them as separated, though they are not separated" (Aristot. de anima. iii. 7, 7-8). Those who followed Alexander Aph. and the neo-Platonists took this "abstract" in a very narrow sense, and in the Arabic commentators these abstractions even become non-substantial beings, as it were disembodied, or rather bodiless, spirits: "in quibusdam libris de Arabico translatis substantiae separatae, quae nos angelos dicimus, intelligentiae vocantur" (S. Thos. Aquin. Quaest. Disp. de anima. 16). Can man know these substantiae separatae by his natural faculties? Ibn Rushd says he can: if otherwise nature has acted in vain, for there would be an intelligibile without an intelligens to understand it; but Aristotle has shewn (Polit. 1, 8, 12) that nature does nothing in vain, so that if there be an intelligibile there must be an intelligens capable of perceiving it. "The commentator (i.e. Ibn Rushd) says in 2 Met. comm. i. (in fine) that if abstract