Page:Eight chapters of Maimonides on ethics.djvu/68

48 As regards the rational faculty, uncertainty prevails (among philosophers), but I maintain that observance and transgression may also originate in this faculty, in so far as one believes a true or a false doctrine, though no action which may be designated as an observance or a transgression results therefrom. Consequently, as I said above, these two faculties (the latter, however, does not consider nutrition to be one of the faculties. Abraham ibn Daud, including nutrition among the soul’s faculties, allots to each a cardinal virtue (Emunah Ramah, III, p. 110). Aristotle excludes the imagination as one of the faculties directly affecting the performance of virtues, but considers it as producing movement through the agency of appetency (De Anima, III, 10). M., later, departs somewhat from the view he holds in the Peraḳim regarding the imagination, and, in agreement with Aristotle, considers it to be bound up indirectly, through the appetitive faculty, with conscious activity (see Scheyer, ibid., pp. 98, and 105). This is the sense of the passage in Moreh, II, 4, where he states that animate beings move either by instinct ( considered equivalent to ), or by reason. Instinct he defines as the intention of an animate being to approach something agreeable, or to shun something disagreeable, as, for instance, to approach water on account of thirst, or to avoid the sun on account of its heat. He, then, goes on to say that it makes no difference whether the thing really exists or is imaginary, since the imagination of something agreeable or of something disagreeable likewise causes the animate being to move. Furthermore, in Moreh, II, 12, he declares that all defects in speech or character are either the direct or indirect work of the imagination. In regard to prophecy, M. lays great stress upon the imagination (ibid., II, 35), considering prophecy to be the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty. During sleep this faculty is the same as when it receives prophecy, except that when asleep the imagination is not fully developed, and has not reached its highest perfection. See supra, c. I, p. 41, n. 1.