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MIND AND SOUL entity far superior to humankind, it appears to be to some extent under the control of mortal men The initiative in any given thought rests with the imagination, not with the receptive intellect The process has been well described as follows: The eternity of the material intellect’s thought of the physical world is, accordingly, not a single continuous Wber, nor does it spring from the material intellect It is wholly dependent on the ratiocination and consciousness of individual men, the complete body of possible thoughts of the physical world being supplied at any given moment by individuals living at that moment, and the continuity of the material intellect’s thought through inWnite time being spun from the thoughts of individuals alive at various moments.7 Averroes’ psychology strikes any modern reader as bizarre: and yet philosophers in the twentieth century have held positions that were not wholly unrelated There is good reason for thinking that the contents of the imagination possess a degree of privacy and individuality that the contents of the intellect not, though it is usually in the social rather than in the celestial realm that the reason for this is sought by modern philosophers And all of us are inclined to talk, with a degree of awe, of Science as containing a body of coherent and lasting truth which cannot possibly all be within the mind of any mortal scientist Because, for Averroes, the truly intellectual element in thought is nonpersonal, there is not, he believed, any personal immortality for individual humans After death, souls merge with each other Averroes argues for this as follows: Zaid and Amr are numerically diVerent but identical in form If, for example, the soul of Zaid were numerically diVerent from the soul of Amr in the way Zaid is numerically diVerent from Amr, the soul of Zaid and the soul of Amr would be numerically two, but one in their form, and the soul would possess another form The necessary conclusion is therefore that the soul of Zaid and the soul of Amr are identical in their form An identical form inheres in a numerical, i.e a divisible multiplicity, only through the multiplicity of matter If then the soul does not die when the body dies, or if it possesses an immortal element it must, when it has left the body, form a numerical unity At death the soul passes into the universal intelligence like a drop of water into the sea Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averrroes on Intellect, 292–3 231
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