Theology of Aristotle

...as it seems at first glance, which we shall teach separately in our own commentaries on these books soon. Lest we delay the impatient, we shall review certain things. The physical production of the world, which he denies in his Physics and On the Heavens, he explains here as metaphysical. And he openly testifies that Plato seems to assert in his speech the temporary creation of the world, while he understands it to be instantaneous. That there is one true principle of things, he confesses here; elsewhere he denies the mathematical one. The Ideas, which he grants here as subsisting and forming, he seems elsewhere to refute as being non-existent in things as essences and forms. The heat, which he admits here as the substance of fire, he receives elsewhere in the form itself, not otherwise named, rejecting it as a quality; and Averroes does the same repeatedly. He permits irrational souls to be immortal here according to substance, but clearly says they are corruptible according to accident, due to the corrupt works of animals. By reciting [them], but elsewhere in the tenth, chapter ten, by correcting [them] and writing according to his own opinion that the rational soul is immortal, but the sensual is mortal. One thing especially troubles [critics], that he denies in the Metaphysics that the rational soul precedes the composition of the animal, [but] here he evidently asserts [it], but by an insolence we say that the soul of this species is perpetual among him; such an entity, according to him, pre-existed eternally, and the intellect enters from outside, i.e., he observes [it enters] into animals. Therefore, he does not struggle so much in this as he does in his other writings in that twelfth [book] of Wisdom. Whence it could be said that it is also common to the rest (if it should be necessary) that it is not likely, and less impossible, for a man, even a philosophical one, to hold different opinions at different times, which is an argument for perfection and persistence. And for those wise men, up until death, it happens quite often—whom it would be tedious to enumerate. Furthermore, the character of the speech...