On the Immortality of the Soul

none have thought: others have interpreted in various ways that it arrives from the outside, or "from without" (as it is commonly said); so far is it from the case that they clearly decreed that the sensitive soul arrives from the outside, as some have claimed. There is also that distinction which those celebrated Greek interpreters of Aristotle posited: they placed one separate intellect by which the human intellect is illuminated, and they also situated another above it, from which this very one receives light. Note, reader. To those of sound judgment, it ought to be most thoroughly persuasive that the mind of Aristotle was better known to these authors than to Alexander and Averroes. For how much more likely can it be thought that Aristotle’s opinion on the soul—although covered in much darkness—was perceived far more clearly and purely by Theophrastus, with whom he indeed completed myriads of walks while disputing the nature of the soul, than by Alexander, born many centuries after Aristotle and Theophrastus, or than by Averroes, who was not only much later in time, but who learned the Aristotelian teachings through the contaminated transmissions of a foreign language? Therefore, let us begin with Theophrastus, and Priscianus Lydus the expositor of Theophrastus, and Themistius, the paraphrast of both Aristotle and Theophrastus in this matter, to show in detail that all the good Peripatetics—Ammonius, Philoponus, Simplicius, Sophonius, Theodore Metochites—decreed according to Aristotle's The manifold intellect in Theophrastus and Priscianus Lydus, from which the immortality of the soul is gathered. opinion that the human soul is immortal. But since this immortality is said to be derived from the intellect, let us first reveal what they decreed concerning the intellect. Mention is made of a manifold intellect in Theophrastus, Themistius, and Lydus: for Lydus cites the human intellect and calls it "pertaining to the soul," which is neither like matter nor like sense, but is a form and, by its own essence, a grasper of all forms; it is said to be "in potential" insofar as it both pertains to the separate intellect—which is joined to the intelligibles—and is perfected by Against Averroes. the same, and it is compared to a blank tablet, not strictly but by a certain proportion. For he maintains that it has forms within itself and is nevertheless perfected by the first and separate intellect. If this had been known to Averroes, I think he would not have poured out so many obscurities in the fifth part of his Commentary on the third book of De Anima, and he would have realized that a tablet stripped of forms is something other than what he seemed to want to say when he reported the distinction of act simply