On the Immortality of the Soul

receives material and particular things in an intelligible manner; so too the potential intellect becomes all things, not in essence but in species, since it receives them in a knowable way. This same Sophonius, speaking altogether more clearly on this matter than other commentators and those who have written paraphrases, decrees without controversy that both the possible and the agent intellect are the most divine part of the soul, not disjoined or separate in substance, but existing in one and the same soul. He teaches that this single intellect of the soul at one time receives the name of potentiality before it is exercised; at another, that of habit while it is not contemplating what it could otherwise contemplate; and at another, that of act while it speculates. This, moreover, is twofold: for if it regards eternal, universal, and divine things, it is called speculative; if human and particular things, it is called active or practical, having obtained different names for its evidently different functions and duties. These are the views of Sophonius, who also brought forward reasons for asserting the immortality of the soul. He says that a thing is corrupted either because it is composed of matter and form, or because, being incorporeal, it is nevertheless in a body, like a figure in wax. The intellect, however, is corrupted in neither way, for it is both abstracted from matter and incorporeal, and it is not in a subject but is firmly established in itself.

What Sophonius decreed concerning the immortality of the soul, and in what manner.

If I judge correctly, the moderns, by those words of theirs, mean this same opinion: that there is an intrinsic principle, or a subsisting intrinsic principle, which Sophonius expressed through that "firmness in itself." From this firmness, indeed, he concludes that the intellect is necessarily incorruptible and eternal, as that which is act through itself, not depending on the body; and that it is the same in potentiality and in act according to the different respects explained above. Nor does it come from without in the manner used by some who judged the intellect itself to be a separate substance; rather, it exists in one and the same soul, and in each and every man, and it differs in perfection from that which is in potentiality. To these points he adds that no power situated in a body and hedged about by it can turn back upon itself; for the body in which it exists would be turned back at the same time. Moreover, no body can apply itself to itself, nor even to another, except according to its surface. But the intellect itself turns back upon itself: it perceives itself, it inquires and asks concerning itself. It finds itself

Interpretation of the author.

A small printer's ornament consisting of three stylized floral or leaf elements arranged in a triangle.