Sometimes the information comes to the prophet without the aid of an image, when the reason prevails over the imagination, like the dream of Abraham at the "covenant of the pieces" (Gen. 15, 12ff.). Sometimes, also, the activity of the senses does not prevent the prophet from seeing the hidden things of the future, and he receives prophetic inspirations while awake. The prophet sometimes faints as he is overcome by the unusual phenomenon, at other times he succeeds in enduring it without swooning. All these cases can be illustrated from the Bible, and examples will readily occur to the reader who is familiar with the various instances and descriptions of prophetic visions and activities in Scripture. The purpose of prophecy is to guide the people in the right way. With this end in view God inspires a proper man as a prophet and gives him superior powers to perform miracles. Not every man is capable of prophecy, only one who has a pure soul. For the most part the prophetic gift is innate, at the same time study and good associations help to develop this power in him who has it. Witness the "company of prophets," whose example inspired Saul (1 Sam. 19, 20), and Elisha as the disciple of Elijah. While we thus see Ibn Daud, unlike Halevi, adopting the philosophical explanation of prophecy, which tries to bring it within the class of natural psychological phenomena and relates it to dreams, he could not help recognizing that one cannot ignore the supernatural character of Biblical prophecy without being untrue to the Bible. He accordingly adds to the above naturalistic explanation a number of conditions which practically have the effect of taking the bottom out of the psychological theory. If Judah Halevi insists that only Israelites in the land of Palestine and at the time of their political independence had the privilege of the prophetic gift, we realize that such a belief is of the warp and woof of Halevi's innermost sentiment and thinking, which is radically opposed to the shallow rationalism and superficial cosmopolitanism of the "philosophers" of his day. But when the champion of Peripateticism, Abraham Ibn Daud, after explaining that prophecy is of the nature of true dreams, and though in most cases innate, may be cultivated by a pure soul through study and proper associations--repeats with Judah Halevi that the time and the place are essential conditions and that Israelites alone are privileged in this respect, he is giving up, it seems to us, all that he previously attempted to explain. This is only one of the many indications which point to the essential artificiality of all the mediæval attempts to harmonize a given system of philosophy with a supernaturalistic standpoint, such as is that of the Bible. It is not in this way that the Bible is to be saved if it needs saving.[242]