Arabic Thought and Its Place in HistoryO'Leary, De Lacy
ReligionIslamic
Arabic Thought and Its Place in History
O'Leary, De Lacy
Philosophy, Arab
and arouse it to activity, and the acquired intelligence or _`aql
mustafad_ is the intelligence aroused to activity and developed under
the inspiration of the agent intelligence. Thus the intelligence in
action is related to the potential intellect as form is to matter,
but the agent intelligence enters from outside, and by its operation
the intelligence receives new powers, so that its highest activity is
“acquired.”
Al-Farabi appears throughout as a devout Muslim, and evidently
does not appreciate the bearing of the Aristotelian psychology on
the doctrine of the Qur´an. The earlier belief of Islam, as of most
religions, was a heritage from primitive animism, which regarded life
as due to the presence of a perfectly substantial, though invisible,
thing called the soul: a thing is alive so long as the soul is present,
it dies when the soul goes away. In the earlier forms of animism this
is the explanation of all movement: the flying arrow has a “soul” in
it so long as it moves, it ceases to move when this soul goes away or
desires to rest. This involves no belief in the immortality of the
soul, nor is the soul invested with any distinct personality, all that
comes later; it is simply that life is regarded as a kind of substance,
very light and impalpable but perfectly self-existent. What may be
described as the “ghost” theory marks a later stage of evolution,
when the departed soul is believed to retain a distinct personality
and still to possess the form and some at least of the sensations
associated with the being in which it formerly dwelt. Such was the
stage reached by Arab psychology at the time of the preaching of Islam.
The Aristotelian doctrine represented the soul as containing different
energies or parts, such as it had in common with the vegetable world
and such others as it possessed in common with the lower kinds of
animals: that is to say the faculties of nutrition, reproduction, and
all the perceptions obtained from the use of the organs of sense, as
well as the intellectual generalisations derived from the use of those
senses, are simply laid on one side as forms of energy derived from the
potentialities latent in the material body, very nearly the position
indeed of modern materialism, as the term is used in psychology. This
does not oppose a belief in God, who is the prime source of the powers
which exist, although that is brought out more by the commentators than
by Aristotle himself; nor does it infringe the doctrine of an immortal
and separable soul or spirit which exists in man in addition to what we
may describe as the vegetative and animal soul. It is this spirit, the
rational soul which has entered from outside and exists in man alone,
which is immortal. Such a doctrine sets an impassible gulf between man
and the rest of creation, and explains why it is impossible for those
whose thought is formed on Aristotelian lines, whether in orthodox
Islam or in the Catholic Church, to admit the “rights” of animals,
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