One important attempt to clear up the difficulty is that made by Alexander of Aphrodisias, the greatest of the commentators on Aristotle, in the second century A.D. Alexander said, as Aristotle has not done, that the "active intelligence" is numerically the same in all men, and is identical with God. Thus, all that is specifically human in each of us is the "passive intelligence" or capacity for being enlightened by God’s activity upon us. The advantage of the view is, that it removes the "active intelligence" altogether from the purview of psychology, which then becomes a purely naturalistic science. The great Arabian Aristotelian, Averroes (Ibn Roschd) of Cordova, in the twelfth century, went still further in the direction of naturalism. Since the "active" and "passive" intelligence can only be separated by a logical abstraction, he inferred that men, speaking strictly, do not think at all; there is only one and the same individual intelligence in the universe, and all that we call our thinking is really not ours but God’s. The great Christian scholastics of the following century in general read Aristotle through the eyes of Averroes, "_the_ Commentator," as St. Thomas calls him, "Averrois che il gran commento feo," as Dante says. But their theology compelled them to disavow his doctrine of the "active intelligence," against which they could also bring, as St. Thomas does, the telling argument that Aristotle could never have meant to say that there really is no such thing as human intelligence. Hence arose a third interpretation, the Thomist, according to which the "active intelligence" is neither God nor the same for all men, but is the highest and most rational "part" of the individual human soul, which has no bodily "organ." *CHAPTER V* *PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY*