This extreme conclusion had already been deduced from the teaching of Aristotle by some of his early commentators (such as Alexander Aphrodisius). There were, indeed, other commentators who, unable to abandon belief in the survival of the soul, tried to explain Aristotle’s words in conformity with that belief by excluding the rational part from the “natural form” and attributing to it a separate and eternal existence.[97] But Maimonides was too logical not to see the inconsistency involved in that interpretation; and so he sided with the extremists, though their view was absolutely opposed to that belief in personal immortality which in his day had come to be generally accepted by Jews. Had he been content with that view alone, he would inevitably have gone back to the conception of primitive Judaism, as we find it in the Pentateuch: that immortality belongs not to the individual, but to the nation; that the national form persists for ever, like the generic form in living things, and the changing individuals are its matter. In that case his whole ethical system would have been very different from what it is. But Maimonides supplemented the teaching of Aristotle by another idea, which he took from the Arabs; and this idea, amplified and completed, he made the basis of his ethical system, which thereby acquired a new and original character, distinguished by its fusion of the social and the individual elements. The idea is in substance this: that while reason, which is present in a human being from birth, is only one of the faculties of the soul, which is a unity of all its parts and ceases wholly to exist when the body ceases, yet this faculty is no more than a “potential faculty,” by virtue of which its possessor is able to apprehend ideas; and therefore its cessation is inevitable only if it remains throughout its existence in its original condition—in the condition, that is, of a “potential faculty” whose potentiality has not been realised. But if a human being makes use of this faculty and attains to the actual apprehension of Ideas, then his intellect has proceeded from the stage of potentiality to that of actuality: it has achieved real existence, which is permanent and indestructible, like the existence of those Ideas which it has absorbed into itself and with which it has become one. Thus we are to distinguish between the “potential intellect,” which is given to a human being when he comes into the world, and is merely a function of the body, and the “acquired intellect,” which a human being wins for himself by apprehending the Ideas. This acquired intellect “is not a function of the body and is really separate from the body.” Hence it does not cease to exist with the cessation of the body; it persists for ever, like the other “separate Intelligences.”[98]