You must know that knowledge concerning the existence of the spirit is intuitive (_darúrí_), and the intelligence is unable to apprehend its (the spirit’s) nature. Every Moslem divine and sage has expressed some conjectural opinion on this point, which has also been debated by unbelievers of various sorts. When the unbelievers of Quraysh, prompted by the Jews, sent Naḍr b. al-Ḥárith to question the Apostle concerning the nature and essence of the spirit, God in the first place affirmed its substance and said, “_And they will ask thee concerning the spirit_”; then He denied its eternity, saying, “_Answer, ‘The spirit belongs to that which_ (i.e. the creation of which) _my Lord commanded’_” (Kor. xvii, 87). And the Apostle said: “The spirits are hosts gathered together: those that know one another agree, and those that do not know one another disagree.” There are many similar proofs of the existence of the spirit, but they contain no authoritative statement as to its nature. Some have said that the spirit is the life whereby the body lives, a view which is also held by a number of scholastic philosophers. According to this view the spirit is an accident (_`araḍ_), which at God’s command keeps the body alive, and from which proceed conjunction, motion, cohesion. and similar accidents by which the body is changed from one state to another. Others, again, declare that the spirit is not life, but that life does not exist without it, just as the spirit does not exist without the body, and that the two are never found apart, because they are inseparable, like pain and the knowledge of pain. According to this view also the spirit is an accident, like life. All the Ṣúfí Shaykhs, however, and most orthodox Moslems hold that the spirit is a substance, and not an attribute; for, so long as it is connected with the body, God continually creates life in the body, and the life of Man is an attribute and by it he lives, but the spirit is deposited in his body and may be separated from him while he is still living, as in sleep. But when it leaves him, intelligence and knowledge can no longer remain with him, for the Apostle has said that the spirits of martyrs are in the crops of birds: consequently it must be a substance; and the Apostle has said that the spirits are hosts (_junúd_), and hosts are subsistent (_báqí_), and no accident can subsist, for an accident does not stand by itself.