Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/52

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INTRODUCTION

the common sense, memory, imagination and judgment, are ultimately based upon Aristotle and are found in Judah Halevi, Abraham Ibn Daud and Maimonides, who derived them from Avicenna and Alfarabi. In the Neo-Platonic writers, such as Isaac Israeli, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Joseph Ibn Zaddik, Moses Ibn Ezra, Pseudo-Bahya, Abraham Bar Hiyya, and so on, we also find reference to the World Soul and its emanation from Intelligence. In the conception of the human soul the Jewish philosophers vary from the Platonic view, related to the Biblical, that the soul is a distinct entity coming into the body from a spiritual world, and acting in the body by using the latter as its instrument, to the Aristotelian view that at least so far as the lower faculties of sense, memory and imagination are concerned, the soul is the form of the body, and disappears with the death of the latter. The human unit, according to this opinion, is body-and-mind, and the human activities are psycho-physical and not purely psychical as they are according to Plato. Some writers occupying intermediate positions combine unwittingly the Platonic and Aristotelian views, or rather they use Aristotelian expressions and interpret them Platonically (Saadia, Joseph Ibn Zaddik, Hillel ben Samuel).

As the influence of the Arab Aristotelians, Alfarabi, Avicenna and especially Averroes, began to make itself felt, the discussions about the Active Intellect and its relation to the higher Intelligences on the one hand and to the human intellect on the other found their way also among the Jews and had their effect on the conception of prophecy. Aristotle's distinction of an active and a passive intellect in man, and his ideas about the spheral spirits as pure Intelligences endowing the heavenly spheres with their motions, were combined by the Arabian Aristotelians with the Neo-Platonic theory of emanation. The result was that they adopted as Aristotelian the view that from God emanated in succession ten Intelligences and their spheres. Thus the first emanation was the first Intelligence. From this emanated the sphere of the fixed stars moved by it and the second Intelligence. From this emanated in turn the sphere of Saturn and the third Intelligence, and so on through the seven planets to the moon. From the Intelligence of the lunar sphere emanated the Active Intellect and the sublunar spheres of the four elements. These Intelligences were identified with the angels of Scripture. With some modifications this