Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

it is pure perfection with which no potency is mixed it is intellect. ‘ All this
they proved in a demonstrative order and by natural deductions which
cannot be reproduced here in this demonstrative sequence, for this would
involve collecting in one place what by its nature is treated in many
different books, and anyone who has the slightest experience of the
science of logic will acknowledge that this is an impossibility. Through
arguments of this kind they came to realize that what has no passivity
whatever is intellect and not body, for what is passive is body which exists
in matter according to them.
An objection against the philosophers in these questions ought to be
made only against the first principles they use in the proof of these
conclusions, not against those conclusions themselves, as it is made by
Ghazali. Through this they came to understand that there exists here an
existent which is pure intellect, and when they saw further that the order
which reigns in nature and in the act of nature follows an intellectual plan
very much like the plan of the craftsman, they realized that there must
exist an intellect which causes these natural potencies to act in an
intellectual way, and through these two points they received the conviction
that this existent which is pure intellect is that which bestows on the
existents the order and arrangement in their acts. And they understood
from all this that its thinking its own self is identical with its thinking all
existents, and that this existent is not such that its thinking its own self is
something different from the thought by which it thinks other things, as is
the case with the human intellect. And about this intellect the disjunction
assumed as a premiss, that every intellect either thinks its own self or
thinks something else or thinks both together, is not valid. For when this
disjunction is admitted, what is said is: ‘If it thinks other things, it is selfevident
that it must think its own self; however, if it thinks its own self, it is
not at all necessary that it should think other things. ‘ And we have
discussed this previously.
And all the things which he says about the hypothetical syllogism which
he formed in the figure he explained are not true. For the hypothetical
syllogism is only valid when the minor and the legitimacy of the
inferenceare proved through one or more categorical syllogisms. For
correct hypothetical inference in this question is: ‘If what does not think is
in matter, then what is not in matter thinks. ‘ But, of course, first the truth of
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