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

a faculty in a body; and it follows that their substratum is a spiritual faculty
which perceives itself and other things.
But Ghazali took first the one of these two classes and denied that the
universal intelligibles belong to it, and then made his objection by means
of the second class, which exists in the faculty of sight and in the
imaginative faculty, and in doing this he committed a sophism; but the
science of the soul is too profound and too elevated to be apprehended by
dialectics. ‘
Besides, Ghazali has not adduced the argument in the manner in which
Avicenna brought it out, for Avicenna built his argument only on the
following: If the intelligibles inhered in a body, they would have to be either
in an indivisible part of it, or in a divisible part. Then he refuted the
possibility of their being in an indivisible part of the body, and after this
refutation he denied that, if the intellect inhered in a body, it could inhere in
an indivisible part of it. Then he denied that it could inhere in a divisible
part of it and so he denied that it could inhere in body at all.
And when Ghazali denied one of these two divisions he said it was not
impossible that there might be another form of relation between the
intellect and the body than this, but it is quite clear that if the intellect is
related to the body there can exist only two kinds of relation, either to a
divisible or to an indivisible substratum.
This proof can be completed; by saying that the intellect is not attached
to any animal faculty in the way the form is attached to its substratum, for
the denial of its being attached to the body implies necessarily the denial
of its being attached to any animal faculty which is attached to the body.
For, if the intellect were attached to any of the animal faculties, it would as
Aristotle says be unable to act except through this faculty, but then this
faculty would not perceive the intellect. This is the argument on which
Aristotle himself bases his proof that the intellect is separate. ‘
We shall now mention the second objection which Ghazali raises against
the second proof of the philosophers, but we must first observe that their
proofs, when they are taken out of their context in those sciences to which
they belong, can have at the most the value of dialectical arguments. The
only aim of this book of ours is therefore to ascertain the value of the
arguments in it which are ascribed to the two parties, and to show to which
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