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

matters through which they receive their plurality. This entity must be
ingenerable and incorruptible’ and is not destroyed by the disappearance
of one of the individuals in which it exists, and the sciences therefore are
eternal and not corruptible except by accident, that is to say by their
connexion with Zaid and Amr; that is, only through this connexion are they
corruptible, and not in themselves, since if they were transitory in
themselves this connexion would exist in their essence and they could not
constitute an identity. And the philosophers say that, if this is established
for the intellect and the intellect is in the soul, it is necessary that the soul
should not be. divisible in the way in which individuals are divisible, and
that the soul in Amr and in Zaid should be one single entity. And this proof
is strong in the case of the intellect, because in the intellect there is no
individuality whatever; the soul, however, although it is free from the
matters’ through which the individuals receive their plurality, is said by the
most famous philosophers not to abandon the nature of the individual,
although it is an apprehending entity. This is a point which has to be
considered.
As for Ghazali’s objection, it amounts to saying that the intellect is
something individual and that universality is an accident of it, and
therefore Ghazali compares the way in which the intellect observes a
common feature in individuals to the way in which the senses perceive the
same thing many times, since for Ghazali the intelligible is a unity, but not
something universal, and for him the animality of Zaid is numerically
identical with the animality which he observes in Khalid And this is false,
and if it were true, there would be no difference between sense-perception
and the apprehension of the intellect.
The Third Discussion
And after this Ghazali says that the philosophers have two proofs to
demonstrate that the soul after once existing cannot perish. The first is
that if the soul perished this could only be imagined in one of these three
ways: either (1) it perishes simultaneously with the body, or (2) through an
opposite which is found in it, or (3) through the power of God, the
powerful. It is false that it can perish through the corruption of the body, for
it is separated from the body. It is false that it can have an opposite, for a
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