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

separate substance has no opposite. ‘ And it is false, as has been shown
before, that the power of God can attach itself to non-being.
Now, Ghazali objecting to the philosophers answers: ‘We theologians do
not admit that the soul is external to the body; besides, it is the special
theory of Avicenna that the souls are numerically differentiated through the
differentiation of the bodies, for that there should be one single soul in
every respect and in all people brings about many impossibilities, for
instance that when Zaid knows some. thing Amr should know it too, and
when Amr does not know something Zaid should not know it either; and
many other impossibilities follow from this assumption. ‘And Ghazali
adduces against Avicenna the argument that when it is assumed that the
souls are numerically differentiated through the differentiation of the
bodies, then they are attached to the bodies and must necessarily perish
with their decay.
The philosophers, however, can answer that it is by no means necessary
that, when there exists between two things a relation of attachment and
love, for instance the relation between the lover and the beloved and the
relation between iron and the magnet, the destruction of the one should
cause the destruction of the other. But Avicenna’s opponents may ask his
partisans through what the individuation and numerical plurality of souls
takes place, when they are separated from their matters, for the numerical
plurality of individuals arises only through matter. He who claims the
survival and the numerical plurality of souls should say that they are in a
subtle matter, namely the animal warmth which emanates from the
heavenly bodies, and this is a warmth which is not fire and in which there
is not a principle of fire; in this warmth there are the souls which create the
sublunary bodies and those which inhere in these bodies . And none of
the philosophers is opposed to the theory that in the elements there is
heavenly warmth and that this is the substratum for the potencies which
produce animals and plants, but some of the philosophers call this
potency a natural heavenly potency, whereas Galen calls it the forming
power and sometimes the demiurge, saying that it seems that there exists.
a wise maker of the living being who has created it and that this is
apparent from anatomy, but where this maker is and what His substance
is is too lofty a problem for human understanding. ‘ From this Plato proves
that the soul is separated from the body, for the soul creates and forms
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