In the post-Maimonidean age all philosophical thinking is in the nature of a commentary on Maimonides whether
avowedly or not. The circle of speculation and reflection is complete. It is fixed by the "Guide of the Perplexed," and the
efforts of those who followed Maimonides are to elaborate in his spirit certain special topics which are treated in his
masterpiece in a summary way. In the case of the more independent thinkers like Levi ben Gerson we find the further
attempt to carry out more boldly the implications of the philosophical point of view, which, as the latter thought,
Maimonides left implicit by reason of his predisposition in favor of tradition. Hasdai Crescas went still farther and entirely
repudiated the authority of Aristotle, substituting will and emotion for rationalism and logical inference. Not knowledge of
God as logically demonstrated is the highest aim of man, but love of God. But even in his opposition Crescas leans on
Maimonides's principles, which he takes up one by one and refutes. Maimonides was thus the point of departure for his
more rigorous followers as well as for his opponents. In the matter of external sources philosophical reflection after
Maimonides was enriched in respect to details by the works of Averroes on the Arabic side and those of the chief
Christian scholastics among the Latin writers. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas furnished some material to men like
Hillel of Verona in the thirteenth century and Don Isaac Abarbanel in the fifteenth. Maimonides was limited to the
Aristotelian expositions of Alfarabi and Avicenna. The works of Averroes, his contemporary, he did not read until toward
the end of his life. After his death Averroes gained in prestige and influence until he succeeded in putting into the shade
his Arabian predecessors and was regarded by Jew and Christian alike as the Commentator of Aristotle par excellence.
His works were rapidly translated into Hebrew and Latin, and the Jewish writers learned their Aristotle from Averroes.
The knowledge of the Arabic language was gradually disappearing among the Jews of Europe, and they were indebted
for their knowledge of science and philosophy to the works translated. Philosophy was declining among the Arabs
themselves owing to the disfavor of the powers that be, and many of the scientific writings of the Arabs owe their survival
to the Hebrew translations or transcriptions in Hebrew characters which escaped the proscription of the Mohammedan
authorities.
The one problem that came to the front as a result of Averroes's teaching, and which by the solution he gave it formed an
important subject of debate in the Parisian schools of the thirteenth century, was that of the intellect in man, whether
every individual had his own immortal mind which would continue as an individual entity after the death of the body, or
whether a person's individuality lasted only as long as he was alive, and with his death the one human intellect alone
survived. This was discussed in connection with the general theory of the intellect and the three kinds of intellect that
were distinguished by the Arabian Aristotelians, the material, the acquired and the active. The problem goes back to
Aristotle's psychology, who distinguishes two intellects in man, passive and active (above, p. xxxvi). But the treatment
there is so fragmentary and vague that it gave rise to widely varying interpretations by the Greek commentators of
Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, as well as among the Arabs, Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes. The
latter insisted on the unity of the intellect for the human race, thereby destroying individual immortality, and this
Averroistic doctrine, adopted by some Masters of Arts at the University of Paris, was condemned among other heresies,
and refuted in the writings of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Maimonides does not discuss these problems in
detail in his "Guide." He drops a remark incidentally here and there, and it would appear that for him too, as for Averroes,
the intellect when in separation from the body is not subject to individual distinction, that there cannot be several human
intellects, since matter is the principle of individuation and the immaterial cannot embrace a number of individuals of the
same species.[320] The problem of immortality he does not treat ex professo in the "Guide." Hence this was a matter
taken up by his successors. Hillel ben Samuel as well as Levi ben Gerson discuss this question in detail.
Hillel ben Samuel does not tower as a giant in mediæval Jewish literature. His importance is local, as being the first
devotee of Jewish learning and philosophy in Italy in the middle of the thirteenth century, at the close of a period of
comparative ignorance. The Italian Jews before his time contributed little to knowledge and learning despite their external
circumstances, which were more favorable than in some other countries. Hillel ben Samuel (1220-1295) was a strong
admirer of Maimonides and undertook to comment on the "Guide of the Perplexed." He defended Maimonides against the
aspersions of his opponents, and was so confident in the truth of his master's teachings that he proposed a conference
of the learned men of Jewry to judge the works and doctrines of Maimonides and to decide whether the "Guide" should
be allowed to live or should be destroyed. Another interest attaching to Hillel ben Samuel is that he was among the first,
if not the first Jew who by his knowledge of Latin had access to the writings of the scholastics, to whom he refers in his
"Tagmule ha-Nefesh" (The Rewards of the Soul) as the "wise men of the nations." He was also active as a translator
from the Latin.
His chief work, which entitles him to brief notice here, is the "Tagmule ha-Nefesh" just mentioned. [321] He does not offer
us a system of philosophy, but only a treatment of certain questions relating to the nature of the soul, its immortality and
the manner of its existence after the death of the body, questions which Maimonides passes over lightly. With the
exception of the discussion relating to the three kinds of intellect and the question of the unity of the acquired intellect for
all mankind, there is not much that is new or remarkable in the discussion, and we can afford to pass it by with a brief
notice.
Men of science know, he tells us in the introduction, that the valuable possession of man is the soul, and the happiness
thereof is the final purpose of man's existence. And yet the number of those who take pains to investigate the nature of
the soul is very small, not even one in a hundred. And even the few who do undertake to examine this subject are
hindered by various circumstances from arriving at the truth. The matter itself is difficult and requires long preparation
and preliminary knowledge. Then the vicissitudes of life and the shortness of its duration, coupled with the natural
indolence of man when it comes to study, completely account for the lack of true knowledge on this most important topic.
Induced by these considerations Hillel ben Samuel undertook to collect the scattered notices in the extensive works of
the philosophers and arranged and expounded them briefly so as not to discourage those who are in search of wisdom.
His purpose is the knowledge of truth, which is an end in itself. He desires to explain the existence of the soul, its nature
and reward. The soul is that which makes man man, hence we should know the nature of that which makes us intelligent
creatures, else we do not deserve the name.
Another reason for the importance of knowing the nature of the soul is that error in this matter may lead to more serious
mistakes in other departments of knowledge and belief. Thus if a man who calls himself pious assumes that the soul after
parting from the body is subject to corporeal reward and punishment, as appears from a literal rendering of passages in
Bible and Talmud, he will be led to think that the soul itself is corporeal. And since the soul, it is believed, comes from on
high, the upper world must have bodies and definite places, and hence the angels too are bodies. But since the angels
are emanations from the divine splendor, God too is body! Thus you see how serious are the consequences of a belief,
in itself perhaps not so dangerous, as that of the corporeality of the soul.[322]
We must first prove the existence of the soul. This can be shown in various ways. We see that of natural bodies some
take food, grow, propagate their like, while others, like stones, do not do these things. This shows that the powers and
functions mentioned cannot be due to the corporeal part of the objects performing them, else stones, too, would have
those powers, as they are also corporeal like the rest. There must therefore be a different principle, not body, which is
responsible for those activities. We call it soul.
As all existents are divided into substance and accident, the soul must be either the one or the other. Now an accident,
according to Aristotle, is that which may be or not be without causing the being or destruction of the object in which it is.
But the body cannot be a living body without the soul. Hence the soul is not an accident; it is therefore a substance.
Substance may be corporeal or incorporeal. The soul cannot be a corporeal substance, for all body is divisible, and
subject to motion and change, whereas the soul, as will be shown later, is not movable, not changeable and not divisible.
It might seem that the soul is subject to motion, since it descends into the body and rises again when it leaves the body.
But this is not so. Descent and ascent when thus applied to the soul are metaphorical. The union of soul and body is not
a spatial relation. The upper world from which the soul comes is not corporeal, hence there is no such thing as place
there, nor anything limited by space. Hence the coming of the soul from the spiritual world and its return thither are not
motions at all. The relation of the soul to the body is as that of form to matter, as Aristotle says.
Granted that the soul's union with and separation from the body are not motions, is not the soul subject to motion while in
the body? Hillel's answer is that it is not, and he proves his point in the prescribed fashion by making use of Aristotle's
classification of motion into (1) genesis and (2) decay, (3) increase and (4) diminution, (5) qualitative change and (6)
motion proper, or motion of translation. He then undertakes to show that the soul can have none of the kinds of motion
here enumerated. The arguments offer nothing striking or interesting, and we can afford to omit them. It is worth while,
however, to refer to his interpretation of emotion. The passage of the soul from joy to grief, from anger to favor, might
seem to be a kind of motion. Hillel answers this objection by saying that these emotions do not pertain to the soul as
such. Their primary cause is the state of mixture of the humors in the body, which affects certain corporeal powers in
certain ways; and the soul shares in these affections only so far as it is united with the body. In its own nature the soul
has no emotions.
We can also prove that the soul is not divisible. For a divisible thing must have parts. Now if the soul is divided or
divisible, this means either that every part of the soul, no matter how small, has the same powers as the whole, or that
the powers of the soul are the resultant of the union of the parts. The first alternative is impossible, for it leads us to the
absurd conclusion that instead of one soul every person has an infinite number of souls, or at least a great number of
souls. The second alternative implies that while the soul is not actually divided, since its powers are the summation of the
parts, which form a unit, it is potentially divisible. But this signifies that at some time this potential divisibility will be
realized (or potentiality would be vain and meaningless) and we are brought back to the absurdity of a multiplicity of
souls in the human body.
Having shown that the soul is not movable, changeable or divisible, we are certain of its incorporeality, and we are ready
to give a definition of the soul. Hillel accordingly defines the soul as "a stage of emanation, consisting of a formal
substance, which subsists through its own perfection, and occupies the fourth place in the emanatory process, next to
the Active Intellect. Its ultimate source is God himself, who is the ultimate perfection and the Good, and it emanates from
him indirectly through the mediation of the separate Powers standing above it in the scale of emanation. The soul
constitutes the first entelechy of a natural body."[323]
The above definition is interesting. It shows that Hillel did not clearly distinguish the Aristotelian standpoint from the Neo-
Platonic, for in the definition just quoted, the two points of view are combined. That all mediæval Aristotelianism was
tinged with Neo-Platonism, especially in the doctrine of the Active Intellect, is well known. But in Hillel's definition of the
soul we have an extreme form of this peculiar combination, and it represents a step backward to the standpoint of
Pseudo-Bahya and Ibn Zaddik. The work of Ibn Daud and Maimonides in the interest of a purer Aristotelianism seems
not to have enlightened Hillel. The Neo-Platonic emanation theory is clearly enunciated in Hillel's definition. The soul
stands fourth in the series. The order he has in mind is probably (1) God, (2) Separate Intelligences, (3) Active Intellect,
(4) Soul. We know that Hillel was a student of the Neo-Platonic "Liber de Causis" (cf. above, p. xx), having translated
some of it into Hebrew, and he might have imbibed his Neo-Platonism from that Proclean book.
Continuing the description of the soul in man, he says that the noblest part of matter, viz., the human body, is endowed
with the rational soul, and becomes the subject of the powers of the latter. Thereby it becomes a man, i. e., a rational
animal, distinguished from all other animals, and similar to the nature of the angels.
The Active Intellect causes its light to emanate upon the rational soul, thus bringing its powers out into actuality. The
Active Intellect, which is one of the ten degrees of angels, is related to the rational power in man as the sun to the power
of sight. The sun gives light, which changes the potentially seeing power into actually seeing, and the potentially visible
object into the actually visible. Moreover, this same light enables the sight to see the sun itself, which is the cause of the
actualization in the sight. So the Active Intellect gives something to the rational power which is related to it as light to the
sight; and by means of this something the rational soul can see or understand the Active Intellect itself. Also the
potentially intelligible objects become through this influence actually intelligible, and the man who was potentially
intelligent becomes thereby actually intelligent.
Intellect ("sekel") in man is distinguished from wisdom ("hokmah"). By the former power is meant an immediate
understanding of abstract principles. The latter is mediate understanding. Wisdom denotes speculation about universals
through inference from particulars. Intellect applies directly to the universals and to their influence upon the
particulars.[324]
Hillel next discusses the live topic of the day, made popular by Averroes, namely, whether there are in essence as many
individual souls as there are human bodies, or, as Averroes thought, there is only one universal soul, and that its
individualizations in different men are only passing incidents, due to the association of the universal soul with the human
body, and disappear when the body dies. The "sages of the Gentiles," Hillel tells us, regard Averroes's notion as
heretical, and leading besides to the absurd conclusion that the same soul is both rewarded and punished; a view which
upsets all religion. Averroes employs a number of arguments to prove his point, among them being the following. If there
are many souls, they are either all existing from eternity or they are created with the body. The first is impossible, for
since the soul is a form of the body, we should have actually an infinite number of forms, and this would necessitate the
actual existence of an infinite number of bodies also; else the existence of these souls for the purpose of joining the
bodies would be in vain. But it is absurd to suppose that there has been from eternity an infinite number of bodies
created like the number of souls, and yet they have not become real bodies with souls until now.
The second alternative is also impossible. For if there are many souls which came into being with the bodies, they either
came from nothing or from something. From nothing is impossible, for nothing comes from nothing except by way of
creation, which is a miracle; and we do not believe in miracles unless we have to. That they came from something is also
impossible; for this something can be neither matter nor form. It cannot be matter, for form, the actual and superior,
cannot come from the potential and inferior. It cannot be form, for then form would proceed from form by way of genesis
and dissolution, which is not true. Matter is the cause of generation and dissolution, not form. We are thus forced to the
conclusion that the soul is one and eternal, one in substance and number; and that it becomes many only per accidens,
by virtue of the multiplicity of its receiving subjects, comparable to the light of the one sun, which divides into many rays.
The Bible cannot help us to decide this question, for its expressions can be interpreted either way. Hillel then undertakes
to adjudicate between the contending views by striking a compromise. He feels that he is contributing to the solution of
an important problem by an original suggestion, which he says is to be found nowhere else expressed with such
clearness and brevity.
Here again Hillel's Neo-Platonic tendencies are in evidence. For he assumes both a universal soul and a great number of
individual souls emanating from it in a descending series. The objection that forms cannot come from other forms by way
of generation and dissolution, Hillel says, is not valid, for no such process is here involved. Generation and dissolution is
peculiar to the action of body upon body, which is by contact. A spiritual form acts upon other forms not through contact,
because it is not limited by time or place. We know concerning the Intelligences that each comes from the one previous
to it by way of emanation, and the same thing applies to the issue of many human souls from the one universal soul. After
death the rational part of every soul remains; that part which every soul receives from the Active Intellect through the help
of the possible or material intellect, and which becomes identified with the Active and separate Intellect. This is the part
which receives reward and punishment, whereas the one universal soul from which they all emanate is a divine
emanation, and is not rewarded or punished.[325]
We must now discuss further the nature of the three grades of intellect. For this it will be necessary to lay down three
preliminary propositions.
1. There must be an intellect whose relation to the material intellect is the same as that of the object of sense perception
is to the sense. This means that just as there must be a real and actual object to arouse the sense faculty to perceive, so
there must be an actual intelligible object to stir the rational power to comprehend.
2. It follows from 1 that as the material sense has the power of perceiving the sensible object, so the material intellect has
the power of perceiving this other intellect.
3. If it has this power, this must at some time be realized in actu. Therefore at some time the material intellect is identified
with the other intellect, which is the Active Intellect.
We must now prove 1. This is done as follows: We all know that we are potentially intelligent, and it takes effort and
pains and study to become actually intelligent. In fact the process of intellection has to pass several stages from sense
perception through imagination. Now our intellect cannot make itself pass from potentiality to actuality. Hence there must
be something else as agent producing this change; and this agent must be actually what it induces in us. Hence it is an
active intellect.
The material intellect has certain aspects in common with the sense faculty, and in certain aspects it differs. It is similar to
it in being receptive and not active. But the mode of receptivity is different in the two. As the intellect understands all
forms, it cannot be a power residing in a body in the sense of extending through it and being divided with the division of
the body, as we see in some of the powers of sense. This we can prove as follows:
1. If the intellect were receptive in the same manner as the senses, it would receive only a definite kind of form, as for
example the sense of sight does not receive taste.
2. If the intellect were a power in body and had a special form, it could not receive that form, just as for example if the eye
were colored, it could not perceive colors.
3. If the intellect were a corporeal power, it would be affected by its object and injured by a powerful stimulus, as is the
case in the senses of sight and hearing. A dazzling light injures the eye, a deafening noise injures the ear, so that
thereafter neither sense can perform its normal function properly. This is not true with the intellect. An unusually difficult
subject of thought does not injure the intellect.
4. If the intellect were similar in its activity to sense perception, it would not be self-conscious, as the sense faculties
cannot perceive themselves.
5. The intellect, if it were like sense, would not be able to comprehend a thing and its opposite at the same time, or it
would do so in a confused manner, as is the case in the powers of sense.
6. The intellect perceives universals; the sense, particulars.
This being the case, there is a difference of opinion as to the nature of the material intellect. Some say that it has no
definite nature in itself except that of possibility and capacity, though it is different from other possibilities in this respect
that it is not resident in, and dependent upon a material subject like the others. That is why Aristotle says that the
material intellect is not anything before it intellects; that it is in its essence potential with reference to the intelligibilia,
and becomes actual when it understands them actually.
Themistius says it is not any of the existents actually, but a potential essence receiving material forms. Its nature is
analogous to that of prime matter; hence it is called material intellect. It is best to call it possible intellect. Being a
potential existent it is not subject to generation and dissolution any more than prime matter.
Alexander of Aphrodisias thinks the material intellect is only a capacity, i. e., a power in the soul, and appears when the
soul enters the body, hence is not eternal a parte ante.
Averroes holds that the possible intellect is a separate substance, and that the capacity is something it has by virtue of
its being connected with the body as its subject. Hence this capacity is neither entirely distinct from it nor is it identical
with it. According to him the possible intellect is not a part of the soul.
Which of these views is correct, says Hillel, requires discussion, but it is clear that whichever of these we adopt there is
no reason opposing the conjunction of the possible intellect with the Active. For if it is an eternal substance, potential in
its nature, like primary matter, then it becomes actual when it understands the intelligible objects. The same is true if it is
a capacity residing in the soul.
Hillel is thus of the opinion in this other question debated in those days, whether the intellect of man is capable of
conjunction during life with the angelic Active Intellect, that it is. The Active Intellect, he says, in actualizing the material
intellect influences it not in the manner of one body acting upon another, i. e., in the manner of an efficient or material
cause, but rather as its formal or final cause, leading it to perfection. It is like the influence which the separate
Intelligences receive from one another, the influence of emanation, and not a material influence comparable to
generation. This reception of influence from the Active Intellect on the part of the potential is itself conjunction. It means
that the agent and the thing acted upon become one, and the same substance and species. The material intellect
becomes a separate substance when it can understand itself.[326]
Before taking up the more theological problem of reward and punishment, he devotes the last section of the theoretical
part of his book to a discussion of the relation of the possible or material intellect to the rest of the human soul. This
problem also arose from Averroes's interpretation of the Aristotelian psychology, and is closely related to the other one of
the unity of the human intellect. It is needless for us to enter into the technical details which are a weariness to the flesh
of the modern student, but it is worth while to state briefly the motives underlying the opposing views. Averroes, who had
no theological scruples, interpreted Aristotle to mean that the part of the soul which was intimately associated with the
body as its form, constituting an indissoluble organism in conjunction with it, embraced its lower faculties of sense,
imagination and the more concrete types of judgment. These are so intimately bound up with the life of the body that they
die with its dea