24. Or: one.
1. Cf. Physics ii.5.ig6bio ff.
2. Physics ii.4.ig6a25 ff. The translation is by and large accurate.
46a] The Guide of the Perplexed II • 20 revolution and the motion that has differentiated and constituted all things 3 according to this order were due to their spontaneity. Now this is a point that arouses strong astonishment 5 I mean the fact that they say concerning animals and plants that they do not come about and are not produced by chance, but have a cause, which is either nature or intellect or some other similar thing — for not any haphazard thing is generated from every seed or sperm, but from this particular seed there comes into being an olive tree and from that sperm a human being — and that at the same time they say of the heavens and of the bodies that alone are divine among all the visible bodies, that they have come into being spontaneously and that they have no cause at all such as is possessed by the animals and the plants. This is the text of his statement. Then he starts to explain in a more lengthy passage the falsity of these imaginings.
Accordingly it is clear to you that Aristotle believes and demonstrates that none of these beings are through chance. Now what contradicts their having come into being4 through chance is their having come into being5 essentially — I mean their having a cause that renders it necessary for them to come into being in this particular fashion. It is because of this cause that they exist in the way they do. This is what has been demonstrated, and this is what Aristotle believes. But it is not clear to me that Aristotle believes that, because these beings have not come into being spontaneously, it follows necessarily that they have come into being in virtue of the purpose of one who purposed and the will of one who willed. For | to me a combina¬ tion between existing in virtue of necessity and being produced in time in virtue of a purpose and a will — a combination uniting these two — comes near to a combination of two contraries. For the meaning of necessity, as Aristotle believes it, is that everything among the beings, which is not an artifact, cannot but have a cause necessitating that particular thing — a cause that has brought it into being as it is — and that this cause has a second cause and this second cause similarly a third one, until finally a first cause is reached from which everything is necessarily derived. This is so because of the impossibility of an infinite series of causes. However, he does not believe withal that the necessity in virtue of which the existence of the world is derived from the Creator — I mean to say from the First Cause — is like the necessity in virtue of which shadow is derived from a body or heat from fire or light from the sun, as those say of him who do not understand what he said. Rather does he believe that this necessity is somewhat like the necessity of the derivation of an intellectum from an intellect, for the 3. Or: the universe. 4. Or: their being. 5. Or: their being.
15 j 14 The Guide of the Perplexed II • 21 [ 46* intellect is the agent6 of the intellectum in respect of its being an intellectum. For this First Cause — though it is according to him an intellect of the highest and most perfect rank of being so that he says that it wills what is necessarily derived from it and rejoices and takes pleasure in it — cannot will anything contrary to this.7 Now this is not called purpose, and the notion of purpose is not included in it. For a man may will to have two eyes and two hands, and rejoice in having them and take pleasure in it and cannot will anything contrary to this. However, that individual does not have two eyes and two hands because of a purpose on his part and because of his having particularized this shape and these actions. For the notions of purpose and of particularization only apply to a nonexistent thing for which it is possible to exist just as it was purposed and particularized and for which it also is possible not to exist in this fashion. I do not know whether | the discourse and speech of Aristotle that these things must necessarily have a cause was understood by certain latter-day men to refer to purpose and particularization, or whether they disagree with him on this and choose the opinion affirming purpose and particularization, deeming that it does not contradict the eternity of the world.
After what we have explained, I shall begin to treat of the opinion of these latter-day men.
CHAPTER 21 Know that among the latter-day philosophers who affirm the eternity of the world there are some1 who maintain that God, may He be exalted, is the Agent2 of the world, who chose that it should exist, purposed it, and particularized it so that it should be as it actually is. They think, however, that it is impossible that this should have happened at one particular time rather than at another; according to them the world has always been and will always be like this. They say: What compels us to conceive of an agent3 as unable to effect a thing unless the agent precedes the act in time is the fact that this necessarily happens to us when we effect something. This is so because in every agent of whom this may be 6. I.e., the efficient cause. 7. I.e., to what is derived from it.
1. The Arabic word may also refer to a single philosopher.
2. Or: Maker. The Arabic term used is applied to the efficient cause.
5. Cf. preceding note.
47^ ] The Guide of the Perplexed II - 21 j i$ predicated, there is a certain privation; accordingly he is at first an agent in potentia and, when he acts, he passes into actuality. But the deity, may He he exalted, in whom there is no privation and nothing at all in potentia, does not precede His act, for He has always been an agent in actu. And just as there is a difference — and what a difference! — between His essence and ours, so is there a difference between the relation linking His act and Himself and the relation linking our act and ourselves. They draw the same analogy4 with regard to particularization and will. For there is no difference between your saying, when treating of this matter: an agent, one who wills, one who purposes, one who chooses freely, or one who particularizes. And they say | it is also impossible that His act or His will should change, as we have explained.5 It has already become clear to you, whc> are engaged in the study of this my Treatise, that these people have altered the term “necessity,” but have let its meaning remain. Perhaps they intended to choose a more beautiful expression or to get rid of one that is shocking. For the meaning of the assertion, as maintained by Aristotle, that this being proceeds necessar¬ ily from its cause and is perpetual in virtue of the latter’s perpetuity— that cause being the deity — is identical with the meaning of their assertion that the world derives from the act of the deity or exists in virtue of His purpose, will, free choice, and particularization, but that it has always been and will always be as it is — just as the sunrise is indubitably the agent of the day, though neither of them precedes the other in point of time. But this is not the meaning of purpose, as we propose to conceive it. For we wish to signify by the term that it — I mean the world — does not necessarily proceed from Him, may He be exalted, as an effect necessarily proceeds from its cause without being able to be separated from it or to change unless its cause or one of its modes also changes. Now if you understand the meaning of the term in this way, it is already known that it is absurd to say that the world necessarily proceeds from the being of the deity as an effect proceeds from its cause, and it is further known that the world has come about through an act of the deity or through His particularization.
Accordingly the matter is reduced to this, and the discussion finally leads us to an inquiry concerning the diversity existing in the heavens, with regard to which it has been demonstrated that it must necessarily have a cause. The inquiry concerns the question whether this cause is the ground of 4. The Arabic word also means “syllogism” and is sometimes used in the sense of “reason¬ ing.”
5. Cf. II 13.
ji6 The Guide of the Perplexed II • 21 [47^ this diversity, the latter having necessarily proceeded from the existence of this cause, or whether this cause is the agent that has brought about this diversity and has particularized it in the way in which we, the followers of Moses our Master, believe. We shall speak of this after we have first set forth a preface by which we shall explain to you the meaning of the necessity maintained by Aristotle so that you should conceive it. Thereupon | I shall begin to explain to you, with the help of speculation and philosophic proofs devoid of falsification, my preference in favor of the opinion accord¬ ing to which the world has been produced in time.
When he6 says that the first intellect necessarily proceeds from God, the second from the first, and the third from the second, and also when he holds that the spheres necessarily proceed from the intellects, and when he sets forth the famous order that you know from various passages in his writings — that order of which we have already expounded a part here7 — it is clear that he does not wish to signify thereby that first a certain thing was, and then, later, the thing necessarily proceeding from the first thing was produced in time. For he does not say that any of these was produced in time. By the term “necessity,” he merely means to signify causality; it is as if he said the first intellect is the cause of the existence of the second intellect, the second of the third, and so on till the last of them. The same applies to the discourse concerning the spheres and the first matter; according to him, none of these things precedes in time, or exists without, any of these other things. It is, to take an example, as if someone said that roughness, smoothness, hardness, softness, thickness, and absorbency, necessarily derive from the first qualities. For no one doubts that these qualities — I ‘mean heat, cold, humidity, and dryness — produce roughness, smoothness, hardness, softness, thickness, absorbency, and other similar qualities. Accordingly they necessarily derive from the four first qualities, even though it is impossible that a body should exist endowed with the four first qualities and devoid of the secondary ones. It is in an exactly analogous way that Aristotle says, concerning that which exists in general, that in it this particular thing necessarily proceeds from that and so forth till the series ends with the First Cause, as he himself says, or the first intellect or however you may wish to call it. All of us aim at one and the same principle. But | he holds, as I have recounted to you, that everything that is other than it necessarily proceeds from it. We affirm that all these things have been made by Him in virtue of a purpose and a will directed toward this particular being, which did not exist and now became an 6. I.e., the Aristotelian philosopher. 7. Cf. II 4.
<\S>b ] The Guide of the Perplexed 11-22 yij existent in virtue of His will, may He be exalted. Now I shall begin to set forth in the following chapters my proofs and my preference in favor of the world’s having been produced in time according to our opinion.
CHAPTER 22 A proposition universally agreed upon, aixepted by Aristotle and by all those who have philosophized, reads as follows: It is impossible that anything but a single simple thing should proceed from a simple thing. If the thing is composite, there may proceed from it several things according to the number of simple things of which the compound is composed. Thus, for instance, what proceeds from fire, in which two qualities — heat and dryness — have combined is the action of heating by means of its heat and that of drying by means of its dryness. Similarly in the case of a thing composed of matter and form, certain things proceed from it in respect to its matter and certain other things in respect to its form, if it is of multiple composition. In accordance with this proposition, Aristotle says that what first proceeded from God was constituted by a single simple intellect only.
A second proposition: Any thing at random does not proceed from any other thing at random, but there subsists necessarily a certain conformity between the cause and its effect. Even in the case of accidents, one accident at random does not proceed from any other accident at random, as would be the case if, for instance, a quantity would proceed from a quality, or a quality from a quantity. Similarly form does not proceed from matter nor matter from form. | A third proposition: Every agent, acting in virtue of purpose and will and not in virtue of its nature, accomplishes many different acts.
A fourth proposition: A whole composed of various juxtaposed sub¬ stances may more appropriately be termed a composition than a whole composed of various substances that have combined with one another. For instance, a bone, flesh, a vein, a nerve, are simpler than the whole of a hand or that of a foot composed of nerves, flesh, veins, and bones. This is too clear to require additional discourse.
After having set forth these premises, I say: With regard to Aristotle’s statement that the first intellect is the cause of the second, the second of the )i8 The Guide of the Perplexed II • 22 [49a third, and so on — even if there were thousands of degrees, the last intellect would indubitably still be simple. How then can the composition have come to exist, the composition existing — as Aristotle believes — in the beings in virtue of necessity? We shall concede to him all that he says concerning a composition of various notions coming about in the intellects, as their intellecta are multiple, when the intellects get farther away from the First Cause. But even if we grant him this guess and conjecture, how can the intellects be a cause for the procession of the spheres from them? And what relation can there be between matter and that which being separate has no matter at all? And supposing that we concede that the cause of every sphere is, in the fashion stated, an intellect — inasmuch as there subsists composition in the intellect, which intellectually cognizes itself and what is other than itself, so that it is as it were composed of two things, from one of which another and lower intellect proceeds, whereas a sphere proceeds from the other — he should still be asked: How does a sphere proceed from the one simple thing from which it proceeds? | A sphere is composed of two kinds of matter and two forms: the matter and the form of the sphere itself and the matter and the form of the star fixed in the sphere. Now if this comes about in virtue of a procession, we cannot but require for this compound a composite cause, the procession of the body of the sphere being occasioned by one of its parts and that of the body of the star by the other. This would be so if the matter of the stars were all of it one and the same. However, the substance of the bright stars may be a certain substance and that of the dim ones may be another substance. It is also known that every body is composed of its matter and its form.
Accordingly it has become clear to you that these things do not conform to the conception of necessity that he sets forth. Similarly the diversity of the motions of the spheres does not agree with the order of their arrangement one beneath the other, in such a way that necessity could be claimed in this field. We have already mentioned this.1 There is, furthermore, another point that ruins everything that has been established with regard to natural things if the state of the heavens is considered. For if the matter of all the spheres is one and the same, why is it not necessary for the form of one particular sphere to be transferred to the matter of another, in accord with what happens beneath the sphere of the moon because of the aptitude of matter? And why is one particular form permanently in one particular matter although the matter of all is common? Unless — by God! — someone asserts that the matter of every sphere is other than that of the others. 1. Cf. II 19.
5o« ] The Guide of the Perplexed H-22 )I9 In that case the form of the motion of the spheres would not be indicative of their matter. This would be the ruin of all principles. Furthermore, if the matter of all the stars is one and the same, whereby are their individ¬ uals differentiated — is it by their forms or by accidents? In either case it would be necessary that the forms or accidents in question should be trans¬ ferred one after the other to each of the stars, in order that | the aptitude of matter not be set at nought. Hereby it has become clear to you that when we say the matter of the spheres or the matter of the stars, these expressions contain none of the meaning of that matter here, this being a case of the equivocal use of terms $ and that every being from among the bodies of the spheres has an existence that is proper to it and that it does not have in common with anything other than itself. How then could it happen that the spheres have in common their circular motion and the stars their fixity?
If, however, we believe that all this has been produced through the purpose of one who purposed, made, and particularized it — as His wisdom, which cannot be grasped, required — none of these questions affect us, whereas they do affect him who claims that all this has come about through necessity and not through the will of one who wills. This is an opinion that does not agree with the order of that which exists, an opinion in favor of which no cause and no new persuasive proof have been brought forward. Withal very disgraceful conclusions would follow upon it. Namely, it would follow that the deity, whom everyone who is intelligent recognizes to be perfect in every kind of perfection, could, as far as all the beings are con¬ cerned, produce nothing new in any of them.; if He wished to lengthen a fly’s wing or to shorten a worm’s foot, He would not be able to do it. But Aristotle will say that He would not wish it and that it is impossible for Him to will something different from what is; that it would not add to His perfection but would perhaps from a certain j>oint of view be a deficiency. I shall sum up for your benefit, and though I know that many men imbued with a partisan spirit shall tax me because of this statement either with having but little comprehension of their argument or with deliberately deviating from it, yet shall I not, because of that, refrain from saying what I in my inadequacy have apprehended and understood. Accordingly this summing-up will be as follows: Everything that Aristotle has said about all that exists from beneath the sphere of the moon to the center of the earth is indubitably correct, and no one | will deviate from it unless he does not understand it or unless he has preconceived opinions that he -wishes to defend or that lead him to a denial of a thing that is manifest. On the other hand, everything that Aristotle expounds with regard to the sphere of the moon and that which is above it is, except for certain things, something analogous to guessing and conjecturing. All the more does this apply to what he says about the order of the intellects and to some of the opinions regarding the divine that he believes; for the latter contain grave incongruities and perversities that manifestly and clearly appear as such to all the nations,2 that propagate evil, and that he cannot demonstrate.
Do not criticize me for having set out the doubts that attach to his opinion. You may say: Can doubts disprove an opinion or establish its contrary as true? Surely this is not so. However, we shall treat this philos¬ opher as his followers have enjoined us to treat him. For Alexander has explained that in every case in which no demonstration is possible, the two contrary opinions with regard to the matter in question should be posited as hypotheses, and it should be seen what doubts attach to each of them: the one to which fewer doubts attach should be believed. Alexander says3 that things are thus4 with respect to all the opinions regarding the divine that Aristotle sets forth and regarding which no demonstration is possible. For everyone who has come after Aristotle says that what Aristotle stated about them arouses fewer doubts than whatever else might be said about them. We have acted in this way when it was to our mind established as true that, regarding the question whether the heavens are generated or eternal, neither of the two contrary opinions could be demonstrated. For we have explained the doubts attaching to each of the opinions and have shown to you that the opinion favoring the eternity of the world is the one that raises more doubts and is more harmful for the belief that ought to be held with regard to the deity. | And this, in addition to the fact that the world’s being produced in time is the opinion of Abraham our Father and our prophet Moses, may peace be on both of them.
As we have mentioned that opinions should be examined by means of the doubts they arouse, I see fit to explain to you something with regard to that.
2. Or: to all the religious communities.
3. On this quotation from Alexander of Aphrodisias, cf. Translator’s Introduction.
4. Or: that he conducts things thus.
CHAPTER 25 Know that when one compares the doubts attaching to a certain opinion with those attaching to the contrary opinion and has to decide which of them arouses fewer doubts, one should not take into account the number of the doubts but rather consider how great is their incongruity and what is their disagreement with what exists. Sometimes a single doubt is more powerful than a thousand other doubts. Furthermore this comparison can be correctly made only by someone for whom the two contraries are equal. But whoever prefers one of the two opinions because of his upbringing or for some advantage, is blind to the truth. While one who entertains an un¬ founded predilection cannot make himself oppose a matter susceptible of demonstration, in matters like those under discussion such an opposition is often possible. Sometimes, if you wish it, you can rid yourself of an un¬ founded predilection, free yourself of what is habitual, rely solely on speculation, and prefer the opinion that you ought to prefer. However, to do this you must fulfill several conditions. rHie first of them is that you should know how good your mind is and that your inborn disposition is sound. This becomes clear to you through training in all the mathematical sciences and through grasp of the rules of logic. The second condition is to have knowledge of the natural sciences and to apprehend their truth so that you should know your doubts in their true reality. The third condition concerns your morals. For | whenever a man finds himself inclining — and to our mind it makes no difference if this happens because of his natural disposition or because of an acquired characteristic — toward lusts and pleas¬ ures or preferring anger and fury, giving the upper hand to his irascible faculty and letting go its reins, he shall be at fault and stumble wherever he goes. For he shall seek opinions that will help him in that toward which his nature inclines. I have drawn your attention to this in order that you should not be deceived. For someone may some day lead you into vain imaginings through setting forth a doubt concerning the creation of the world in time, and you may be very quick to let yourself be deceived. For in this opinion is contained the destruction of the foundation of the Law and a presumptuous assertion with regard to the deity. Be therefore always suspicious in your mind as to this point and accept the authority of the two prophets1 who are the pillars of the well-being of the human species with l. I.e., Abraham and Moses.
}22 The Guide of the Perplexed II • 24 [ 51& regard to its beliefs and its associations. Do not turn away from the opinion according to which the world is new, except because of a demonstration. Now such a demonstration does not exist in nature.
Furthermore, the student of this Treatise should not engage in criticism because of my using this rhetorical mode of speech in order to support the affirmation of the newness of the world. For Aristotle, the prince of the philosophers, in his main writings has likewise used rhetorical speeches in support of his opinion that the world is eternal. In such cases it may truly be said: Shall not our perfect Torah be [worth as much] as their frivolous talk?2 If he refers in support of his opinion to the ravings of the Sabians, how can we but refer in support of our opinion to the words of Moses and Abraham and to everything that follows therefrom?
I have promised you a chapter in which I shall expound to you the grave doubts that would affect whoever thinks that man has acquired knowledge as to the arrangement of the motions of the sphere and as to their being natural things going on according to the law of necessity, things whose order and arrangement are clear. I shall now explain this to you. | CHAPTER 24