Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
When God in his kindness favored the human race by giving them a soul, which he united with the body, he also gave them the possibility of attaining eternal happiness. The second intellect is partly speculative or theoretical and partly practical. The theoretical intellect studies and contemplates all intelligible existents which are separate from matter.
Now, argues Crescas, whether the number of causes and effects is finite or infinite, there must be one cause of all of them which is not itself an effect. For if all things are effects they are "possible existents" as regards their own nature, and require a cause which will make them exist rather than not. This self-subsisting cause is God.
There are thus at least two sorts of objects of which we are aware, namely, particulars and universals. Among particulars I include all existents, and all complexes of which one or more constituents are existents, such as this-before-that, this-above-that, the-yellowness-of-this. Among universals I include all objects of which no particular is a constituent.
Further, every body possessed of magnitude or extension is divisible, hence it must have "union" to hold its parts together. But this "union" is not essential to all existents; for we have seen that its function is to unite accidents with body. And as accidents are separable while body may continue to exist without them, "union" disappears together with the accidents.
If all existents are possible, we have an infinite series, every link of which is dependent for its existence upon the link preceding it; and so long as there is no first there is nothing to explain the existence of any link in the chain. We must therefore assume a first, which is itself not again dependent upon a cause prior to it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking