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Updated: May 11, 2025
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.
All these principles we must keep in mind, for we shall by means of them prove later the existence and incorporeality of God. As the concepts of physics are essential for proving the existence of God, so are the principles of psychology of importance in showing that there are intermediate beings between God and the corporeal substances of the world. These are called in the Bible angels.
So Crescas takes up in detail all the Maimonidean proofs of the existence, unity and incorporeality of God and points out that they are not valid because in the first place they are based upon premises which Crescas has refuted, and secondly were the premises granted Maimonides's results do not follow from them.
He cannot be two or more, for "separate" essences which are not body are not subject to number unless one is cause and the other effect . It follows, too, that he is not subject to time, for there is no time without motion . We have thus proved with one stroke God's existence as well as his unity and incorporeality.
The arrangement of the work in the two divisions of "Unity" and "Justice," the discussion of substance and accident, of the creation of the world, of the existence, unity and incorporeality of God, of his attributes, of his justice, and of human free will, are so similar in the two that it is external evidence alone to which we owe the knowledge of certain Karaite works as Jewish.
From the indivisibility of being he inferred its incorporeality, and therefore denied all bodily existence. The list of Eleatic philosophers is doubtfully closed by the name of Empedocles of Agrigentum, who in legend almost rivals Pythagoras. In the East he learned medicine and magic, the art of working miracles, of producing rain and wind.
Maimonides, as we know, based his proofs of the existence, unity and incorporeality of God upon twenty-six philosophical propositions taken from the works of Aristotle and his Arabian interpreters. As he was not writing a book on general philosophy, Maimonides simply enumerates twenty-five propositions, which he accepts as proved by Aristotle and his followers.
From Unity it follows that no attributes either essential or accidental can be applied to God, such as wisdom, strength, generosity, and so on, for they would cause multiplicity. From incorporeality we infer that God is not subject to corporeal affections like fear, sorrow, joy, grudge, and so on. Independence of time implies infinite power and want of resemblance to other things.
Having disposed of the arguments of the Mutakallimun, Maimonides proceeds to prove the existence, unity and incorporeality of God by the methods of the philosophers, i. e., those who, like Alfarabi and Avicenna, take their arguments from Aristotle. The chief proof is based upon the Aristotelian principles of motion and is found in the eighth book of Aristotle's Physics.
It does not follow if one of the two elements a, b, of a composite a + b is found separately, that the other must be found existing separately likewise. We have seen that from the principle of the existence of God follow four derivative dogmas, unity, incorporeality, independence of time, freedom from defects. We are now told that from these secondary roots issue a number of branches.
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