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Decomposition is impossible. A given form may disappear, but another form immediately takes its place. The combination of matter and form is the essential condition of sublunar existence, hence there can be no question of the soul entering or leaving the body, or of its activity apart from the body.
If the man is wise and wicked, the wisdom of the soul will enable it to exist without body; but on account of its wickedness and indulgence in the desires of this world, it cannot become completely free from the creatures of this world, and the best it can do is to rise above the sublunar world of change to the world of the planets where the forms do not change, and move about beneath the light of the sun, the heat of which will seem to it like a fire burning it continually, and preventing it from rising to the upper light.
And if so, neither can the sublunar order be destroyed, which is the work of the heavenly bodies. There is of course the abstract possibility of their being destroyed by their maker, not naturally, but by his will, as they were made; but we can find no reason in God for wishing to destroy them, all reasons existing in man for destroying things being inapplicable to God.
On the other hand, pure matter is actually nothing. It is just capacity for being anything, and the moment it is anything it is affected with form. It is clear from this account that matter and form are the bases of sublunar life and existence. No change, no motion without matter and form. For motion is presupposed in all kinds of change.
Ibn Daud as a Jew could not accept this solution, and so he cut the knot by saying that while it is true that matter cannot originate in the way in which the composite objects of the sublunar world come to be, it does not yet follow that it is absolutely ultimate and eternal. God alone is the ultimate and eternal; nothing else is.
As, again, there proceed from them other beings which are not permanent individually but only as species, namely, the species of our world, it is clear that with reference to the sublunar world there is so much Providential influence as to bring about the permanence of the species, but not of the individual. To be sure, the individuals too are not completely neglected.
In discussing the second fundamental principle, Revelation, Albo argues in the good old fashion that man is the noblest creature of the sublunar world, and the most distinctive and noblest part of man his form and essence is the theoretical reason. Hence the purpose of man must be the realization of the theoretical intellect.
The object of knowledge is not the particular thing which is constantly changing; nor yet the logical abstraction which is only in the mind. It is the real unity of sublunar nature as it exists in the Active Intellect. The problem of the definition is closely related to that of knowledge. The definition denotes the essence of every individual of a given species.
This is purely an argumentum ad hominem, for Maimonides does not regard the sublunar and superlunar worlds as independent of each other. He recognizes the unity of the universe.
Yet the Sphere cannot take the place of prime matter surely, for it is undoubtedly endowed with form, nay is rational and intelligent, as we have seen. When Israeli says that prior to the four elements there is nothing but the Omnipotence of God, he means that the sublunar process of change and becoming stops with the elements as its upper limit.
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