Note 3 — III. THE PYTHAGOREAN PHILOSOPHY.

Kindi has a fourfold division of the Spirit3: first the Spirit which is ever real,—the Cause and the Essence of all that is spiritual in the world,—thus without doubt God or the First Spirit produced; second, Spirit as the Reasoning capacity or Potentiality of the human soul; third, as the Habit or actual possession of the soul, which it can make use of at any moment, just as, for example, the writer can make use of his art; fourth and last, as Activity, by which a reality within the soul may be carried over to the reality that is without. The Activity last named appears, according to Kindi, to be the act of man himself, while to the First Cause,—to the ever-existing Spirit,—he ascribes the carrying of Potentiality into Habit, or the realisation of the Possible. The real Spirit or Mind we have thus received from above, and the third ʻaql is therefore called ʻaql mustafad, (Lat. intellectus adeptus sive adquisitus). The fundamental view of antiquity—that all our knowledge about things must come from a source outside of us—, runs, in the form of this doctrine of the ʻaql mustafad or Spirit which we receive from above, through the whole of Arabian Philosophy, and thence passes into Christian Philosophy. Unfortunately the theory is nearly correct, as far as this philosophy is itself concerned, for the ‘Active Spirit’, which has created it, is in reality the Neo-Platonic Aristotle.