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Part One · Chapter Thirty-One — The Limits of the Human Intellect
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Know that the human intellect has things it apprehends within its power and nature; and in existence there are existents and matters which it is not in its nature to apprehend at all — by no means and through no cause; rather the doors of their apprehension are barred before it. And in existence there are matters of which it apprehends one aspect and is ignorant of others; and from its being an apprehender it does not follow that it apprehends everything — just as the senses have apprehensions yet cannot apprehend at any distance whatever, and likewise the rest of the bodily faculties: for though a man, say, be strong enough to lift two hundredweight, he is not strong enough to lift ten. The disparity of the individuals of the species in these sense-apprehensions and the rest of the bodily faculties is plain and clear to all people; but it has a limit, and the matter does not run on to any distance whatever and any amount whatever.
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The very same judgment holds for human intellectual apprehensions: the individuals of the species differ in them greatly. This too is very plain and clear to the people of knowledge: so that a meaning which one person derives by his own speculation, another person can never understand — even were it explained to him in every expression and by every parable and over the longest time, his mind would by no means penetrate it; rather his mind recoils from grasping it. And this disparity too is not without end; rather the human intellect has, beyond doubt, a limit at which it stops.
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Now there are things whose apprehension is shown to a man to be impossible, and he does not find himself yearning to know them, since he perceives the impossibility of that and that there is no door through which to enter to reach it — like our ignorance of the number of the stars of heaven and whether it is even or odd, and like our ignorance of the number of the species of animals, minerals, and plants, and the like. And there are things whose apprehension a man finds himself yearning for greatly — the intellect's drive to seek their reality and inquire after it is present in every speculative group of people and in every age. In these things opinions multiply, disagreement arises among the speculators, and doubts come about — because of the intellect's attachment to apprehending those things, I mean the yearning for them, and because each one supposes that he has found a way by which to know the truth of the matter, while it is not within the power of the human intellect to bring a demonstration upon it. For everything whose reality you have known by demonstration admits of no disagreement, no contention, and no opposition, save from an ignorant man who is contrary with the contrariness called 'demonstrative contrariness' — as you find groups who were contrary about the sphericity of the earth and the circular motion of the sphere and the like. These people have no entry into this aim.
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These matters in which this perplexity has arisen are very many in the divine matters, few in the natural matters, and nonexistent in the mathematical matters.
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Alexander of Aphrodisias said that the causes of disagreement about things are three. The first is the love of dominion and victory, which divert a man from apprehending the truth as it is. The second is the subtlety of the apprehended thing in itself, its obscurity, and the difficulty of apprehending it. The third is the ignorance of the apprehender and his falling short of apprehending what can be apprehended. So Alexander mentioned. But in our times there is a fourth cause he did not mention, because it did not exist among them: habit and upbringing. For a man has by his nature a love of what he is accustomed to and an inclination toward it — so much that you see the people of the desert, for all the squalor, lack of pleasures, and scantness of provisions they are in, loathe the cities and take no delight in their pleasures, and prefer the bad but habitual conditions to the good but unaccustomed ones; their souls find no rest in dwelling in palaces, nor in wearing silk, nor in the luxuries of the bath, oils, and perfumes.
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Likewise there happens to a man, with respect to the opinions he is accustomed to and was brought up on, love of them, protectiveness toward them, and estrangement from anything else.
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By reason of this cause too, a man is blinded from apprehending the truths and inclines toward his accustomed notions — as befell the multitude regarding corporeality and regarding many divine matters, as we shall explain — all of it on account of habit and being brought up on texts whose veneration and acceptance is settled, whose external senses indicate corporeality and indicate imaginings that have no truth, but were said by way of parable and riddle; and that was for reasons I shall mention.
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Do not suppose that this which we have said — the deficiency of the human intellect and its having a limit at which it stops — is a statement said according to the Law; rather it is a matter the philosophers have stated and apprehended in its true apprehension, without regard to any school or opinion. It is a true matter, in which none doubts save one ignorant of what has already been demonstrated of these things.
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This chapter we have set down only as a preface to what comes after it.