Chapter Three — Effects Issuing from the Human Being by Will Differ in Strength and Weakness

We say next: These effects differ in strength and weakness by reason of the strength and weakness of apprehension. Suppose a person performs an act: he does not break off from it except by the cessation of volition (irāda) — supposing the instrument holds out and the matter that receives the act remains sound in receiving its effect. Volition lapses only after the lapse of the knowledge that is its principle (mabdaʾ) — namely, the knowledge that the act is obligatory outright — as we have shown. And since nothing but the final felicity (al-saʿāda) is unconditionally obligatory for us, every act owes its obligatoriness to its lying on the path of what is good in itself; and even this does not hold of everything unconditionally, nor in all states — rather in one state and not another, one time and not another, one condition and not another. So an act's being obligatory needs many qualifications, whether these hold in reality (ḥaqīqa) or by way of assent (idhʿān) and opinion, as we have set all of that out in the book al-Iʿtibārāt. The meaning of these conditions is that, where they fail, there is an assent that things stand contrary to those qualifying conditions. For example: the runner runs on condition that no fatigue and exhaustion befall him; when he tires and flags, he stops — for he assents that bodily rest is now more obligatory and more binding. So we say: acts are conditioned in their obligatoriness.

And though equal in that respect, they differ in that one act may be conditioned by nothing, or by something rarely met with in its kind, while another is conditioned by many things, one or another of which can hardly fail to coincide with some impediment. In the first case many chance encounters with things fit to impede and contend do not affect the act and its volition; in the second, volition lapses and the act breaks off at the mere appearance of a single partial impediment. An example is the state of the brave man and the merely strong man in combat. The brave man believes there is no life with abasement — that leaving open the way of the corrupting enemy is abasement and disgrace — so he wills nothing but honor, and does not will life without it, nor all that is willed for life's sake, such as the soundness of limbs. The strong but corrupt man wills victory and therefore wills life, and everything life requires, so as to seize by it the pleasures of victory; failing that, he wills nothing but life, since his highest aim is life itself and whatever life cannot do without. Every wounding blow that comes upon the brave man, every hardship and pain he suffers — even bitter death — he bears with fortitude in pursuit of honor. The strong man, by contrast, has a steadfastness and endurance bounded by whatever portent of death rises before him, or whatever leaves his life without relish: he halts when matters reach that limit — unlike the brave man. Similar is the difference of resolve between two seekers of victory: the resolve of one may collapse before the other's. It is thus plain that acts and effects differ along the two sides of strength and weakness.

We say next: This rests on the strength and weakness of knowledge. For the lapse of the act and its volition is only through the lapse of knowledge; and the lapse of knowledge — that is, of the assent to obligatoriness — comes about only when its terms are removed; and a term is removed only when its contradictory is established in reality, or when the term passes away from the soul (nafs). And passing-away occurs only through weakness of the soul's directedness (tawajjuh al-nafs); for while the soul is directed toward it and wills to witness it, passing-away is impossible — unless the instrument that bears it is weak. On the first supposition — the establishment of the contradictory — and on the last — the passing-away of the form, as when forgetting expels it — the act falls outside the case we are supposing. And it is well known that the difference mentioned among people and their resolve does not rest on either of those two. Therefore the lapse of volition is only through weakness of knowledge arising from weakness of the soul's directedness — namely, the soul turns toward something else that it desires, and volition weakens, for the soul is never without some volition. Thus it becomes known what pertains to the resumption of its act. Then the soul, when an impediment appears, does not turn toward repelling the impediment but toward reinforcing it, insofar as the soul is directed toward it. For example: one who intends to drink water, if his thirst is not strong and the distance to the water is long, finds his soul turning to the imagined pleasure of stillness and the ease of sitting; then if darkness happens to intervene, or a dust-laden wind, or heat, he pictures that as a benefit reinforcing the sitting — and does not so much as consider whether it is an obstacle to walking to the water: its being a reinforcement of sitting suffices to keep him from the quest. It is thus plain: that gradation (tashkīk) in knowledge is on account of gradation in the soul's directedness; and it is also plain that the soul is never devoid of some knowledge, and that when it turns away from one form it turns to another form that obstructs the first — for forms are many and habit runs that way — and that the knowledge of two contraries is a single knowledge. Hence the heedless man's daring is stronger than the experienced man's.

We say next: Every gradation in the act is accompanied by a gradation in knowledge. For when two acts, one strong and one weak, both issue from the heedless man, the difference between them lies either on the side of knowledge, as has passed, or on the side of the bodily instrument — I mean the powers of motion and sense. The first has already been explained. As for the second: it is well known that the bodily instruments tire and weaken to the utmost in the state of fear and grief, in proportion to how fixed and rooted these are. And though that comes by way of the weakness of the diffused power, it certainly rests on knowledge. So if, in every such case, the power’s weakness comes by means of the knowledge of what is feared or grieved over, then the power's completeness and intensity come either by means of knowledge — the knowledge of their nonexistence — or through there being no knowledge of them at all, neither of their existence nor of their nonexistence. But it is well known that every act that issues, issues from knowledge of the act’s fittingness and the absence of corruption — and this is knowledge of nonexistence, if only in a general way. Nor does it tell against knowledge having a share in strength and intensity that this condition befalls the bodily powers and instruments by means of knowledge of frightening or grieving causes — as is evident. This, on the side of deficiency and weakness. So too on the side of increase: the more complete the knowledge of the act's obligatoriness — whether in appetitive (al-quwwa al-shahwiyya) or irascible (al-quwwa al-ghaḍabiyya) acts — the more complete the act's occurrence. From this it results that the ranks of the act, ordered from weakest to strongest and from strongest to weakest, are accompanied by ranks of the knowledge of obligatoriness and of the knowledge of corrupting factors. It results, too, that there are of necessity two extremes, and no truly neutral state devoid of knowledge. The first point sought is therefore established.

We say next: The gradation mentioned in knowledge follows — on the face of it — the gradation in the keeper of the cognitive form (al-ṣūra al-ʿilmiyya), and is in reality a branch of the gradation in the soul's directedness. For it is known by direct experience that there is a difference between apprehending some external sensible — a shape, a color — and apprehending the very same thing in pure imagination (al-khayāl); and on the face of it, the difference between them is the presence of the keeper in the first case and not in the second. But let the ground of the difference be considered more precisely than that.

So we say: If we survey external sensibles we find among them a difference in this very respect: there is a great difference between a sensible we perceived and dwelt upon in conceiving, and one with which we were content at the sense’s first contact. Let this be tested with ordered tangibles differing in quality — heat and cold, roughness and smoothness, hardness and softness — as we pass the touching hand over them; and likewise with visibles differing in color and light, and whatever other visible qualities there may be, as we let the eye rove over them. So with the other sensibles: the longer the sense dwells in conceiving and contemplating them, the more lucid their forms grow; the more it hurries, the weaker they grow, till they border on bare imagination. There is, then, a difference between what the sense perceived over a short time and over a long one: what grows strong is what was sensed over a long stretch of time, while the rest differs little, or not at all, from bare imagination. Then, looking deeper, we find that the sense's dwelling, too, does not of itself produce strength. For when we are plunged into different, intermingled sounds — as often happens in public and clamorous gatherings — and we attend and aim at one of the speakers, we hear his speech and pick it out; the rest, though we hear them all the same, is like a single continuous sound with indistinguishable parts and letters. So too in sickness and the suffering of pains: when the sick man busies himself with talk or something else, his apprehension of the pain is weak, and he is not pained by it as he is when unoccupied. This runs uniformly through all sensibles: there is no difference between the strong and the weak form in these examples except the presence or absence of the soul's directedness. Directedness, then, has a share.

Then, whenever we lift directedness from any example in which strength was found, the matter returns to weakness. And in pure imagination too we see the same difference we see in the forms of external sensibles — for imagination sometimes yields the strength of the sensed, and more, as in those afflicted with sirsām and in the illness of sirsām. And when we consider how things stand in that state and in pure imagination, we find the soul, in pure imagination, directed toward things — especially sensibles, by its habituation to them; and the more of them we remove, the stronger apprehension grows. It is thus plain that the criterion of the strength of knowledge is the strength of the soul's directedness. And it has also appeared that whoever breaks this habit and strives persistently in entering into himself — his pure imagination stands to him as sense stands to us, and conversely.