Chapter Four — Every Occurring, Sensed Act Has an Effect upon the Soul

So we say: When we have grown accustomed (iʿtiyād) to a thing, we feel no pain at it when it occurs — that much is evident. But if we sense the occurrence of something contrary to it, that is hard for us and productive of pain — sometimes even leading to perishing, as in the case of sudden shock, when grief crowds in all at once. And when it occurs a second time, it does not affect us as it did the first. Likewise, the more often it occurs, the more it declines in importance, and sometimes it has no effect at all. The proximate cause of such impact is strangeness; for man is so constituted as to search for the cause. What a man has seen in such a way that it settles, in general, in his apprehending power and his retentive faculty (ḥāfiẓa), he does not seek to uncover, since it is present with him. And since the stores of knowledge men hold differ of necessity, their recall differs of necessity as well. It is therefore possible that some are hard to summon and some easy. If one wants to summon the hard, one must turn one’s directedness away from what is present toward what is hidden — a familiar procedure in the case of someone heedless, or as though heedless, of the hidden content lodged within. A man thus possesses things known, things as-if-known, things unknown, and things as-if-unknown. What is unknown — its cause too is unknown; otherwise it would itself be known, as has been established in its proper place. But the strange — what is not familiar to the soul, nor present, but hidden and unattended — belongs to the unknowns; so the soul must search out its cause. Further, whatever is established with the soul, the soul is directed toward it, heedless of its contrary, as has passed. So when its contrary occurs and a man encounters it, he searches for its cause — that is, for all the notions that surround it and are bound up with it. And since, by hypothesis, it is contrary to what is established and present, all these notions are contrary too. The effects consequent on the repugnant thing are therefore ordered and multiplied according to the multiplicity and number of what accompanies it. And the more this is so, and the more its congruent features are observed, the stronger grows the soul’s directedness toward it, and the more firmly it is established with the soul. When it is first established, it forces into hiddenness what in the prior knowledge was contrary to it, while itself passing from hiddenness into manifestness. Then, when it occurs a second time, two attributes are now in it. By its attribute of hiddenness — for the prior knowledge has not been wholly demolished — the soul turns to it and increases its scrutiny of it. By its attribute of manifestness, that turning of the soul toward it is, the second time, less than the first. And the ratio of the third to the second is as that of the second to the first. The same account holds — by a parallel exposition — when the incoming knowledge is not preceded by a knowledge contrary to it. But there is a difference between them. The incoming form, being contrary, turns the soul away from the first form, and its congruent features were the more firmly established with the soul — for the soul, turned away from each one of them in turn, turns back to them. So its conceiving of its congruent features multiplies, and of the causes and congruent features it first encountered; so it is the more firmly established with the soul, and nearer to articulation. It is otherwise where the knowledge arrives first: the soul’s directedness is then confined to what it has encountered of them, and its temperamental and other affections diminish. Hence the saying: the worth of a blessing is known after its loss. Hence too, delight and pain at a thing are stronger after toil and striving for it; and it has many parallels. It is thus plain that every knowledge has some effect upon the soul in its very establishment and by way of its effects — joy, grief, anger, craving, and the like. It is plain, too, that an incoming form which is contrary is stronger in effect, firmer in existence, and harder to remove than a form arriving first.

We say next: Repeated arrival brings rootedness (rusūkh) and difficulty of removal. The reason appears from what we have just set out about the difference of forms with the soul in manifestness and hiddenness; for rootedness is a kind of manifestness. The more often a form arrives, the more the soul’s directedness toward it multiplies and strengthens; and the more this is so, the harder its turning from it — that is, its heedlessness of it and its forgetting of it — as you have learned. We say next: In man — indeed in every animal — there is a settled disposition (malaka) and a state. By a settled disposition we mean the firmly rooted cognitive form from which the act proceeds with ease — that is, with little deliberation (rawiyya) and little agitation of the soul; by state (ḥāl) we mean the contrary of that. The reason is what you have learned: the more often a cognitive form arrives, the more it takes root and the harder it is to remove; and the more this is so, the more easily the act proceeds from it, and the weaker the need for deliberation and thought to secure the firm judgment of its obligatoriness. And with the form’s intense establishment the incompatibles weaken, pass away, and drop out of knowledge, while knowledge of the form strengthens; so deliberation diminishes; and the stronger the form, the weaker the deliberation, until it ends at that which involves no deliberation at all — and that is complete rootedness. It is thus plain that in man there are settled dispositions and states, the one contrary to the other. It has also become plain that the state lies on the path toward a settled disposition and is its precursor; and that of settled dispositions, some can pass away and some cannot — namely the complete, firmly rooted settled disposition — unless the term “settled disposition” be conventionally restricted to firmly rooted knowledge that cannot pass away.