a healthy body has a faculty by which it loves beneficial foods. This is why the natural disposition is praiseworthy and those who corrupt it are blameworthy.

Yet it may be asked: Is this natural disposition, with its faculty, receptivity, preparedness, and aptitude, sufficient for attaining knowledge, or does knowledge depend on proofs learned from outside?

If knowledge depends on proofs learned from outside, it may be attained in some cases and not others. Moreover, that external cause cannot, by itself, necessitate knowledge; at most, it serves to inform and remind. If knowledge must then arise, its attainment is necessary when those causes are present; otherwise, it is not. In that case, the natural disposition possesses only a receptivity to knowledge and faith when it finds someone to teach it the means to them.

Yet it clearly also possesses a receptivity to denial and unbelief when it finds someone to teach it the means to them—namely, making someone a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian.

There would then be no difference between faith and unbelief, or between knowledge and denial: it would contain only a faculty receptive to either and a preparedness for it, while the outcome would depend on an external agent acting upon it.

This is the first possibility, which we have refuted, explaining that it affords no grounds for praising the natural disposition. But if it contains a faculty that of itself necessitates knowledge, even when no one teaches it the proofs of knowledge, then knowledge must arise within it without the proofs of knowledge that we hear. This holds whether one says that it is necessary knowledge within it, or that it arises through causes such as proofs that take shape within the soul, without hearing anyone present an argument. For the soul