People have differed over the words of Allah, Most High:

“And they ask you about the spirit.” [Al-Isrā’: 85]

Does this mean the spirit of a human being, one of the angels, or something else? There are two well-known views.

Even assuming that the human spirit is intended, the text does not explain its manner of being. Such an explanation is possible only for something that has a counterpart resembling it. The spirit is not of the same kind as the entities we observe, so its manner of being cannot be made known to us, even though it has a manner of being in itself.

Then the person who referred us to their statements about the soul may be told:

It is well known that their strongest proof that the soul is not a body is their assertion that knowledge inheres in it. If it were a body, what inheres in it would be divided when it is divided, for a body is divisible, whereas knowledge is indivisible and has no parts.

They may frame this argument in terms of knowledge of what is indivisible, such as knowledge of universals, immaterial entities, and the Necessary Existent. Knowledge of a single object is indivisible, since knowledge corresponds to its object. If the object of knowledge is indivisible, knowledge itself is indivisible; consequently, the subject in which knowledge inheres is indivisible and therefore cannot be a body.

This is the strongest proof they have. Responses to it have varied considerably, as has been explained at length elsewhere. Here, however, we say that it can be answered in several ways.

First: Knowledge inheres in the soul just as life, power, will, love, hatred, and all other accidents dependent upon life do. They concede that these attributes can inhere in a body. Thus, whatever answer accounts for these attributes inhering in the soul also accounts for knowledge inhering in it.