Second: The objection raised against them by the author of The Incoherence and others. They said:
“Your argument is contradicted, on your own premises, by the estimative faculty, which apprehends in a sensible object something not perceptible to the senses—for example, the faculty in a sheep that apprehends a wolf’s hostility. This hostility is treated as a single thing that cannot conceivably be divided, since hostility has no parts such that one could suppose one part to be apprehended and another to disappear. Yet, according to you, it is apprehended by a bodily faculty, for the souls of animals are imprinted in bodies and do not survive death—a point on which they agree. Even if they can contrive to posit divisibility in the objects apprehended by the five senses, the common sensory faculty, and the faculty that retains images, they cannot posit divisibility in these meanings, which need not exist in matter.”
He then raised an objection to his own argument, saying:
“This offers a counterexample in matters of reason, yet rational truths admit of no counterexamples. For as long as they cannot doubt the two premises—that a single instance of knowledge is indivisible, and that what is indivisible cannot inhere in a divisible body—they cannot doubt the conclusion.”
He answered that the aim was to expose their incoherence and inconsistency, and this had been achieved, since one of their two claims had been refuted: either what they said about the rational soul or what they said about the estimative faculty.
Third response: It may be said: What do you mean when you say that knowledge is indivisible, whereas the subject in which it inheres is divisible if it is a body? If by divisibility you mean the possibility of dispersing its parts, why do you say that every body can have its parts dispersed? Even supposing this to be possible in itself, why do you say that, if it is divided, the soul no longer remains a soul or a spirit, even though its parts remain dispersed?
Likewise, it may be said concerning knowledge, power, life, and all the other accidents inhering