When they are told, “To affirm something like this is self-evidently impossible,” they retort, “On the contrary, it is possible; universals themselves are possible and do exist, even though they cannot be pointed to by the senses.”

What they have failed to grasp is that universals exist as such only in the mind, not in concrete reality. Yet they base their entire discussion of humankind’s origin and final return on this figment—an illusion whose falsity is plain to most ordinary people.

[The reason for the confusion]
The confusion that besets both the deniers and the affirmers regarding the spirit is widespread. Its root lies in the fact that the spirit—what the philosophers call the “rational soul”—is neither of the same species as this physical body nor of the elements and the compounds that emerge from them. It is of an altogether different order. One group therefore describes it solely by means of negations that stress its otherness from the bodies we perceive, while the other group treats it as just another kind of perceptible body. Both views are erroneous.