The principle from which a thing comes into being is therefore its nearest point of origin in the order of existence and the closest station to which it may return on the ladder of perfection. They maintain that every celestial sphere possesses a soul that imparts motion, and that each such soul has a separate intellect which it follows in both its actions and its understanding, until the series culminates in the First Sphere. The soul of that sphere is the first of souls, its intellect the first of intellects, and it is the very first entity to proceed from the First Principle.

They further assert that the First Principle itself is also an Intellect, yet it stands above all other intellects in rank and is eternally in pure actuality. Every intellect apart from it takes another as its model, its exemplar being its proximate source; whereas He—exalted is He—is the exemplar of every who seeks an exemplar and the source of every source. He is the First Principle, the supreme God, and they do not hesitate to call Him “Intellect.”

The term “intellect” (ʿaql) as they now employ it in Arabic, however, is a rendering of a word from the Greek language, and its place in that language is not the same as that of ʿaql in Arabic in its original sense, as we noted in the study of the soul. In Arabic, ʿaql refers to the faculty that restrains human thoughts and passions, preventing them from carrying out their resolutions as desire would have them do. A person is drawn toward certain things by his first impulses, prompted by appetite or anger, and the ʿaql holds him back