THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES 119

the essential ““stripping bare’ (tajrid) of the Intellect.
The Intellect does not have as its immediate object the
empirical existence of things but their permanent
essences which are relatively “non-existing’ since on the
sensory plane they are not manifested.! Now this purely
intellectual knowledge implies direct identification with
its object and that is the decisive criterion which dis-
tinguishes intellectual ¢ vision” from rational working
of the mind. This “vision’ does not, however, exclude
sensory knowledge ; rather it includes it since it is its
essence, although a particular state of consciousness
may exclude one in favour of the other.

Here it must be made quite plain that the term
““intellect” (al-‘aql) is in practice applied at more than
one level: it may designate the universal principle of all
intelligence, a principle which transcends the limiting
conditions of the mind; but the direct reflection of Uni-
versal Intellect in thought may also be called “intellect”
and in this case it corresponds to what the ancients
called reason.

The mode of working of the mind which is com-
plementary to reason is imagination (al-khiyal). In
relation to the intellectual pole of the mind imagination

1. When certain modern thinkers would see in the act of knowing a sort
of an: ihilation—relative and subjective—of the object of knowledge considered
as pure existence they merely reproduce the unreal and im~licitly absurd
character of thought which has turned aside from intellectual principles and
ended by emptying itself of any qualitative content. The crude and undifferen-
tiated “‘existence’® which these philosophers oppose to the intellectual act
of the subject is nothing but the shadow cast by this absence of intuition in
their .own thought: it is pure unintelligibility. What is real *‘in itself”’ is
essence ; if perception doe snot simultaneously grasp all aspects of a sensory
object that is because both the level of manifestation and the knowledge are
alike relative.