the birth of the child or at its conception. But Jehuda ha-Levi,
the most pious of all the philosophers, emphasized vigorously the
indivisibility of the soul, its incorporeality and its reality apart from
the condition of the body, and--in opposition to the Aristotelian
free-thinkers, who expected the human soul to be absorbed into the divine
soul, the active intellect,--he declared the immortality of the individual
a fundamental article of faith.(932)

Now some of the Jewish thinkers, following Jehuda ha Levi, Ibn Daud, and
others, though Aristotelians, shrank from the logical conclusion of
denying all individuality to the soul, and attributed to it rather a
process of purification, which ends with the elevation of the soul-essence
to angelic rank and thus guarantees its immortality. Not so Maimonides,
who accepted with inexorable earnestness the Aristotelian idea of form as
the perfection of matter. The essence of the human soul is, for him, that
force or potentiality which qualifies it for the highest development of
the intellect, and is alone capable of grasping the divine. Yet it can
acquire a part in the creative World-spirit only in the same degree as it
unfolds this potentiality to share the divine intellect, whose seat is the
highest sphere of the universe. By dint of this acquired intelligence it
can live on as an independent intellect, in the image of God, and thus
attain beatitude in the contemplation of Divinity.(933)

7. Naturally the view of Maimonides, that a certain measure of immortality
is granted only to the wise,--though they must be morally perfect as
well,--aroused great opposition. Hasdai Crescas proves its untenableness by
asking, "Why shall the wise alone share in immortality? Furthermore, how
can something that came into existence in the course of human life
suddenly acquire eternal duration? Or how can there be any bliss in the
knowledge of God where there is no personality, no self-conscious ego to
enjoy it?" Therefore Crescas ascribed to the soul an indestructible
spiritual essence whose perfection is attained, not by mere intellect or
knowledge, but by love of God manifested in a religious and moral life,
and which is thereby made to share in eternal bliss.(934)

8. All these various thinkers find the future life either expressed or
suggested in the Scriptures as a truth based upon reason. This is
especially the conception of Abraham ibn Daud, who, contrary to his
Aristotelian successor