DE ANIMAE IMMORTALITATE On the Immortality of the Soul

They say that it cannot be removed at all, neither from the subject nor from the object body; therefore, they either decide or greatly suspect that it can neither understand without it, nor be a survivor without it. But if it were freed from the corporeal bond, they claim that it either returns again through Pythagorean transmigration, or that it lies torpid in leisure. And thus they run out into an infinite number through the eternity of the world. They certainly think of the soul as a part of man such that, because of this, the part cannot survive if the whole is corrupted. For this reason, they wish the whole itself to be abolished, and they think it is so one with the body in the constitution of man that they believe that if one is joined from the other, that which is the "being" of man perishes entirely. And thus they either place it in the number of natural forms, so that they want it proved by natural reason that the soul is immaterial only by participation, or at least they are not troubled to contend that this opinion is more probable than that by which immortality is usually asserted. Against the arguments themselves that bring forth mortality, which will be dissolved later. These and whatever things of this kind they scatter, they either establish the intellect by which the soul itself understands as entirely mortal with Alexander, or as one in all men with Averroes. Neither of these, however, has seemed to me worthy of being decided by a man of excellent talent and doctrine. For those who say such things ought to know or remember that the properties of the human soul are such that inferior things cannot be conferred upon it. It, being incorruptible, informs the corruptible body and survives the body, as will be widely evident in the progress; and because of