Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/326

advanced state of astronomical science, reduced the number of In- telligences to ten, corresponding to the ten spheres as follows: the seven planetary spheres, the sphere of the fixed stars, the diurnal sphere embracing them all and giving all of them the motion from east to west, and the sphere of the elements surrounding the earth. Each one of these is in charge of an Intelligence. The last separate Intel- ligence is the Active Intellect, which is the cause of our mind's passing from potentiality to actuality, and of the various processes of sub- lunar life generally.

These are the views of Aristotle and his followers concerning the sep- arate Intelligences. And in a general way his views, says Maimonides, are not incompatible with the Bible. What he calls Intelligences the Scriptures call angels. Both are pure forms and incorporeal. Their ra- tionality is indicated in the nineteenth Psalm, "The heavens declare the glory of God." That God rules the world through them is evident from a number of passages in Bible and Talmud. The plural number in "Let us make man in our image" (Gen. 1, 26), “Come, let us go down and confuse their speech" (ib. 11, 7) is explained by the Rabbis in the statement that “God never does anything without first looking at the celestial 'familia."" (Bab. Talm. Sanhedrin 38b.) The word "look- ing" ("Mistakkel") is striking; 280 for it is the very expression Plato uses when he says that God looks into the world of Ideas and produces the universe. 281

For once Maimonides in the last Rabbinic quotation actually hit upon a passage which owes its content to Alexandrian and possibly Philonian influence. Having no idea of the Alexandrian School and of the works of Philo and his relation to some theosophic passages in the Haggadah, he made no distinction between Midrash and Bible, and read Plato and Aristotle in both alike, as we shall see more particularly later.

Maimonides's detailed criticism of Aristotle we shall see later. For the present he agrees that the philosophic conception of separate Intelligences is the same as the Biblical idea of angels with this excep- tion that according to Aristotle these Intelligences and powers are all eternal and proceed from God by natural necessity, whereas the Jewish view is that they are created. God created the separate Intel- ligences; he likewise created the spheres as rational beings and im-