WorkAvicenna

A Compendium on the Soul

A map of the soul's powers, from nourishment and growth up to the intellect, that later turned up copied word for word in Judah Halevi's *Kuzari*.

by Avicenna55 passages held

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Original title: Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār
Original language: Arabic

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Overview

The Sāmānid ruler in Bukhara had let the young Avicenna into his royal library, and soon afterwards Avicenna dedicated his first book to him, apparently in thanks, opening it with a long and deferential address to the prince. In Arabic it is Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār (A Book on the Soul, in the Manner of a Compendium), and it is also known by a title meaning a research into the faculties of the soul. Its ten sections first prove that the soul's powers exist, then sort them into vegetative, animal and human; they treat the five outer senses and the inner ones, and argue that the human soul is a substance that does not depend on the body, with a source outside it that stands to human minds as light stands to sight. Even here the knowledge the rational soul must gain is set out in the order of the philosophical curriculum, as it would be in his later summaries. The little book travelled far. A Latin version by Andrea Alpago, an Italian physician who had worked in Damascus, was printed at Venice in 1546. In 1875 Samuel Landauer of the University of Strasbourg edited the Arabic from two manuscripts, one at Leiden and one in Milan, and found that fifteen pages on the philosophers' view of the soul in the Kuzari of Judah Halevi, the Jewish poet and philosopher of twelfth-century Spain, were taken from it word for word. The English text is Edward Abbott Van Dyck's, printed at Verona in 1906 for pupils in the government schools of Cairo; the dedication and Van Dyck's own preface are not part of the text given here.

Key concepts

What are the three classes of the soul's powers?

Vegetative, animal and human. The vegetative powers feed, grow and reproduce, and every living thing has them. The animal powers add perceiving, through the outer and inward senses, and moving. The human power adds reason, which grasps general truths. Each class includes the ones below it, so a human being feeds and grows like a plant and perceives like an animal.

What are the inward senses in this compendium?

They are the powers inside the head that work on what the five outer senses bring in. One gathers the senses' reports, one keeps the images, others combine them and draw from them meanings no sense perceived, and one remembers. A lion sees distant prey no bigger than a small bird, yet is not misled about its size: that judgement belongs to an inward power, not to the eye.

Why does the compendium prove the powers exist before defining them?

Because describing something whose existence has not been shown is, it says, a departure from clear teaching: a definition of nothing teaches nothing. So the first section establishes that there are powers of soul at all, from what living bodies do that bodies as such do not, and only then are the powers divided, classified and defined.

What does the human soul climb through on its way to perfection?

Through the sciences in their order. It starts as a bare capacity to know, then acquires first truths, then what reasoning and proof yield: the terms of logic, the natures of plants, animals and the soul itself, mathematics with its number, geometry, astronomy, music and optics, and finally knowledge of divine things. The soul's growth follows the philosophical curriculum.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Ladder of Powers

What does a living thing have that a stone made of the same elements lacks? The young Avicenna answers by proving that the soul's powers exist before he defines a single one.

The compendium will not describe what it has not first shown to exist. No power of the soul, it argues, arises from a blend of the four elements; each comes upon the mixture from outside. The powers form a ladder. Plants feed, grow and reproduce, and reproduction ranks first, since feeding serves growth and growth serves the making of another. Animals add the five outer senses, the inward senses and the powers of movement. Each higher soul includes the powers beneath it, which serve one another in a fixed order.

soul
vegetative soul
animal soul
reproduction
growth
psychic faculties
perception
sense perception
elements
motion
causation
form
definition

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A Mind Lit from Outside

If thinking is not something the body does, where do our ideas come from? The last sections answer with a mind that stands apart from the body and a source that lights it.

The human soul begins with nothing but the capacity to know and climbs, through logic, physics, mathematics and the divine sciences, toward its perfection. It is a substance in its own right: a body as such conceives nothing, and a sense organ wears out under a strong object, as the eye weakens staring at the sun. What moves the soul from capacity to knowledge is a mental essence distinct from bodies that stands to human minds as light stands to sight, with one difference: light gives only the power to see, while this essence gives the forms themselves.

rational soul
intellect
universals
incorporeality
immortality
mind-body relation
metaphysics

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Within this work

passages held: 55
distinct concepts: 114
by passages held, corpus-wide: #639

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causation” and “motion”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 12 pairings. 62 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
causation	motion	4
causation	soul	4
imagination	perception	4
motion	soul	4
intellect	sense perception	3
motion	perception	2
perception	soul	2
causation	perception	1
intellect	soul	1
motion	sense perception	1
rational soul	soul	1
sense perception	soul	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

A Compendium on the Soul (Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār) you are here EN
A Treatise on Love (Risāla fī māhiyyat al-ʿishq)
Written at the request of a jurist, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿṣūmī, and set out in seven short sections.
AR
al-Najāt
Between the vast al-Shifāʾ and the allusive Ishārāt in both length and manner, and the usual way into his logic.
AR
al-Taʿlīqāt
A classroom companion to his metaphysics: short notes on its key terms, read today beside al-Shifāʾ.
AR
Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle (Fann al-Shiʿr)
Filed under logic, as the Arabic tradition filed Aristotle's Poetics, it closes the nine logical books of al-Shifāʾ.
AR
Kitāb al-Nafs
The fullest of his many accounts of the soul, written as natural science, and the one Latin Europe read.
AR
Kitāb al-Siyāsa
The household branch of practical philosophy, set out for a man, his family and his servants, in a short Arabic treatise.
AR
Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt)
Shorter than al-Najāt and far shorter than al-Shifāʾ, though written after both, as a statement of his mature philosophy.
AR
Risāla fī maʿrifat al-nafs al-nāṭiqa wa-aḥwālihā
A short epistle in three chapters and an epilogue, one of several treatises on the soul that circulate under his name.
AR
The Healing, Logic: Isagoge (al-Madkhal)
The first of the nine books of logic in al-Shifāʾ, and the place where the prologue to the whole encyclopedia stands.
AR
The Metaphysics of The Healing (al-Ilāhiyyāt)
His fullest metaphysics, known to Latin readers as the Liber de philosophia prima; it closes al-Shifāʾ after the logic, the physics and the mathematics.
AR

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