The servant Muḥammad Ḥusayn ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī — may God aid him toward His good pleasure — says: This is the sum of discourse concerning the states that supervene upon man insofar as he is one brought to completion, by his innate make (fiṭra), through knowledge. Our predecessors confined themselves, of this subject, to what they have bequeathed us of discourse on dreams (manāmāt) and on prophecies (nubuwwāt) and the accidents attaching to the Prophet — God bless him and his Household. We have kept parallel to their course, save that we have added to it the remainder of the discourse, so far as time has allowed and reach could attempt — and God, glorified be He, is the One whose help is sought. It is a single essay (maqāla) containing sixteen chapters:

Chapter One: on the purpose of this art.

Chapter Two: on certain principles, taken from the Iʿtibārāt and elsewhere.

Chapter Three: that these effects which issue from man by volition differ in intensity and weakness; that this rests upon the strength or weakness of the knowledge — indeed, no graded variation (tashkīk) in an act is free of it; and that the gradation in the knowledge arises from gradation in the soul's attending (tawajjuh) to the thing known.

Chapter Four: that every sensible act that takes place has some impress upon the soul; that repetition of the act brings firm-rootedness and difficulty of removal; and that in the animal there are habitus (malaka) and passing state (ḥāl), with what attaches to that.

Chapter Five: on good and evil, the beneficial and the harmful; that man has a felicity and a wretchedness; and that each of the two divides into real and supposed.

Chapter Six: that among man's acts there is mutual crowding (tazāḥum); that this leads on to crowding among the habitus; how pleasure and pain supervene from this; and that, had the acts of different faculties issued from one single faculty alone, no pain would have supervened there.

Chapter Seven: that among acts, and likewise among the faculties, there is interconnection; that it divides into natural and customary; and that the human habitus accord with the perfection of those animal and vegetal faculties to which they are bound, on the side of good and on the side of evil alike.

Chapter Eight: on how knowledge comes about for man, and its multiplication, and the issuing of his acts thereby; that all these knowledges terminate in this — that the Absolute Real (al-ḥaqq al-muṭlaq) is absolutely necessary; that every act is true in reality, while the false exists only by accident; and that there is here another kind of truth which is the pivot of pleasure and pain in the soul.

Chapter Nine: on the condition of individual men as to their degrees in these knowledges; they divide into felicitous, wretched, and intermediate.

Chapter Ten: on that in which the perfection of the people of felicity, and of those next after them, terminates.

Chapter Eleven: on that in which the perfection of the people of wretchedness, and of those next after them, terminates.

Chapter Twelve: on that in which the perfection of the intermediate, and of the weak among the generality, terminates.

Chapter Thirteen: on what attaches to all this of discourse upon the dream-vision (ruʾyā) and its interpretation.

Chapter Fourteen: on how the soul exercises effects in this world.

Chapter Fifteen: on prophethood, messengerhood, imamate, revelation (waḥy), inspiration (ilhām), the veridical dream, the miracle (muʿjiza), the breach of custom, and the charism (karāma).

Chapter Sixteen: on the reality of magic (siḥr) and soothsaying (kihāna), the giving of reports of things unseen, and the appearance of certain strange effects from certain people.

It has been shown, further, in the book of Iʿtibārāt that man, insofar as he is brought to completion through his perceiving, possesses estimative, posited conceptions and assents; that these multiply as his perfections multiply, and divide as those divide — some of them being posited convictions of his insofar as he is an individual, others insofar as he stands within the domestic society or within civil society — multiplying then with yet a further multiplication as each of the two conditions multiplies. It was shown too that his specific perfections, those proper to his kind, are volitional matters; that his volitions stand in need of posited opinions, for the singling-out of the perfection; and that the issuing of real things from him comes about by means of his willing what he believes of the external — such of it as is in some manner united with the external things: by his bringing it about, the external thing occurs, not the believed thing, that being iʿtibārī. And it was shown that this estimative faculty in us is by nature a manipulator, a carrier-over, which does not verify in its acting. From this follows a property of it: when it perceives some object of conception, then — since it does not verify it — it tampers with its definition by addition and subtraction, so that the thing's definition is handed on to its like, and to the like of its like, and so forth; afterwards, returning to each one of these and perceiving its own specific definition — having already judged them one — it judges them to be one, paying no heed to the multiplicity and mutual otherness gleaming plain before it.

So much for conceptions; and close to it is its judging among assents, where in its judgment it may go to the farthest lengths on the two sides of subtraction and addition. The root of the matter is that it is of this faculty's property to judge unity in the many things and multiplicity in the one; and by this instrument was accomplished the interposing of the posited matters and estimative opinions between the animal and the perfections proper to its kind.

Know, too, that upon these knowledges external effects sometimes follow — and this, summarily, is evident: the paling of the face, the blush of shame, and other sensible effects; the sick man's joy upon his learning of health — nay, his very health upon his knowing of it — and the like. Between a class of qualities and states, then, and a class of knowledges there hold specific linkages; and this, with its like — much of it being what the inquiries of this book are built upon — is made clear in the second essay of the book of Iʿtibārāt.

Know also that these acts which issue from us differ. Some are easy of occurrence, as when the act falls in with a custom or a firmly rooted disposition; and some are the contrary, such that its occurrence — the bringing of it about — weighs hard upon a man, as when it meets a disposition set against it, so that it needs much deliberation. And each of the two divides into many divisions of intensity and weakness. Let us state, then, what the cause of this is.

We say thereupon: acts conditioned in their obligation, though on a par in this respect, differ nonetheless in that one such act may be conditioned upon nothing, or upon some condition scanty in its kind, while another is conditioned upon many things, hardly free of one of them colliding with an impediment. In the first case, many a chance meeting with things capable of hindering and crowding affects neither the act nor its volition; in the second, the volition lapses and the act breaks off at the mere appearance of a single partial impediment. An example is the case of the brave man and the merely strong man when the two go to battle. The brave man holds that there is no life joined with abasement, and that yielding the road to the corrupting enemy is abasement and disgrace; so he wills nothing but honor, wills no life without it, nor any of the things willed for life's sake — soundness of limbs and the rest. The strong but corrupt man wills victory, and therefore wills life, and all that life has need of, so that through life he may seize the pleasures of victory; failing that, he wills nothing but life, for his loftiest aim is life itself and whatever life cannot stand without. Every wound, then, that falls upon the brave man, every fatigue and pain he undergoes — unto bitter death itself — he bears with hardihood in the quest of honor; while the strong man's firmness and patience are bounded by whatever omen of death rises before him, or whatever robs his life of its relish: he halts when the affair carries him to that term — not so the brave man. Of the same kind is the difference of resolve in two seekers of a victory: the resolve of the one may collapse before the other's.

It is plain, then, that among the acts and effects there is a difference along the two sides of intensity and weakness.

We say next: this rests upon the strength and weakness of knowledge. For the lapsing of the act and of its volition comes only from the lapsing of the knowledge; and the lapsing of the knowledge — the assent to obligation — its removal, I mean, comes about only by the removal of its terms; and the removal of the terms, or of one of them, comes about either by the real establishment of their contradictory or by their passing away from the soul. Passing away occurs only through weakness of the soul's attending; for so long as the soul attends to a thing and wills the witnessing of it, passing away is impossible — except through weakness of the instrument bearing it. Now on the first supposition (the establishment of the contradictory) and on the last (the passing of the form, as by an abrupt forgetting), the act falls outside the case we have posed; and it is well known that the difference we have described among men and their resolves does not rest on either of those two. The lapsing of volition, therefore, is solely from a weakness of knowledge arising from weakness of the soul's attending: the soul turns to some other thing that it longs for, and the volition weakens — for the soul is never devoid of some volition, and so of some knowledge, for its act to follow upon. And in that case the soul, when an impediment shows itself, attends not in the direction of repelling the impediment but in the direction of strengthening it, just insofar as it is attending to it. For example: one bound for a drink of water, if his thirst is not strong and the distance to the water far, finds his soul turning to conceive the pleasure of staying still and the comfort of sitting; if there then chances to intervene a darkness, or a dust-laden wind, or heat, he conceives that as a benefit confirming the sitting — without ever framing the question whether it is an impediment to walking to the water; its being a confirmer of the sitting suffices to bar him from the quest.

It is plain, then, that the gradation in knowledge is on account of the gradation in the soul's attending; plain also that the soul is never devoid of some knowledge, and that in turning away from one form it turns to another which thwarts the first — multiplicity being what it is, and habit being what it is — and that the knowledge of two contraries is one. Hence it is that the daring of the heedless man is, in one respect, stronger than the daring of the experienced.

We say, moreover: the gradation we have described in knowledge follows — on the face of the matter — gradation in the retainer of the cognitive form; in truth, it is an offshoot of gradation in the soul's attending. For it is known by immediate finding that there is a difference between our perceiving one of the external sensibles — shape, say, or color — and our perceiving the very same thing in pure imagination; the difference between them being, on the face of it, the presence of the retainer in the first case and not in the second. But let us examine the ground of the difference with a finer eye. We say: when we survey the external sensibles themselves, we find among them a difference in this very respect; for great is the difference between sensing a sensible and dwelling in the conceiving of it, and merely contenting ourselves with the first incidence of sense upon it. Let this be tried with tangibles set in a row, differing in quality — heat and cold, roughness and smoothness, hardness and softness — as we pass the touching hand across them; likewise with visibles differing in color, light, and the rest of the visible qualities, as we sweep the gaze over them; and so with the other sensibles. The longer the sense-faculty dwells in conceiving and considering them, the more lucid grow their forms; the more it hurries, the weaker they grow, until sometimes they sink to the rank of bare imagination. There is a difference, then, according as the sensible has been sensed for a little time or for long: what grows strong is the sensible sensed for a considerable time, and the rest does not differ from bare imagination much — or at all.

Then, if we go deeper, we find that even the dwelling of sense does not of itself produce the strength. For if we are thrust among diverse, mingled voices — as happens often in public and clamorous assemblies — and we fix our concern and our intent upon one of the speakers, we hear his speech and pick it out; as for the rest, though we hear them just as we hear him, they are to us like one continuous sound, its parts and letters all alike.

So likewise in sickness and the suffering of pains: when the sick man busies himself with some conversation or other matter, his perception of the pain is weak, and he does not suffer from it as he suffers when that occupation is absent. This runs uniformly through all the sensibles; and no difference is found between the strong case and the weak in these examples except the presence of the soul's attending and its absence. The attending, then, has a hand in it. Moreover, whenever we lift the attending away from any example in which strength was found, the matter returns to weakness. And as for pure imagination, we see in it too the same difference we see in the forms of the external sensibles; for sometimes imagination bestows the full strength of the sensed — nay, more, as with the brain-fevered and in the sirsām — and when we study the state of things there and in pure imagination generally, we find that the soul, in pure imagining, is attending to many things, the sensibles especially, by its habituation to them; and the more of these we remove, the stronger grows the perception.

It is plain, then, that the criterion in the strength of knowledge is the strength of the soul's attending; and it appears too that whoever breaks this habit and strives in penetrating inward into his own soul, his pure imagination comes to stand for him in the stead that sense holds with us — and conversely.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī), abridged: the birsām and the sirsām are diseases that afflict man, caused by an inflammation of the membrane of the brain, or of the partition-membrane interposed between the heart and the stomach; when they strike they lead to confusion of mind, loss of concentration, and violent fever, such that the sufferer of this disease beholds forms that have no existence in the outer world.]

Further: to every matter settled in the soul the soul is attending, heedless of its contrary, as has passed. When its contrary occurs and a man runs into it, he searches for its cause — that is, for all the meanings that hedge it about and are bound up with it; and since by hypothesis it is contrary to the settled and present, all those meanings are so too. The effects, then, that follow upon the discordant thing come ranked and multiplied according to the multiplicity, and the number, of what attends it; and the more this is so, its concomitants being observed, the intenser grows the soul's attending to it, and the firmer it settles in her. Once its first degree is settled, it casts a certain obscurity over the prior knowledge that stood contrary to it, itself passing out of obscurity into clarity. When it occurs a second time, it now bears two characters: in virtue of the obscurity still in it — the prior knowledge not having been wholly demolished — the soul attends to it and deepens her scrutiny of it; while in virtue of its clarity, that scrutiny is less the second time than the first, and the third stands to the second as the second to the first. The same account holds where the incoming knowledge is not preceded by a contrary knowledge, by a parallel argument — yet with a difference: the incoming form, where it is contrary, drives the soul away from the first form, and its concomitants settle the firmer in the soul precisely because she has been turned from each of that form's own concomitants and directed upon these; so her conceiving multiplies upon its concomitants, its causes, and the agreeables she met with at the outset, and it becomes the more firmly settled in her, the nearer to articulation. Not so when the knowledge arrives at first hand: the soul's attending is then confined to just so much of it as she happened upon, and her temperamental affections, among other things, are then fewer. Hence the saying: the worth of a blessing is known after its loss;

and hence pleasure or pain taken in a thing after toil and labor in it is the keener — and there are many parallels.

It is plain, then, that every knowledge has some impress upon the soul in point of settledness, and on the side of its effects — joy, grief, anger, greed, and the like; plain too that the incoming contrary form is stronger in effect, firmer in existence, and harder of removal than the form that comes at first hand.

We say next: repetition of arrival produces firm-rootedness and difficulty of removal. The cause of this shows from what we have just set out concerning the difference of forms in the soul as to manifestness and obscurity; for rootedness is a certain kind of manifestness. The oftener a form arrives, the more frequent and the stronger grows the soul's attending to it; and the more this is so, the harder grows her turning from it — that is, her growing heedless of it and forgetting it — for the reasons you have learned.

We say further: in man — indeed in every animal — there are habitus (malaka) and state (ḥāl). By the habitus we mean the firmly rooted cognitive form from which the act issues with ease — that is, with little deliberation and little agitation of soul; by the state, the contrary of that. The reason is what you have now learned: the more often a cognitive form arrives, the deeper it roots and the harder its removal; and the more this is so, the more easily the act issues from it, and the weaker grows the need of reflection and thought to procure certainty of its obligation. As the form's settledness intensifies, the incompatibles weaken, pass away, fall into unknownness, while knowledge of the form itself strengthens; deliberation therefore lessens — the stronger the form, the weaker the deliberating, until the matter ends at that with which there is no deliberation at all: and that is complete rootedness.

It is plain, then, that in man there are habitus, and state which is its contrary; plain also that the state lies on the road to the habitus and is its antecedent; and plain that some habitus can pass away while others cannot — namely the complete and firmly rooted habitus — unless indeed one settles, by convention, on reserving the term "habitus" for that rooted knowledge alone which admits of no removal.

We say next: man has a real perfection, and a supposed, estimative perfection. The real perfection is evident. As for the supposed, imagined perfection: man, having several mutually differing faculties — the vegetal, the animal, the rational — has several perfections, each of them, at the first of his growth, in potency; these have their roads and intermediaries, so that there are many beneficial things, differing in kind — for the beneficial has its very quiddity fixed by the good for which it is beneficial; and the goods being diverse, the beneficial things of each are other than the beneficial things of the rest. Should one and the same thing chance to be a good for one faculty and beneficial for another, it is then a thing of two aspects. The absolute good, however, is that in which there is no aspect of mere benefit: it is sought from every aspect.

Now man, through the prompting of one of his faculties or through certain happenstances, sometimes grows mightily zealous to halt at certain of the beneficial things and intermediaries, for reasons that compel that assent — seeing that, as we stated in the book of Iʿtibārāt, some posited notions may be set up as an original around which other things branch. Such is he who prefers wealth for its own sake, and so draws no profit from the dinar in that for which it is an intermediary: he neither eats nor drinks nor clothes himself nor spends; he only heaps and hoards, supposing that a good — whereas, had he reflected with the least reflection, he would have found the dinar a sheer intermediary by which are attained the comforts and pleasures of food, drink, dress, and marriage; and were these ends not in nature, the dinar would never have been preferred at all. He is like a man who finds a treasure in a remote and desolate desert, where it avails his condition nothing and delivers him from destruction not an atom's weight — even as a single grain, in the bird's eyes, is grander of worth than a peerless pearl over which the greatest kings and the men of riches contend.

And could those comforts be reached directly, obeying a man as his imagination obeys him, the dinar would never be aimed at, nor would any preferring or seeking ever alight upon it.

Further: the more numerous and the stronger the effects that branch from the intermediaries, the harder the halting at them, and the more difficult the departing from them. All these are supposed goods, according to the dress the estimation puts upon them; in point of reality there is no goodness in them — their benefit is only according as they convey to the good; and should any of them in any respect prove a hindrance, then to that measure it is an evil and a harm. Of the good, then, there is the supposed and there is the real; and from here it has become clear how one and the same thing may be beneficial in one respect and harmful in another.

Furthermore, though these goods be many in outward seeming — the acts of each one of the real faculties being perfections and goods for it — yet if we suppose the faculties gathered in one single many-sided thing, there is of necessity a mutual crowding among their acts. For the non-bodily acts issuing from the possessors of souls are acts that issue by coercion of the bodily powers, against the exigency of the bodily nature: evils relative to it, goods relative to the acting faculties. And the thing which is the principle, if supposed one, is in its essence without sides — the sides lie rather in the powers of its essence; so its good, I mean the perfection of its existence, is one thing, though the goods of its existence be many things. Were its powers all on one level, its good would be the equilibrium in their acts — that is evident; but since the thing has a single perfection, these many powers must needs be in it to block the roads of corruption that assail it in respect of its perfection. It is manifest, then, that these powers are servants, all of them, relative to the final perfection: beneficial things toward it, to be aimed at and preferred just in the measure that they benefit and preserve it. The perfection that belongs to them in their mutual relations is the equilibrium of their acts; and in the relation of the whole of them to the final perfection, it is that their acts issue in a measure that does not impair the furthest end and the absolute good — inclining not from the mean toward either side, excess or defect: and that is equilibrium. The perfection and felicity of the faculties, then — and they are other than what was created for the absolute good — is the equilibrium in their acts: they are beneficial things, and that is their benefit; while the absolute perfection of such a [many-powered] thing is the perfection of its own proper existence, its felicity, which is completed only by perfection in its beneficial things — namely, the equilibrium of their acts. Thus it stands confirmed that the perfection and the good of a thing, in point of reality, is the perfection that attaches to it really, with no figurative usage in the matter.

We say next: from all this there supervene pleasure and pain. For these two, as has been shown elsewhere, are expressions for the faculty's attaining what is a perfection for it, insofar as it is an attaining and a perfection, and for the failure to attain in that whose station it is to attain it. These contracted habitus we have described being settled in the faculties: whenever one of the faculties attains what is its perfection — its agreeable act — it takes pleasure in it; and whenever it is deprived, that is the pain.

But it must be known that pleasure is the attaining of an agreeable, as stated — not the repelling of a discordant, as is the famous and popularly received view. They said: the sick man deprived of health takes pleasure in it only at its first oncoming, then no delight; so in other cases — no pleasure with permanence; whence the saying, "the worth of the blessing is known after it is gone." But this is a supposition that sound experience belies: whoever takes up any of his perfections of settled existence, conceives it completely, and turns his soul to the intellection of it, delights in it just as he delighted at its first arrival and oncoming; and so on the side of the deficiencies and the contraries of perfection. And it is well known that in such a case there is no repelling at all.

Moreover, that supposition would entail that pleasure and pain are each privative — the mere driving-off of the preceding state; for as pleasure (on their view) is contracted at the settling-in, so likewise pain — which is evident; and it would result that each of the two is the absence of an absence, which comes back to a flagrant contradiction. Each of them would be the driving-off of a settled state; and if pleasure (or pain) is the prior settled state, while the other — that by which it is driven off, and which includes its absence — is its opposite, then the two turn out to be contraries, not a privation and a possession: two existential perfections of some one faculty, contrary to one another; and that, in a single faculty, is impossible, as has been verified in its place. The point sought is therefore established.

By this it appears that these pleasures and pains are only by the soul's complete attending to the thing: as long as the perceiving endures, the pleasure endures; and the stronger the perceiving, the stronger the pleasure.

Again: were the faculty's act single, with nothing to distract, its pleasure would continue, and would increase to the utmost possible.

It appears also that pure pain has no existence whatever, unlike pure pleasure — for pain is the absence of pleasure, and its existence is by way of accident. This is a secret with secrets beneath it — understand it well.

It appears further that there is neither pleasure nor pain save by perception. Witness to this also: any pleasure whatever — if we suppose the perceiving faculty heedless of it, we lose it; and if we suppose the faculty perceiving it while it has in truth no external existence, the very pleasure itself is found.

We say next: a single faculty does not suffer from its own act — that is plain from what has been explained. Every faculty suffers only from the act of another, inasmuch as that act involves the absence of its own act, and by this it suffers. Yet for this there must be a bond between the two; otherwise the act of one wholly separate thing has no touching upon the act of another wholly separate thing — which is evident; and that bond must lie in something possessed of the power of perception, for were it in something else, the very same difficulty would return.

From here too it appears that over the faculties of man there is something encompassing, binding them together, as just passed; for the perceiver in us is the bond — either immediately, or the matter terminates in it at the last.

It must be known as well that abundance of one faculty's acting habituates the other faculty to what corresponds to it in its own province — with difficulty, if this come after the habitus is rooted; with ease, if before. For, as has passed, the arrival of the act leaves its impress in the soul, fixing an agreeable form until a habitus results; there settles then a quasi-intermediate habitus whose acts are by their nature strongly similar to the acts of the crowding faculty, mimicking them. For example: the proud and swaggering man — his eating, his drinking, his walking, his sitting are all of them figured with pride and swagger; the grieving, careworn man's acts are all sorrowful; and the lovesick man is love-mad in everything he does.

And from all of this it has become clear that had the acts of different faculties issued from one single faculty, no pain would have arisen there — since, as has passed, a single faculty does not suffer from its own acts.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī), abridged: on pleasure as the perception of the agreeable, the editor refers to the Asfār (I, the chapter on pain and pleasure) and al-Mabdaʾ wa-l-maʿād (the chapter "that He, exalted, is in joy"), among other works. He notes that the definition "pleasure is the perception of the agreeable insofar as it is agreeable, and pain the perception of the discordant insofar as it is discordant" is the famous one among the philosophers, cited by Avicenna in the Ilāhiyyāt of the Shifāʾ (essay VIII, ch. 7); that Avicenna later refined it in the Ishārāt (III, 337): pleasure is the perception-and-attainment of the arrival of what is, for the percipient, a perfection and a good as such; pain the perception-and-attainment of the arrival of what is, for him, a bane and an evil; and that al-Ṭūsī, the commentator of the Ishārāt, judged this second definition nearer to precision than their saying "pleasure is perception of the agreeable." Among the physicians the received view was that of Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī: "pleasure is the departure from the non-natural state."]

We say further: the human perfections — the perceptions — accord with the perfection of the other two powers, I mean the irascible and the appetitive, on the side of good and on the side of evil alike. For you have learned that among the faculties there is a ruling something which orders their acts and their habitus, guards them from contradiction and divergence, and is master over all the scattered acts and the varieties of perceptions. This principle must be that by which the specific nature of man subsists — since the reality of man is lifted away when it is lifted away. And if the specific nature is completed only by this principle, and it is granted that it admits of perfection and deficiency, then the perfection of the species rests upon its perfection. That being so — and it having acts of its own in itself, and acts with respect to the ordering of the faculties and the repelling of contradiction and divergence from among them — the human perfection in these subordinate faculties is the equilibrium of their acts according to the apportionment made by this perfecting principle: that is, that no faculty's act be such as to damage and thrust away the perfection of this principle within it by passing out toward excess or defect.

Knowing this, you know that if these two powers pass from potency into act on the side of good — that is, of equilibrium — the ruling principle goes forth to its perfection on the side of good. Let it then take up all its perfections in itself, the whole having been made ready for it; so that were it supposed to subsist by itself, without the company of these two material powers — or stripped of them — there having been prepared for it habitus answering to the two powers and habitus answering to the acts of its own self, it would take pleasure in all the bodily acts by way of the forms, and in the perceptual acts. But if the two powers have passed into act on the side of evil — excess or defect — they will have hindered the ruling principle from its perfections, and there will have settled therein all manner of contradictories and incompatibles; so that were it supposed to subsist by itself, or to be stripped and left without the two, it would be strong of perception yet empty of its perfections — and it would suffer the most violent suffering, and take fright, and would see, according to the acts of the two powers, everything it loathes from them: for the pain is all-engulfing, and the aspect is not manifold such that it might turn away from one thing to another.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī), abridged: something near this sense is found in Jāmiʿ al-saʿādāt (I, the chapter on the soul, its names, and its four powers); al-Narāqī there observes that the cause of collision among the four powers — the intellective, the leonine irascible, the beastly appetitive, and the satanic estimative — is such that the mutual repulsion among the rest arises with the intellective power; the proof being that in the souls of the other animals there is no contention or tug-of-war, since they lack the intellective power: in beasts of prey wrath prevails, in cattle appetite. The editor further notes that the dove-simile is found in one of the First Teacher's ethical books — the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, the Magna Moralia, the Politics, the Constitution of the Athenians — and that the Burhān cross-references are to essay I, chapter 2 of that treatise.]

Know, then, that the real propositions — those that answer to existence — just as among them there are truth and falsity, correspondence with the fact-itself (nafs al-amr) and its absence, and the corresponding among them terminate in necessary, nay primary, propositions, and the whole in the first of firsts — namely, that affirmation and negation are not true together nor false together — even so stands the case in these posited propositions: some of them agree with the order of things, and some do not; the first we call true (ḥaqqa), the second false (bāṭila). And every truth-through-another terminates in a truth-through-itself, until the whole terminates in the Truth of truths — which, in this domain, is that the Absolute Real is obligatorily to be enacted.

Now we have shown there that man's acts issue only from the posited opinions, and that they issue only from an intention of obligation.

We say then: every obligatory-through-another, terminating as it does in what is obligatory-through-itself and obligatory from every aspect, it must be that a man's aiming at any obligatory act whatever is — from him — an aiming at the Absolute Obligatory, obligatory from every aspect; the error, where he errs, lies only in the application. We have shown in the book of al-Mughālaṭa that error has its existence by accident, and that every mistake is right in reality and mistaken by accident. So runs the discourse in our present matter: all these acts, the false of them and the true alike, are true in reality; the false is false only by accident — understand this well.

And know that the proposition man does nothing but the obligatory truth is a self-evident, innate proposition, though most men deny it — all save the rare one, if such there be; yet reflection yields it, and demonstration too. For man is by necessity never devoid of act; every act is from a knowledge; and the known terminates in the Real: so every man is, by necessity and by innate nature, a confessor of the Real.

There is, moreover, a truth in another sense here: the things lying on the road of the soul's perfection — taken broadly, whether toward good or toward evil, toward felicity or wretchedness — are ranked in a manifest order. The utmost felicity branches upon things which branch upon others, and so on without end, until the chain terminates in the Absolute Real, about whom there is by innate nature no dispute at all; and likewise complete wretchedness, with its preliminaries and the preliminaries of its preliminaries, until it terminates in sheer falsehood, according to what has already passed.

And you have learned that the whole, on another consideration, are things-by-accident. The final Truth, then, if compounded, and compounded again, in a chain into which nothing of the accidental enters, conveys to the utmost felicity — which is why all its branches are named truths; but if it be compounded so that the accidental enters in, or if the sheer false — which exists by accident — be compounded with its branches in an essential compounding, it conveys to complete wretchedness.

We say then: what is determinative for the arising of the virtues and the vices, of felicity and wretchedness, is this sense of the true and the false. For we have shown that no act issues from just any knowledge, but from a knowledge joined with assent — that being knowledge in truth — and this is achieved only by the soul's turning toward it. Suppose, then, a perfection, a knowledge of it, and an assent therewith, until the knowledge becomes absolute and unconditioned: thereby virtue issues and the habitus is fixed. Suppose instead a knowledge without assent and issuing: this comes about only with the soul's turning from it to something else — that is, to an assent, by choice, to the vice: there, there is denial (juḥūd). And where there is no knowledge, or there is, but joined (for one cause or another) with heedlessness of assenting to it, there is neither assent nor compliance, neither denial nor obstinacy. The first division begets a felicitous habitus, the second a wretched habitus; in the third there is nothing further — only that it is a deficiency due to certain causes.

Thus it has appeared that the man who knows the Real and assents to it at every level is the complete felicitous one; that the man who knows the Real and does not assent — this with respect to what is other than the Absolute Real, since, as has passed, that is impossible — is the complete wretch, his very assent to the matter of the Absolute Real standing as the proof against him; and that the man who does not know the Real, or knows it but fails of assent through some cause beyond his choice, or knows and assents to the Real at some levels but not at others out of incapacity, is neither felicitous nor wretched in respect of the things unknown to him and the things he disowns: his felicity is in the measure of his knowledge of the Real and his assent to it. The individuals of mankind in this division have ranks and degrees beyond reckoning; and the criterion of felicity and wretchedness in them is what we have stated.

The most rightful of perceptions is the perception of the First One, exalted is He: that He is the Existent in reality — by Himself and for Himself — and that all else exists by Him and is nothing in itself. With this meaning present, no existent whatever retains any subsistence in his eyes; and therefore he perceives nothing but the First Real, exalted is He — perceiving everything, even his own self, by Him, exalted is He, and doing all his acts by Him, exalted is He: not that he wills an act for His sake, exalted is He, but that He — exalted is He — wills it, and so the act issues from him. Between the two senses lies a mighty difference, which complete reflection will yield.

It has appeared, then, that this man perceives and beholds nothing other than Him, exalted is He; and by Him he perceives every percept and every known.

It has appeared too that in none of his acts does he will any but Him, exalted is He — though the act does, as a fact, take place; for the willed is the known, and if he has no known but Him, exalted is He, he has no willed but Him.

And it has appeared that he suffers from nothing at all — since by hypothesis he sees and meets nothing but Him — and that he takes pleasure in none but Him, exalted is He, rejoicing and gladdened to the utmost degree; nay, the fiercer the tribulation upon him, the fiercer his rapture and exultation: at rest in Him, surrendered to Him, well-pleased with Him, relying upon Him. And it has appeared that thereby he finds all the virtues and is quit of all the vices: brave, continent, wise, just, with nothing in him of their opposites or of the branches of their opposites; rather, all the attributes of the Real — blessed and exalted is He — show forth and are made complete in him, since all in him besides the lordly aspect has been consumed.

This last is a further matter, subsequent to the completing of his virtues which came first by reason of the equability of the temperament; for this is in truth a burning-up and a severing of the very stuff of natural vice and its turbidities.

Such is the sum of the discourse on the man of equable temperament, strong by native constitution; another portion of his state will appear further on, God willing.

As for the man who brings his faculties to equilibrium by art and custom, his state approaches a likeness of the former's; but the difference is the difference of native constitution and discursive thought. For the equilibrating, the work of thought — being an ordering of premises by choice and by deliberation according to one's capacity — may err through some hidden slip falling among its folds, and that by degrees; whereas the first man too, though his traversing of the road of perfection is not without a certain gradualness, yet the gradual advance there meets no obstructor save at the extremity of weakness — unlike this company who employ art and speculation on the road of acquiring the perfections.

In sum, this company have, in their journeying on the road of perfection, other circumstances in which they differ from the possessors of innate equilibrium. The soul at the first onset, if the side of the natural powers — appetite and wrath — prevails in her, is turned by that to their side, and the sovereignty is theirs; and this being so, she assents to whatever appetite or wrath dictates, and their habitus are formed.

And the rational faculty being held in subjection beneath all this, its percepts are turned toward what suits the acts of those two — by the subjugation already likened above; so the man assents to those posited matters that flatter the soul's caprice: the dignity of leadership, station, fair repute and its perpetuation, and the rest of the lofty things in the world of positing.

With all this, men at these degrees are at great variance. The fallen of aspiration, base of nature, assents to appetite; the middling, to wrath; the high, to the estimative things — and rarely do all three coincide in one man. For the estimative acts come by the working of the rational faculty — which gives man his specific character, as has passed — and though it be subjugated under another, yet the acts are its acts and after the pattern of its nature, and so they are the most closely touching and adhering to the man. The acts of wrath, in turn, are like an isthmus between the acts of appetite and the acts of estimation: their materials are in the last resort appetitive, while their necessitator and giver-of-form is otherwise — namely the soul; so they stand below the purely estimative and above the purely appetitive in closeness of adherence to the man. And if you survey the conditions of men in their appetites, their conquests, and their purely estimative opinions, and ponder them with a full and honest pondering, comparing one with another, you will find many witnesses to the truth of what we have said.

Every man of base nature held in contempt by his fellows fancies for himself some station, and appurtenances out of the estimative things, for whose sake he will sacrifice all his desires and conquests, preferring nothing above them — though the divergence among men in these notions branches into many ways.

Up to this station he beholds the Real, exalted is He, only through another — and that is not the true beholding, as is plain. His beholding of Him, exalted is He, waits therefore upon the forgetting of the other; then upon the forgetting of self, and annihilation (fanāʾ) in the beholding of Him. When that forgetting and this forgetting are both attained, the light of the One Real — blessed and exalted is He — dawns over the ranks of His Names, His attributes, and His essence; thereat all evils, deficiencies, and pains are effaced, and nothing remains but sheer existence — the sheer of every perfection, without multiplicity; and all that was in the preceding worlds is now possessed in the noblest manner that must be. This is a station beyond the compass of exposition.

After this rank comes the rank of beholding sheer Unity with no aspect of multiplicity at all — though multiplicity stand in the very eye of Unity. Then, when rootedness is won and intimacy confirmed, the turning of attention toward the other harms him no more — for there is no other: whatever he finds, sees, or meets, he finds in it only the One Real, blessed and exalted is He; and so too in his acts. This Complete Man sees the Real by the Real and the creation by the Real; nothing busies him from anything, no affair from any affair. The attributes of the Real show forth in him, and from him issue His acts, exalted is He — no free choosing attends him, and no compulsion. This is the sum of the discourse on what awaits the complete; only, he who is complete by native constitution has in all of it an ampler portion than his like who completes himself by art.

And let it be known that sheer purity belongs only to the final rank; before it, some bane may still occur and work a deviation — for so long as the soul endures, she lies open to both sides, felicity and wretchedness, the causes of both being present together; whereas at the final rank there is no cause there, no multiplicity, no independence. Some men halt partway on the road; some turn back upon their heels; some shoot through like the meteor. The pivot in this — external causes apart — is the object of one's devoted concern: the halting happens at it because independence is accorded to the thing attended to, and so the showing-forth of the effects of that station is cut short — this is plain. The likeness of it is a man looking at something from behind many panes of glass: whenever his eye fastens upon one of them, he sees not what lies beyond it, and his seeing terminates at it. Not so the possessor of the final rank, who beholds the Real, and the creation, by the Real. And there is no nobility like farness of aspiration.

For the rest — the traits, states, and acts not here mentioned — the condition of this man, felicitous by acquisition, resembles the condition of the man felicitous by native constitution.

Know, then, that there are here ranks according to the partialness of the native endowment, as you learned in the case of acquisition; so the number varies, and in some men the kinds are compounded. These are the sums of the states of the complete felicitous ones in their journey to their perfection. The greater part of it — the last stages especially — passes with some people for the conjuring of an illusionist, and with others for a charism reserved to its own folk; with such we hold no debate. Let us turn, then, to the sums of the states of the people of wretchedness.

We say next: as for the man over whom the rulings of the estimative power prevail — you have learned that this prevailing is in truth owing to the prevailing of one of the other two powers; it begets from the rational faculty rulings suited to theirs yet detached from them in matter. The root of these is: "appetite must be preferred" — or wrath — and this is an appetitive or an irascible ruling.

Then the man sees that he attains this felicity only by seizing and owning its rein; so the owning of the rein becomes, in his eyes, choicer and more felicific than the bridled object itself — for of the things desired he can attain but one at a time, while of his dominion he attains whatever he wishes, choosing and disposing as he wills. And this is innate with respect to all volitional acts, particular and universal alike: that man be free, elective, in his willing.

Then — setting aside the particulars of acts and their non-essentials, this too being among the innate things, as we have stated in its place — there remains the preferring of the principal acts and matters; and this is more specific than the first.

Then common opinion takes this felicity to be the attaining of what are, in their eyes, the great things — the most exclusive of the objects of desire, that which falls to one man after another singly, the generality being too short of reach (quṣūr) to arrive at it, or their hands being cut short (taqṣīr) by force. Hence the concern of men — the fallen excepted — has turned to treading these two paths in their affairs, the two we have just named: the falling-short and the cutting-short.

So you see them toiling, spending stratagems to display something by which to mark themselves off from the crowd: kinds of adornments and arrangements, dress, foods and drinks, fashions of dwellings and of sitting-halls; and hence this class never ceases climbing, passing from fashion to fashion — all in what the generality, and the others of their own class, cannot reach. And the class raised but a little above the degree of the low contends with this class over their marks of distinction, to ward off humiliation from themselves, sharing in them either in truth or by imitation; so the contention and mutual repulsion never cease between them.

As for the other path: it is what is distinguished by its very nature, beyond the reach of the hands of the many, through conquest and exaltation over them, so that men bow in some manner to its possessor and point to him with the finger. This is station (jāh) — emirate, leadership, and the other kinds of mastery and renown. This path is the most intimately cleaving of all things to mankind, and the last thing from which even the elect of the elect come pure. It has degrees from which no man is free: the very basest of men has in his own eyes some scrap of station without which he would not care to go on living. It may even mingle with that absolute free choice which is among the innate things — nay, with absolute felicity itself, so that a man loves his very life only through it. It has, however, many unbounded degrees, according to men's opinions about the absolute felicity which serves as its matter: one sees it in wealth, another in sons, another in fair repute, another in leadership, another in other things; and what prevails among men is the first, their trial by it being the most prevalent. Such, in sum, is the condition of these three companies.

We say further: all of these remain perpetually in imaginal pains and griefs from which they have no respite. For the matter of their opinions is the material things, in which the rule of contrariety and crowding runs everywhere; and it is impossible that any material thing be attained in the best manner conceivable — and hence aimed at — since matter is limited: whatever of it exists, something more and better than it can be conceived. So at everything they find, they go on seeking what is more than it in fineness and closer in agreeableness; their soul recoils from what they do attain, turned as it is toward the conception of what is more perfect; this forces the conceiving of the deficient thing under its aspect of deficiency, whereupon love falls away — for love is what draws toward the side of perfection, not deficiency — and aversion follows. And when any of the objects sought has passed away, it is conceived under its aspect of pleasure, and from that is begotten regret. So man — this being his condition — remains ever between regret and hope, with some small pittance of pleasure from which the soul soon turns away in distaste. This stands as the proof against them in their cleaving to the world. And when the soul is alone with them, she takes fright at the loss of her perfections and grieves to the utmost; and the imagination figures that in the terrible, abominable, hideous shapes it has at hand — an inseparable companion: and wretched is the companion! [cf. Qurʾān 43:38]

Such is the state of the complete wretched and those next after them; the difference among them, where there is one, is the difference of native constitution and acquisition, parallel to what passed concerning the felicitous.

We say lastly: there is here yet another company among those over whom the estimative opinions prevail — the travelers of the paths of the soul, or of sheer austerity, apart from the road of the Real, as you have learned: those who take up the purifying of the soul, or its disciplining, while abandoning the principles of its perfections and their furthest ends — such as the people of estimation, the people of the soul, and the people of subjugation (taskhīr). To these gleam certain sciences of the soul, unpurified; they grow familiar with what they behold, and take a pleasure fiercer and more abundant than any the aforementioned people of the world attain; and sometimes the pains of the world fall away from them altogether, as with the enraptured and the love-crazed. But this is theirs only while they are engaged upon it; when the soul stands empty, diverted from all else, torn loose from what it was upon — their state is the state of the three companies of the world-engrossed already described, as you have learned.

We say then: in that case the soul sometimes figures what she meets by its generic correspondent, and sometimes takes the very thing seen itself. If she figures it by the generic correspondent — or by what corresponds for her, through a personal habit or a chance association — the dream stands in need of interpretation (taʿbīr): which is the passing-over from correspondent to correspondent until one comes to stand upon the original thing witnessed. Thus a man may see height as a sky, a minaret, or a horse; glory as sultanate and crown or the like; he sees the enemy as a serpent or a dog or some other thing of dread — indeed he sees every fearsome, guarded-against thing in the form of his enemy. And sometimes the passage runs from contrary to contrary, just as it runs from like to like: from health to sickness, from life to death.

All this where the figuring halts at the second or third remove. But where it runs on in a chain, from one correspondent to another, or to a contrary, and so on and on, the standing upon the original becomes impossible. This division is called muddled dreams (aḍghāth aḥlām), and it is not interpreted; it befalls mostly the wily, deceitful man, or the disputatious man whose mind keeps shifting from correspondent to correspondent or to contrary.

All this, where there is figuring. Where there is none, the dream needs no interpretation: it is the very thing that appeared there. This falls mostly to one whose mind is free of tampering, and to the person of strong retention; hence the saying that truthfulness brings true dreams — for the truthful man does not tamper with what he sees and receives, but keeps it as it is, in its own shape.

[Editor's note (Rabīʿī): the root of this saying goes back to the famous Prophetic ḥadīth in the books of the generality: "Those of you most truthful in speech are those most truthful in dream-vision."]

It has appeared, then, that sleep is of four divisions. First: that caused by temperament or the like — it has no interpretation. Second: the muddled dreams — these too have no interpretation; but the absence of interpretation here is from the impossibility of arriving, whereas in the first division it is from the nullity of the vision itself. Third: the true dream untampered-with — this too has no interpretation, there being no need. Fourth: the dream worked over by figuring — this division alone stands in need of interpretation, because the soul has tampered with it, figuring what she received in another form.

And be it known that the original thing seen may be particular and may be universal, the manner of interpretation differing as they differ. The interpreter, then, must keep in view the dreamer's opinion as to his goal and his purpose, his occupation and his standing, his habits, the thoughts in him at his falling asleep, his truthfulness, his character, and his temperament — in sum, everything that has a hand in the dream; then let him judge as he sees fit and as appears to him.

Be it known too, and marked well: sleep sometimes prevails so far as to turn the soul wholly into it, necessitating — according to what appears in it — a volition toward outward acts: sitting up, speaking, fleeing, nocturnal emission, and the like. Its cause has already passed; and temperament has a great hand in this chapter.

Now man's knowings are theoretical and practical. The theoretical are the true opinions that go back to the First Maker — mighty is His name — His Names, His attributes, the beauty of His acts, the angels brought near, and the order of creation in its origin and its return. The practical are the true opinions that go back to what is obligatory among the soul's perfections alongside the realities — namely the traits of the soul, its ethics. There are besides bodily perfections, general and particular, by which the perfections proper to the soul are made complete, that man may live with them the life that this lower world requires: specific perfections from the chapters of appetite and wrath — the perfections accruing to the soul from the body alone; and with numbered companies, the people of the household; and with mankind at large, the people of the quarter, the town, the kingdom, the region, and the world. And there are also acts by which these beautiful habitus are procured and preserved, without which they would not settle — since, as passed earlier, the habitus does not hold firm while uncongenial acts keep arriving.

It is thus clear that the opinions descending upon the messenger — what is named the Sharīʿa — must comprise all of this.

There must be set out in it the opinions whose acceptance is obligatory concerning God, mighty and majestic, His Names and His attributes, and the ordering of His creation in the Origin and the Return.

Then must be set out the true opinions on the soul's ethics, its virtues and its vices.

Then must be set out the laws bounding the domestic and the civil society, distinguishing the permitted from the forbidden in a manner congruent with the true knowings — for perfection here is intended for the sake of another, and so is measured by its measure.

Then must be set out the acts that go to the preserving of the knowings — what are named the acts of worship, comprising the kinds of submission and humility and the practice of reverence toward Him, exalted is He, with the personal works attaching to them. These, then, are what the Sharīʿa comprises; the other sciences, crafts, and conditions lie outside it — save where they touch it for soundness or corruption, as some medicine is indispensable, some geometry, and the rest of the trades and crafts.

From all that has passed it is plain that there must be in the world a messenger, and that there must descend upon him a Sharīʿa gathering the laws of knowledge and of practice together.

We say further: this matter differs in strength and weakness according as men differ, with the passing of time, in their preparedness for receiving the knowledges and perfections, as has been explained. It is necessary, therefore, that the Sharīʿas differ according to the times, and that the later in religion be abrogator and completer of the earlier.

We say next: man being by nature changeable in opinions and posited notions — as we indicated before and showed in the book of Iʿtibārāt — it follows necessarily that the Sharīʿa be, in every age, preserved with some among men who have the strength not to alter: one whose soul is protected (maʿṣūma), its connection with the principles and the high worlds kept unbroken. He is the one named the Imām: he guards the Sharīʿa, acts by it, and calls to the acting by it according to possibility — like the messenger.

This, the more so as the truth in every age is overborne: what comes first upon the natural disposition and sits entrenched in the soul is the following of caprice and the love of this world, the dressing of the false in the form of the true, and the rest of the collisions and crowdings.

From this it is plain that some imamate must exist, just as the messengership; and that the world is never in any age devoid of it — unlike the messengership. This being so, it is permissible that messengership and imamate be joined together in a single man, and that they part: that is, the existence of an imām without a messenger is a thing found.

We say further: since the true is not told apart from the false, nor truthfulness from lying, by demonstration alone in the eyes of all — for demonstration, the decisive proof, is not within the reach of the generality; nay, even the elect, if they reach it, their souls do not rest quiet against hidden, subtly-derived objections — there must then be, in the messenger, the power to manifest a thing that breaches custom, from which it is divined that his soul is joined to the higher world and suckled from it, at the moment of challenge (taḥaddī): this is what is named the miracle (muʿjiza). And it is required, by the divine solicitude, that he never be overcome in it — such a deed being possible of issuance from the complete friends of God as well; and it is required too that the universals of what he claims accord with the plain verdict of reason. All this is patent and evident from the foregoing principles.

Praise belongs to God for the completion; and blessing, and peace, upon the Household of protection and messengership.

The finishing of it fell on the morning of Saturday, the eleventh night having passed of the month of Jumādā the Second, of the year one thousand three hundred and fifty of the Prophet's Hijra [≈ 24 October 1931] — God bless him and his Household and grant peace.