The inner faculties
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 5 anchored passages
al-ḥawāss al-ẓāhirah wa-al-bāṭinah · al-ḥiss al-bāṭin · al-ḥiss al-khārij · al-ḥiss al-mushtarak · the common sense · the estimative faculty · the imagination · the intellect · the intellective faculty · the outward and inward senses
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
The division of sensation into outward and inward, used both to grade cognition below intellect and, in the similitudes, to supply the soul with its ministers and soldiers.
that is inward is able to apprehend (*idrāk*) the sensible after its absence, yet still with the matter that discloses it — such as the common sense and the imagination and the rest.
the outward sense does not apprehend the sensible except together with the matter that discloses it, such as the eye and the ear and the rest.
and this (5) king has secretaries and troops and governors, namely the outward and the inward senses.
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
The ranked apprehending faculties through which one reality passes, multiplying in sense and imagination and unifying in the intellect.
So knowledge is a single reality that appears in the abode of waking in an accidental form, veiled from the outward sense, apprehended by the intellect as universal and by the estimative faculty as particular;
Have you considered how the single reality appeared upon the intellective faculty in a unitary, subtle, immaterial form, and then appeared upon the senses in divergent, dense, material forms?
So the fixed entities, by which I mean those realities in their own selves which the estimative faculty posits, are not existent at all.