The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK TWELVE 195 itself understands them or whether they are understood by the other spirit and by it unfolded to the mind. But if this knowledge is revealed to the mind (and it cannot surely be revealed by a body), it follows. of necessity that the revelation must come only from some spirit.
CHAPTER 13
The power of divination.
27. There are some who hold that the human soul has within itself a power of divination.>? But if this is so, why is it not always able to exercise this power, since it always wishes to do so? Is it because it has not always the aid needed for the exercise of the power? Well then, any aid that is given to assist the soul in divination®® could not come from nothing or from a body.®! Hence the soul would have to receive aid from a spirit. Then how is it aided? Does something happen in the body whereby the attention of the soul is somehow disengaged and illuminated to such an extent that it sees within itself symbolic likenesses which were already there but which it did not see (just as we also have in memory many objects which we do not behold)? Or are images produced in the soul which were not previously there? Or are they in some spirit into which the soul rushes and enters to see them? But if the soul already possessed them as its very own, why did the soul not also understand them? For it often happens, indeed most frequently, that it does not understand them. Should we say that, just as the spirit is assisted in order to see images within itself, the mind also, unless it receives similar aid, cannot understand the objects contained in the spirit? Or should it be said perhaps that there is no question of a removal of bodily impediments or disengagement of the soul from them in order that it may by its own power go out to the objects to be seen, but that it is carried directly to these objects, whether just to see them in the spirit or to know them also in the intellect? Or does the soul see the objects sometimes in itself and at other times by means of mingling with another spirit?