of God are plant spirits, and below them in knowledge of God, animal spirits.
Each kind is innately formed upon knowledge and gnosis of God, caring only for glorifying Him with praise, exalted is He. Below these in knowledge of God are human spirits. Angels and the inanimate are innately formed upon knowledge of God, having neither intellects nor appetite; animals upon knowledge of God and appetite; humans and jinn upon appetite and gnosis through their forms, not through their spirits.
God gave them intellect to return appetite to the revealed-law balance and repel its contention outside its prescribed locus. He did not bring intellect into existence for them to acquire sciences. What He gave them for acquiring sciences is the faculty of thought. Hence their spirits were not innately formed upon gnosis as angels’ spirits and those of all other than the two weighty kinds were.
(Form, Nature and the Limits of Effect)
Human ranks differ in knowledge of things. Some spirits wished to join the ruling of their governed form to the ruling of Nature, from which that form came, assigning it Nature’s rank within ruling. It never attains that rank.
He was told by
