  But how in the first place do we get from potential intellect to actual intellection? It is here that al-Kindi might have told some sort of empiricist story, perhaps involving abstraction; such a story plays at least some role in al-Kindi’s successors al-Farabi and Avicenna. But instead al-Kindi gives a thoroughly intellectualist account of how we come to think, one which is parallel to, but distinct from, his account of sensation. Just as sensation is actualized by an external sensible form, so intellect is actualized by an external intelligible form. This form will reside in the final type of intellect, the “first intellect,” which is al-Kindi’s version of the infamous “maker intellect” in Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5. While it is unclear what position this first intellect is meant to have in al-Kindi’s ontology, it is clear that it is distinct from human intellect. The first intellect is “always in act,” which means that it can serve as an external source for intelligible forms, just as sensible object serves as an external source for a sensible form.