  It is curious that many of his contemporaries tried to respond to the challenge of proving the immortality of the soul by appealing to coherence, precisely when the Alexandrists emphasized that the coherence of Aristotle was placed in mortality: every substantial form is born and perishes with the compound to which it gives the essence. Pereira was then not original when he tried to respond to Pomponazzi’s mortalist thesis by resorting to an alternative coherence based on the radical separation of body and mind. But, in this attempt, he showed, probably as no one before, that the hylomorphic explanatory scheme applied to the nature of the human being led to an unavoidable crossroads: one path ended in an integral materialism, the other in a strict dualism. Those who chose this last road, as Pereira undoubtedly did, had a peremptory question before them: what is the body for? For Pereira the body was a datum of experience whose negation would have been contrary to the principles upon which he wished to sustain his work, i.e., experience and logical coherence. His response came through the allegory of an imprisoned man (AM: II.1067). The soul is like a man inside a reticular sheath. This man cannot know anything at all if he is not “awakened” by the blows that fall on the surrounding sheath from outside. Such blows or affections produced by external realities are necessary for the man wrapped in such a sheath to awaken and know, but they are not enough to explain knowledge itself. Thus, for Pereira the body is a kind of “alarm clock” of the soul. This corporeal affection is required pro statu isto (i.e., the state of union body-soul) as conditio sine qua non of human understanding. But it is no less true that for Pereira the soul outside this sheath-jail would be permanently awake and would possess a more perfect knowledge of itself as well as of the other objects. Unfortunately, Pereira did not explain at any time why the soul has to be in such a deplorable state: forgetful of itself, and aware only when it is unpleasantly excited by external stimuli. The tone in which Pereira referred to the situation of the incarnated soul shows us the most pessimistic version of an anthropological dualism: the knowledge that the soul is capable of achieving in this life is only a pale reflection of the one it can reach in the other. If, as Pereira seems to think, the soul is essentially self-consciousness, this nature can be reached here only indirectly, and for a limited time. But Pereira told us nothing of the metaphysical framework that would be needed to explain what universal order allows a reality of a higher nature to be restricted in this way. If the death of the compound involves the reunion of the soul with its true condition (“corrupto carcere statim in totum expergiscetur”/“once his prison was destroyed he would be completely awake” AM: II.1068/1069), why should it suffer the unfortunate restrictions to which it is subjected in the body?  Although he wanted to deal with the issue of the soul’s immortality from the point of view of natural reason, in the end it was necessary to transcend the physical realm to give a full explanation of the fact that two natures as different as the spirit and the body cohabit in human beings.