 For Pereira, the rational soul is completely different. Its indivisible nature is alien to the generative process that gives rise to a living body. Thus, in Pereira life and spirit are sharply disconnected. This is the only way to demonstrate the immortality of the soul. To achieve such a demonstration, he believed that, as principle of apprehension and knowledge, the soul has to comprehend in itself all the episodes included in this activity. What is more, the substance of the soul is always its own activity. Now, if this is so, the question is why the soul is not continually thinking. Gómez Pereira’s answer was that attention is what determines both the perception of objects which can be perceived sensorily and the self-perception of the soul itself; the latter as well as the former depend on the will of the soul: consequently, they are not continuous (AM: II.1071). If it were so, we could not perceive anything else. Moreover, the necessary condition for self-perception is some kind of “awakening” that the soul experiences from external objects: only after this excitement does the soul become aware of itself, that is, of its own existence. The final conclusion of Pereira is then: 