Development Of The Human Soul

Appendix 11. (1231).

Ancient philosophy found itself in great difficulty as a result of the poverty and imperfection of philosophical language. Tiedemann makes this observation about Greek philosophy in expounding Plato's Parmenides. I find the same obstacle present in all periods until our own time. A history of philosophy should bring together with great care examples of such obstacles to the free progress of philosophical thought. They arise from insufficient and ambiguous terms, one of the great sources of dissension and argument amongst philosophers, and a real obstacle to progress, as historians should indicate. However, we have no history of philosophy, nor will we have one soon, nor will the moment for one arise shortly if historians of philosophy, the mother and reason of all sciences, refuse to limit their investigation to narrow areas and provide accurate, partial accounts of Schools or nations. For the moment, I think it useful, whenever I have the opportunity, to indicate examples of the insufficiency of words used by the greatest philosophers, and of the inconstancy with which they use them.

The word motion pertains properly speaking to bodies, which pass from one place to another. Note, however, that little by little it receives a wider meaning in the Psychology left us by Aristotle where eventually it comes to mean generally every transient act.

1. Aristotle first distinguishes four species of motion: passage, alteration, increase and decrease (bk. 1, c. 1). Now, it is clear that alteration, increase and decrease are not properly speaking motion, but acts produced in a material substance by concurrence of multiple movements. Nevertheless, these so-called species of movement are confined to the body; they are movements, and effects of movements, in a material substance.

2. According to this concept of motion, Aristotle distinguishes motion from sense by maintaining that some of his predecessors had posited the essence of the soul in motion; some in sense; others in both (bk. 1, c. 1). A little later he says, rather incoherently, that 'all of them define the soul as three things: motion, sense and incorporeality.' He seems to mean by 'incorporeal', the intellect or idea. He finds motion also in sense. He says: 'But if the soul moves, someone will say that it is moved especially by sensible things,' and then, attacking Plato, adds that he (Plato) 'wants the soul of the universe to be what is called 'intellect', because this philosopher gives it circular motion. But the movement of the sensitive or appetitive soul is not circular.'

3. Next, not content with granting motion also to sense, Aristotle posits it about intellect. He says that 'the motion of the intellect is intellection.' Then, however, he removes motion from the intellect by saying that 'intellection is rather like a certain kind of quiet, a kind of state.' Again, in the following chapter, he states that suffering, happiness and reasoning are movements, but maintains that the soul produces such movements without moving. It simply makes the heart and the body move, partly through the movement called 'passage', partly through the movement called 'alteration'. He says: 'This must not be understood as if motion were somehow in the soul. Sometimes, however, it comes to the soul, sometimes from the soul. For example, sense goes from these things (to the soul). Memory, then, comes out of it into those movements or states of quiet which are found in the instruments used by the senses.'

It may well be that when Aristotle speaks of some movement on the part of sense or reason, he uses the word metaphorically, but it cannot be denied that such use of metaphor often makes his reasoning laborious and uncertain.
In the third book of Metaphysics he uses the word with an even more extended meaning. He says that 'all actions are done through movement.' Plato, with the whole of ancient philosophy, attributes the same very broad meaning to the word motion (*) (cf. Theaetetus, and the whole of ancient philosophy).