Chapter 4
The immortality of the soul proved directly from consciousness
134. If the soul is a substance altogether different from the body, we cannot infer the death of the soul from the death of the body.
135. Moreover, the word 'death' means only the cessation in a body of acts of life and animation. The word 'death', therefore, refers only to the body, and it would be absurd to attribute it to what is not body. But spirit means a substance that is not body; spirit, therefore, is not subject to death. But the soul is spirit (cf. 133). Therefore the soul is immortal.
136. Nevertheless, a person who has not thoroughly grasped the efficacy or connection of the preceding propositions may be doubtful whether an individual retains any feeling of his own when deprived of all corporeal feelings and stripped of his own body. The doubt arises from observing that almost all operations of thought need images or other bodily feelings. It seems that those cognitions are accompanied by a bodily feeling in the way that other feelings, sensible of themselves, are not.
My own position is that intellective operations are sensible of their essence. I believe that the essence itself of a human being consists in feeling, as I said. If the actualised human essence were not sensible, it would not be a human being, nor could a human being perceive himself.
137. The objection is further resolved when we observe that if intellective operations were not in their own way sensible, they could never become such through the addition of animal feelings. Animal sensibility presents only itself to our perception, and we know perfectly well how to distinguish what animal sensibility, tied to space, presents to us from what is presented by merely intellective operations totally immune from space. To put it briefly, we reason about our intellective operations: for example, about reasoning itself. We find in them properties totally contrary to the laws of matter such as 1. the indwelling of consequences in their principles, and the exclusion of space from consequences and principles; and 2. the simplicity of an act which, operating outside space, joins consequences to principles, and so on. All these are properties repugnant to animal feelings. But we would be unable to reason in this way about intellective operations, or find in them properties repugnant to animal feeling, if they themselves, with their immaterial objects, were not sensible. As we said, feeling is the first rudiment necessary for every discussion (cf. 12). Intellective operations, therefore, are also accompanied by their own sensibility. But, if this is the case, we have to say that the first amongst them, the immanent, essential action that we have called the 'intuition of being in general', is also sensible.
If the soul were deprived of all animal feelings, divested of the body and reduced to pure act intuiting being, it would still retain its own feeling. But we must be careful not to form a false, impure concept of this spiritual feeling.(68)
138. We must not add anything which pertains to the nature of bodily feeling. Moreover, we have to understand that the act of intuition is in no way extended outside its object (being). It is, as it were, a spiritual sense-experience which reveals only the object as its term, but which, as an activity, has a principle different from the object to which it adheres in a way essential to it and from which, therefore, it cannot be separated without lapsing into nothing. The sensibility proper to this intuitive act is consequent to the object intuited through the act. Without the intuition of the object, that act would not be sensible because it would not in any way be.(69) The sensibility of the primal intuition comes from the object referred to the subjective, sentient principle.(70)
139. We conclude, therefore, that the human soul, even separated from the body, retains per se a feeling of its own (although without reflection), and consequently its own essence, which consists in feeling. It is immortal. This is St. Augustine's extremely effective argument for the immortality of the soul.(71)
Notes
(68) Cf. Teodicea, 848; and Appendice, 48-49 [Milan, 1845].
(69) When Cicero wrote: 'The mind itself is the source of the senses, and is ITSELF A SENSE' (Acad., 4: 10), he showed on the one hand that he was unable to distinguish sufficiently the difference between animal feeling and the mind. On the other hand, he understood that the mind itself was some kind of sense.
(70) Cf. AMS, 258-268, where I showed that every feeling has essentially a principle and a term.
(71) Those who find that its (the soul's) substance is some kind of incorporeal life (that is, an incorporeal feeling) and that this substance is life animating and vivifying every living body, have tried as a consequence to prove, as anyone could, that it is immortal BECAUSE LIFE CANNOT LACK LIFE (De Trinit., 10: 9).