Essence of the Human Soul - Book 3

The union and mutual influence of soul and body

Introduction

247. We may sum up what has been said about the essence of the soul as follows. We saw that it lies in the primal, substantial feeling we express when we say myself (cf. 69-70). Only by meditating on this feeling can we know with certainty the characteristics of the essence of the soul. Consequently I made feeling the principle and criterion of all psychological teaching.

I then investigated this intimate feeling and showed that in every human being the soul is one and the principle of all human actions, that it is simple, incorporeal and does not die. In fact, the word death simply means the experience undergone by the body when the soul ceases to vivify it. But the soul is active in the body's death, of which it is the negative cause through the cessation of its act, called animation.

Our next problem was the identity of the soul, complicated by an apparent triplicity in the soul's nature. We saw that there is first a principle and term, then a plurality of terms with many actions, and finally two active principles of very different character: feeling and intelligence.

We showed however that the term is not an element intrinsic to the soul but simply its condition or essential relationship. The term cannot therefore duplicate the soul; the multiplicity of the term cannot be in the soul, which is purely principle. Also, different actions, because they are not the soul, do not multiply it. Finally we found that over and above the two active principles discernible in the soul, another principle governs them both, and that in this superior principle, which is the soul itself, the soul's identity is properly located.

Next, we examined the kind of changes the soul could undergo without losing its identity, and the kind that could cause this loss. This gave us a good opportunity to discuss the differences which separate the human soul from the souls of brute animals and from pure intelligences.

After this, I showed that the nature of the soul (as of all contingent things) is that of being simply real. Consequently, unless its reality is perceived, or there is some vestige of it to which its reality can be referred, we cannot conceive its essence positively. The essence of the soul is known by means of a concept which is determined and as it were outlined in ideal being by an act of the mind which considers the relationship between the real and the ideal.

Finally, I proved that the soul is finite precisely because it is real and in so far as it is real. But, because being is its object, the soul communicates with the infinite. Being is like an interminable space into which the soul can freely and infinitely extend itself.

248. The nature of the soul, therefore, and its limitation, consists in its reality (for this reason I placed its nature in feeling which is precisely what is real).(119) We must now investigate and analyse more fully the soul's limitation. To do this, we must consider the soul relative to the body it animates. Properly speaking, the soul is limited by extended, corporeal reality which also contributes to its actions. In this book therefore I will deal with the nexus between, and the mutual influence of, soul and body.

Notes

(119)When I say that the essence of the soul is in feeling, this means feeling considered in itself, as possible.