Chapter 6
Development of the proof of the simplicity of the soul
from the nature of the continuum
443. I have already used the first proof, drawn from the nature of the continuum, in Anthropology. It could, however, be illustrated more fully with the authority and speculations of the ancients on the need for a simple principle to contain the body, which otherwise would dissipate into nothing.
It is a property of the extended body that every assignable part in it is outside and independent of every other, just as it is impossible to assign a part of the body within which more and more parts cannot be assigned. Such a substance, however, is absurd if the parts are not united and contained by a simple principle. 'That which cannot be thought' is absurd. But the first parts of the body are not found existing in themselves; in every assignable part, a smaller part is outside all the others in such a way that there is no extended part which is everything in itself. Only simple points are in se but, as unextended, they are neither body nor parts of an extended body. Consequently they cannot form anything extended whatever their multiplicity. We have to conclude that either what is extended does not exist or, if it exists, does so only in a simple principle which brings it together.
444. This formed the ineluctable argument of the Alexandrian Platonists. Nemesius offers it in the following form:
| The arguments used by Ammonius, master of Plotinus the Pythagorean, are sufficient to refute all those who affirm that the soul is body. He said: 'Bodies change of their nature. Indeed, they disintegrate and divide infinitely. But if nothing immutable remains in them, they need something to contain and connect them, to bind them together, as it were, and hold them in. This is what we call soul. If the soul is indeed a body of any sort, even the most subtle of bodies, what will its container be? We have shown that all bodies need something to contain them, and so on ad infinitum until we arrive at something which is altogether devoid of body'.(189) |
Those who can follow this argument will profit by the study of philosophy. Anyone who absolutely cannot follow it should abandon the subject.
445. We should not believe, however, that this way of arguing is peculiar to
the school of Alexandria. It is part of the inheritance received by this school
from the first Italic philosophers.
Xenophanes, in beginning to speak about unity as a necessary element in
the explanation of the nature of all things, cannot be credited with distinct
ideas. Aristotle testifies that he did not explain whether he was talking about
unity of matter or unity of concept.(190) But to have noticed even in general and indistinctly
the need to have recourse to some unity to give consistency to nature
was at least to have glimpsed that there could be no body without something
simple to contain it.
446. Xenophanes was succeeded by Parmenides and Melissus in Italy. These both upheld the principle of unity, but the former, according to Aristotle's conjecture, maintained that it proceeded from reason; the second wanted to find it in matter itself.(191) It seems that both forgot sense, Parmenides by falling back on intelligence, Melissus by halting at matter. Sense and intelligence were still not accurately distinguished from one another. Parmenides confused sense with reason; Melissus, sense with matter. Nevertheless, both saw that something simple was needed to explain nature.
We see from Aristotle's later remarks in the same place that Parmenides included sense under reason. According to Aristotle, Parmenides affirms that ens is one, and that non-ens is nothing.
| But he was constrained to pursue things which appear, and thought that the one depended on reason and the many on sense. As a result, he posited two causes and two principles, hot and cold, as it were, fire and earth. The one, that is, what is hot, he posited with ens, the other with non-ens. |
How could Parmenides declare that fire was a condition or property of ens, which is one through reason, unless he considered fire or heat as the principle of life produced in great part by breathing air, which is then broken down through contact with the blood by means of an operation similar to combustion? Here it is obvious that animal life, or the sensitive principle, intervened in the ens and in the one which, according to Parmenides, is dependent upon reason. But this sensitive principle is precisely that which, through its simplicity and unity, enables bodies to be one, that is, enables them as such to be something, to be that which they are, extended bodies.
447. Zeno of Elea, another light of the ancient school of Italy, succeeded Parmenides and Melissus. Careful consideration shows that his arguments against the existence of movement are all reduced to the principle: 'That which is extended has no unity in itself.' If, therefore, we prescind from some simple principle containing the body and making it one, no bodily phenomena can be explained. In this case, the body is a complex of contradictions and absurdities.(192)
448. This argument, drawn from the nature of the continuum, is similar to that developed by St. Augustine,(193) St. Thomas(194) and many others, and drawn from the existence of the entirety of the soul in all parts of the body. Modern authors have denied this truth only because, having abandoned internal observation and the witness of consciousness (the only authoritative witnesses in reasoning about the soul), they preferred to work through abstract reasoning. They imagined the soul as a kind of tiny, tenuous body residing in a determined part of the body. This is, of course, very far from the truth. The soul, the sentient principle, clearly does not reside in some determined point of the body, but is present wherever it feels. Its nature is entirely reduced to the immanent act of feeling to which no element, alien to that act, can be added. That the whole soul is in every part of the body where it feels simply means that it receives and possesses in itself that which is felt. This argument about the simplicity of the sentient principle is reduced, therefore, to the first argument about the unity of the continuum. In fact, the continuum is only such because it resides in what is simple. This was St. Thomas' way of conceiving it. He affirmed constantly: 'It is the soul that CONTAINS THE BODY AND MAKES IT ONE rather than the opposite.'(195)
449. Paulinus of Aquilea, a notable 8th century Italian Father of the Church, wrote in a similar vein when he maintained that the soul
| wonderfully rules the whole continuous, separable, divisible mass of the body. Diffused throughout the whole body, the soul vivifies and animates it and, like a point at the centre, preserves its own individual dignity without breaking up into the qualities of something else. Although incorporeal, the soul through the body disposes all things corporeally while the substance of the body, although corporeal by means of an incorporeal creature, that is, the soul, fulfils the bodily actions.(196) |
Notes
(189) De natura hominis, c. 49.
(190) Metaph., 1, c. 4.
(191) Ibid.
(192) Cf. C. H. Lohse, Dissertatio de argumentis, quibus Zeno Eleates nullum esse motum demonstravit, et de unica horum refutandorum ratione, Halle, 1794.
(193) De Trinit., 6 [8].
(194) S.T., I, q. 76, art. 8.
(195) S.T., I, q. 76, art. 3.
(196) Adversus Felicem Urgelitanum. - St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, in his still extant Disputazione dell'anima, posits the principle that, 'the soul is known directly through its own actions (eam ex propriis actionibus cognitam habemus).' The proper action of the soul is to give life to the body. St. Gregory, therefore, asks how the soul gives life to the body. He shows that if it were joined to the body as one solid adheres to another, it would not animate the whole, but only those points which it could touch; if it were mixed with the body as one fluid is mixed with another, it would be divided in parts and would no longer exist as the one, same soul which simultaneously enlivens all the parts of the body of an animal. We have to say therefore that it is whole and entire in all parts of the body and, while remaining one, enlivens them all. - But body joined to body increases in mass; the soul existing in the body does not swell it, but vivifies it. The soul is not the body, therefore, but devoid of body'.