Chapter 15

The hypothesis that all particles of matter are animated

500. What has been said implies that life or the sensitive soul can be united to matter even in the absence of external, extrasubjective phenomena of life. In this chapter I will first propose the hypothesis that feeling is united to all the elementary particles of matter, and then determine whether this entails fatal consequences.

501. The hypothesis could certainly be false, and cannot be admitted until verified by the most accurate experiments of fact. On the other hand, I can find no argument which demonstrates its absurdity. Some claim that it can be used to support materialism and pantheism, but in my opinion they are wrong because they make arbitrary additions to the hypothesis which denature it.

502. First of all, it is clear that materialism cannot in any way be legitimately deduced from the hypothesis. We need only consider that if every particle of matter has some feeling conjoined with it, the extended particle is simply the term of this feeling. On the other hand, feeling requires a simple principle as its essential constitutive.

503. In the case of pantheism, the presence in the universe of a greater or smaller number of animated substances is completely indifferent. Provided these substances are created, and totally distinct from the Creator, pantheism is excluded.

504. In the second place, an hypothesis which grants feeling to the first elements of matter must not be confused with the hypothesis of the world soul conceived by the ancients. Even this hypothesis, although erroneous, does not necessarily imply pantheism, provided the world soul is created. But the hypothesis about an animator of the first particles implies more, namely, that there are as many souls as individual particles or groups of particles. These souls are either individually distinct or at least apt for being distinct and multiplied by means of separation. Consequently they could never be confused with the divine substance, which is most simple and in no way multipliable.

505. In the third place, corporeal feeling is truly distinct from intelligence, and blind. God however is essentially intelligible and intelligent. He cannot therefore in any way be confused with a sensitive soul.

506. In the fourth place, the sensitive soul is simply the sensitive principle, with matter as its term and in natural opposition to the principle. These two things (principle and matter) have different natures. It is therefore impossible to reduce all things to a single nature or substance, as the pantheists do.

507. These facts clearly indicate that if anyone wished to deduce pantheism from animation of the particles of matter, he would have to confuse 1. what is contingent with what is necessary; 2. what is multipliable with what is unmultipliable; 3. feeling with intelligence (he would have to be a sensist),(241) and 4. the sensitive principle with its felt term. Pantheism in fact is nothing more than absolute confusion, honoured with the title of 'system'.

508. Synthesis in the human mind precedes distinction of concepts, just as chaos in creation precedes the distinction of parts in the universe. It comes as no surprise therefore if pantheism appears at the beginning of all philosophies. Not that confusion is necessarily natural to the human mind. What is natural is that the mind begins to think in great generalities and perceives real things as a single, varied thing, so to speak. But in composing a philosophical system out of these first, poor materials, human beings grow proud and, confident of what they can do, rush headlong into error and invent pantheism. Nevertheless, because every error has its origin in some truth, it will be helpful to consider the deviations of the human spirit in order to discover evident consensus or some general inclination of the whole human race. This may serve as an indication and characteristic of truth. In fact, it cannot be denied that there was always and everywhere a very great inclination in the human mind to suppose that matter was animated, although the concept has been overlaid with errors.

509. India, where life in all areas of nature seems so fertile, indefatigable and luxuriant, was inevitably the country in which universal animation would be imagined more easily.

510. Moreover, the cause of animation was attributed to a universal spirit. There is a sense in which this unity of life would not be foreign to the truth; it is the way the East thinks. The Scriptures themselves speak of 'a spirit of life', which animates every living thing.(242)

In fact, granted that sensitive life multiplies with the division of living continua, all living matter must surely be conceived as united and organated, and consequently animated, as it were, by a single soul.

But once we lose sight of the multiplication of this soul through the division of its term, and claim that the soul preserves its unity even when the continua are divided and no longer have contact with each other, we fall into error; we have failed to acknowledge the multipliability of the soul and the plurality of souls.

511. Indian philosophers however added a much more serious error to this: they stopped at the world soul, accepting it as God, creator of all things. From that moment nothing could prevent them from descending into pantheism.

512. It is not difficult to acknowledge that matter exists solely in relationship to feeling. In feeling, the soul (the sentient element) is the active principle in which and by which the extended exists as felt. This very easily paved the way for emanationism.

If we accept the hypothesis of emanationism, all beings would have to share in the living substance of the first being from whom they are supposed to be derived.

513. The Code of the Laws of Manu, describing the origin of the world, says:

From this seed posited in the water, he himself emerged under visible form or like a supreme Soul (param-atma). From this supreme soul emerged 1. intelligence; 2. consciousness or 'myself', and 3. feeling diffused in the sensitive, active organs, and also a common, inferior sense. This explains the origin of all beings.

All beings therefore, like feeling, intelligence, consciousness and the five subtle particles or elements which compose the five senses, came from spiritual principles, and must all be accompanied by life and feeling.(248)

Hence it is no surprise that eventually feeling is attributed to plants:

In a word, the whole universe is, in this system, the Creator himself under a particular form.

514. The life of all beings and of all the molecules composing the universe is mentioned, among other places, in the Isha-Upanishad of the Yajur-Veda, where we read in the translation of J. Pauthier:

According to this system death is simply the dissolution of the external form; feeling never perishes. Individual souls pass into the universal soul when the aggregation of their matter is broken up. There is nothing but change in the universe. This explains the distinction between the corruptible universe, subject to destruction, and the incorruptible principle and the imperishable elements(256) which properly speaking constitute its intimate substance.

515. This very ancient way of explaining the phenomena of the world demonstrates how antiquity was convinced that phenomena cannot be reasonably explained by recourse to brute causes as our modern materialists maintain.

The explanation also shows the foundering rocks of pantheism, emanationism and the transmigration of souls. These errors can so easily be espoused if such a delicate question is not approached with the greatest perspicacity and caution. It is clear however that they are not the necessary consequence of the hypothesis that corporeal elements are indivisibly united with a feeling whose term they constitute. This feeling would not always be one, and would not emanate from God as if it had something of his own substance. Created from nothing, the feeling could not be confused with matter nor with the intellective principle which in human beings is superior to matter.

516. From the East, we turn to Greece. Here, nearly all philosophical schools admitted the opinion of a world soul. Plato, Heraclitus and other schools each conceived it in their own way, but all agreed that the world was animated.

517. Many attributed life in the strict sense to the elements; among them, Empedocles. Sturz writes, 'Empedocles considered every element a spirit or soul.'(257) But Empedocles took the matter to extremes and deified the elements. Plato also predicated sense of the elements.(258)
According to Plutarch, Democritus 'believed that all things, even dead bodies, share in a soul. Clearly therefore they always have a share of heat and feeling, most of which however has evaporated.'(259)

518. This opinion of the animation of the world was received by the Italians. Virgil presented it in magnificent verse, Cicero in most elegant prose.

519. I said that one of the errors which did harm to the opinion of a world soul was its constantly maintained unity. Another was the inability to draw a line between sense and intellect. This meant that a universal soul was posited which was both sensitive and intelligent. When errors of this kind penetrated the Church they became heresies.(260)
But spontaneous generation was not opposed by the Fathers of the Church. They sometimes explained it by having recourse to a primal animation of certain corporeal molecules.(261)

520. The Italian philosophers of the 17th century re-asserted the hypothesis of universal animation but, failing to distinguish between the sensitive and intellective soul, fell into the error of a single world soul. Telesio wrote a small work entitled Quod animal universum ab unica animae substantia gubernetur [Animality is governed by a single soul-substance].

521. Francis Xavier Feller wrote:

However, this addition of a neutral substance of the kind suggested above, as a sort of minister of animation, is merely the addition of one entirely gratuitous hypothesis to another. All we need suppose is that feeling is attached to the elements, and at once we have a satisfactory explanation of the facts of spontaneous generation and of the various manifestations of life, movement and organising process throughout the world.

522. After Van Helmont proposed his archeus, the philop}hers and doctors who called themselves 'Neo-Pythagoreans' arrived on the scene. They spoke about a common soul, which they distinguished from the intellective soul. One of their principal errors was the transmigration of this soul. We must note however that the transmigration of a purely sensitive soul is not only erroneous but absurd, because such a soul cannot transmigrate from one body to another without detaching itself from the first, and it cannot do this without perishing or losing its identity.(264)

523. We can say therefore that the hypothesis of the animation of matter was never clearly presented free from errors and arbitrary additions. If we brought together all who have posited it in so many different ways, without counting the errors added to it, we would find it common to all the principal schools of philosophy in all ages, as follows:

1. Materialists agree with it. For them, the cause of life and feeling is a force attributed to matter. Their only error is their inability to distinguish between this force and matter itself.(265)

2. All those who admitted or admit a world soul agree with it. Their only error is to make this soul intelligent and independent; they also exclude plurality of individuals.

3. Pantheists and emanationists agree with it. They err solely by making souls parts of the divine substance, or even the divine substance itself arranged in various ways.

4. Naturalists agree. They suppose a neutral substance, a biotic fluid, a weightless quid invading and suffusing everything, animator of everything. They err simply by admitting an extra substance in nature, of which neither the existence nor the power is proved.

5. Pythagoreans throughout the ages, or rather all the most ancient schools, agree. They admitted a common soul which individuates or transmigrates, but erred by adding transmigration to the above-mentioned errors.

6. All the various kinds of idealists agree. For them, matter is a modification of spirit. Their only mistake is to confuse term (matter) with spirit (principle), what is sensible with what is intelligible.

If all these systems are stripped of their errors, we find a fundamental opinion common to all, namely, the need to suppose animated matter.

524. The hypothesis that life is joined to the elements of matter was fostered and at the same time corrupted more than ever in Germany, the homeland of transcendental idealism.
The impetus given to German philosophy by Schelling's Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur is well known. Kant, who took a great deal from Leibniz's system of monads, also made a contribution. Leibniz himself had to some extent been preceded by the Englishman, Glisson (d. 1776), who in turn had been preceded by our Italians, Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, Cardano (d. 1576) and others. I will discuss Francis Glisson's presentation of the theory.

525. He begins by stating that the concept of substance can be applied only to that which has three faculties, perceptive, appetitive and motive.(266) Then, taking for granted that bodies are substances, he tries to demonstrate that material substance itself has these faculties.

In Chapter 15, he had already dealt with the distinction between natural perception, which he attributes to material substances, and sensation. It is here that he reveals his total lack of understanding of the nature of sensation and how it differs from intellection, with which he confuses it. At the same time he at least glimpses something of the truth, if not the truth itself. For example, in comparing his natural perception with intellectual perception, he indicates the following difference:

I myself have indicated this important difference between sensitive and intellectual perception. The former is simple and involves no judgment; the latter is double and accompanied by a judgment. Although the Englishman's authority confirms my teaching, he did not see that intuition is prior to intellectual perception. Intuition, which involves no judgment, is objective; sensation and sensitive perception are subjective and extrasubjective.

526. Moreover, Glisson glimpsed the objectivity of intellectual perception when he saw that its objectivity was a necessary condition for the existence of will and of freedom. He said:

Here, I agree with Glisson. He attributes to the object of the intellect, as such, an indifference that can be removed by the will, which thus renders the object good or bad for itself. I have called this function practical reason; it freely causes one object rather than another to be better for us and to prevail.

527. But when Glisson tries to distinguish between natural perception (which corresponds to what I have called fundamental feeling) and sense (which corresponds to my sensation), he shows his lack of clear and distinct ideas, because he knows neither the distinction between extrasubjective phenomena and subjective facts, nor the other distinctions mentioned above.
Glisson therefore assigns the following differences to his natural, or as he calls it, animal perception:

1. It is homogeneous and inorganic, whereas sensitive perception is organic. - This difference, however, is purely extrasubjective and does not imply an internal difference between the two perceptions.

2. It is simple, whereas sensitive perception is composed and, as it were, doubled because it is a perception of a perception. - Here he failed to observe that sense does not turn back upon itself. It is always most simple, although perception, in so far as distinct from sensation, contains an extrasubjective element. In this sense it can be said to be composed of two elements, but never of a perception which has another perception as its object. Perception, in which there is only a term but never an object, is always single. Consequently, because Glisson did not recognise the essential simplicity of sensation, he later had to endow his natural perception with a kind of duplicity which led him into intricate, subtle and totally useless arguments.

3. Hence he even endows sense with judgment: 'Sense includes a certain kind of implicit judgment about the thing perceived.' Again, he confuses sense with intellective perception, although in sense the thing perceived is not even an object (a judgment can be made only about an object) but an element which, relative to the sentient principle, has the concept of matter or of term. The activity of the sentient principle exists only with its term and, because it is individual, cannot multiply itself nor judge the element that it needs in order to exist.

4. Glisson, still on the same mistaken path, grants to sense the possibility of erring, even though error pertains only to judgment, that is, to a function of reason.

5. He believes that sense can contemplate an object: 'The perceived object is contemplated as something outside oneself.' And he is so far from conceiving sensation and sensitive perception in their purity and simplicity that he invariably and arbitrarily adds some intellectual element. Consequently, in speaking about his natural perception, he invariably uses expressions which are applicable solely to intellective perception; he furnishes his natural perception with a SELF, and the faculty to represent itself, its causes, its effects, etc.(267)

528. But this is no surprise — I say quite openly and honestly that I have never found a philosopher able to form the concept of simple sensation without adding to it something intellective or material.(268)

Notes

(241) Virey rejected spontaneous generation because he was afraid of falling into pantheism. It is an important observation that sensists are much closer to pantheism than others, precisely because pantheism abolishes all differences, and sensism abolishes the difference separating feeling from intelligence.

(242) [Douai] Gen 1: 2; 6: 3, 17; Job 12: 10; Ps 103: 29; Eccles 3: 21; Ezech 1: 20, 21; 10: 17; 37.

(243) Avya Kritarupat, which they translate as 'from his form not yet revealed and manifested'. This could mean from 'prime matter' or from the 'eternal possibility existing in the word'.

(244) Bk. 1, 7-8. Nevertheless, the Code of Manu distinguishes between animate and inanimate beings.

(245) I interpret the word manas as internal sense or feeling, basing myself on the poem of Ishvarakrishna, which is the compendium of Sankhya philosophy and mentions Manas in the 17th. distich: 'Manas or interior sense shares substantially in the double nature of these two series of feelings' (that is, of the five organs of perception and the five organs of action). 'It judges, compares and is called 'sense' because of its affinity with the other senses.'

(246) These six principle are the five senses formed from the five subtle particles or elements. The sixth is the triad resulting from internal sense, intelligence and consciousness. Cf. the poem of Ishvarakrishna quoted above, distich 29.

(247) Manava-Dharmasastra, c. 1: 14-16.

(248) Material elements cannot subsist on their own. Ishvarakrishna says, 'Like an unsupported picture or a shadow without solid body, subtle being or body lacking support cannot subsist without the different element' (distich 41). Later he says: 'Body cannot subsist without conditions or modes of being. The development of conditions and modes of being, like manifestation, can never subsist without body. A double creation (intellectual and elementary) is therefore said to proceed from body and conditions.'

(249) The obscure quality is explained in Bk. 12: 26, 29 where it says that its distinctive sign is ignorance. It is defined as 'a disposition lacking the distinction of good and evil, incapable of discerning objects, inconceivable and unappreciable by consciousness and the external senses.' Hence in this philosophy, the distinction between brute and animated beings is reduced to this; in brutes the faculty of knowledge is present but hidden. Ishvarakrishna says, 'This body, formed for use of the soul, behaves like an actor: according to inclination, it clothes itself sometimes in the original conditions of intelligent principles, sometimes in the derived conditions or non-intelligent principles. It all depends on the union between the procreating nature and its essential virtue' (distich 42).

(250) Manava-Dharmasastra, c. 1: 49.

(251) The six successive emanations are the triad (internal sense, intelligence, consciousness) and the five elements from which the five sense-organs are made.

(252) The triad, too, is included in 'manas' which sometimes means the internal sense alone, principle of the triad, because the internal sense is understood to contain consciousness and intelligence which emanate from it. Cf. the Uttara Mimamsa, bk. 2, c. 4.

(253) Here, seven principles are mentioned in place of the previous six. The six, having emanated, corresponded to the six emanations; the seventh is the emanator. Ishvarakrishna's poem says, 'The procreative root is uncreated. The great one or intelligence and the other procreative and procreated principles are seven' (distich 3). The first procreator is thus included in these principles. He is precisely the one manifested in the universe in his visible form, and consequently is the first, fundamental principle of the world.

The six emanations are mentioned in the Code of Manu, bk. 1, 74-78: 'At the breath of this night, Buahora, who had fallen asleep, was woken, and upon waking, made the spirit (manas, the triad) emanate which essentially exists, and does not exist through external senses (first emanation). The spirit (the triad), moved by the desire to create, effects creation and gives birth to air, which the wise men consider endowed with the quality of sound (second emanation). The air undergoes a change and becomes the vehicle of all odours, pure and very strong, whose known characteristic is tangibility (third emanation). Next, a metamorphosis of air produces fire, which gives light, dispels darkness, shines and is said to have the property of visibility (fourth emanation). Then fire undergoes a change to become water, whose quality is taste (fifth emanation). Finally, from water comes earth, whose quality is odour (sixth emanation). This is how creation is effected at the beginning.'

(254) Note carefully that Indian philosophy explains motion by appealing to the first spiritual being, and gives the universe a soul.

(255) 1: 7, 17.

(256) 'Subtle beings (the elements) are durable, but those born from father and mother (organisms) are perishable and return to nothing' (Ishvarakrishna, distich 39).

(257) Empedocles, §9, 15. Aristotle, De Anima, 1, 1: 2.

(258) * (Plato, Timaeus).

(259) De Placit. Phil., bk. 4.

(260) According to St. Jerome it is heretical to admit a rational soul joined to all things. Commenting on the words of St. Matthew, 'He rose and commanded the winds and sea', he writes: 'In this passage, we understand that all creatures sense their Creator. The things rebuked and commanded sense the one who commands, not in the erroneous way imagined by the heretics who consider all things animated, but because of the majesty of the Creator who makes things that cannot sense us sense him' (In Matth., c. 8, 5).

(261) St. Augustine held the same opinion: 'Certain hidden seeds of everything that visibly and bodily comes into being are concealed in the corporeal elements of this world' (De Trinit., 3, 8. Cf. St. Thomas, S.T., I, q. 115, art. 2).

(262) Discorso sulla storia universale, 2 part., n. 1.

(263) Kirker, Mund. subt., 2 part., p. 337: 'This hypothesis, strangely distorted by Carra in his Nuovi Principî di Fisica, concerns the origin and nature of the human soul.' Cf. also Sennert, Medicina practica, bk. 6.

(264) Cf. M. A. Sinapius, Theoremata et quaestiones etc., c. 5, which speaks about 'the outpouring of spirits and the transmigration of the common soul according to the modern Pythagoreans'.

(265) Geo. Freitag, professor at Groningen, undertook to demonstrate against Sennert the activity of the elements and the origin of form and of the brute soul of matter. Cf. his Novae sectae Sennerto-Paracelsicae detectio et solida refutatio (Amsterdam, 1637).

(266) I say therefore that all substances, properly so called, that is, subsisting in themselves or by their own effort, have A KIND OF VITAL NATURE; they are endowed with three basic faculties, perceptive, appetitive and motive' (De natura substantiae energetica, seu de vita naturae eiusque tribus primis facultatibus perceptiva, appetitiva, et motiva naturalibus, etc., London, 1672, c. 16). Glisson saw that a body without life could not be conceived, but he made no distinction between life and body. He did not see that body is simply the term of a sentient principle, a real term endowed with its own activity in opposition to the vital activity united to it.

(267) 'The OBJECT (of natural perception) is its own entity which REPRESENTS ITSELF AND ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS together with all the INFLUENCES brought to bear by other things, such as association, co-operation, consent, dissent, etc.' (op. cit., c. 15).

(268) Among modern Italians who have attributed properties of life to the elements or to the molecules of bodies, we find, in addition to Forni, Anton Giuseppe Pari, Ricerche analitico-razionali sopra la fisica, l'analisi, e la vita della molecola chimica di prim'ordine ecc., Milan, 1834.