Chapter 3
Origin and confutation of metempsychosis
668. The death of the animal being, that is, of the animated organism, is not destruction, but modification of feeling. It is simply dissolution of the individual or of the organic soul, that is, of the harmonious feeling of stimulation, continually reproduced, possessing a centre of prevalent activity, whose organisation is an extrasubjective manifestation.
At this point, it will help if we consider the origin of metempsychosis. It would seem necessary to attribute such a system, for the most part at least, to inability on the part of the first philosophers to distinguish the intellective from the sensitive principle,(354) and to their way of looking upon the human being as a more perfect animal, nothing more. Because they believed in spontaneous generation and observed the frequent occurrence of similar facts in nature, they concluded that all corruption was generation and that the dissolution of one animal led to the formation of others from the previous animal's sections. This appeared to be transmigration of souls. Hermias, a 2nd-century Father of the Church, mocked the pagan philosophers in his attractive booklet for their uncertainties and contradictions. In doing so, he touches on their teaching about the vicissitudes of the human soul:
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At one moment, I am immortal and rejoice in my immortality; at another, I become mortal and feel sad. When I am mingled with determinate bodies, I change into water, air, fire; a little later, I am no longer air or fire, but beast or fish. When my turn comes, I have dolphins as brothers. But if I look at myself, I see my body and am terrified. I no longer know what to call myself. Am I man, wolf, bull, bird, serpent, dragon, or chimera? These students of wisdom have changed me into every kind of beast on earth, in the sea, in the air. I am polyform, wild, tame, dumb, noisy, brute and endowed with reason. I swim, fly, cleave the air, crawl on the ground, run and sit down. Here comes Empedocles, and he makes me a bush!(355) |
669. These philosophers made a twofold mistake.
1. They dealt with human beings as though they had only a sensitive soul, as mere animals;
2. Many of them did not realise that the individuality of feeling ceases with the death of the animal, and that what remains is the feeling possessed by the surviving continua.
However, Heraclitus 'the Obscure' seems to have glimpsed this truth. He posited a common, universal soul with which particular souls were fused. The Stoics who followed him said the same(356) but made another mistake by insisting that this soul was one only; there were not as many souls as there were continua. From here, they passed to another error about the soul of the world; and to yet another, but much more serious error, when they affirmed this soul to be God himself.
Notes
(354) Aristotle noted this (Physic, bk. 4, text. 52, and 57). St. Thomas also: 'The ancients were ignorant of the power of understanding, and did not distinguish between sense and intellect. As a result, they thought that there was nothing in the world except that which could be apprehended by sense and imagination. And because only body falls within the imagination, they thought that nothing else existed except body, as the Philosopher says - This was the error of the Sadducees who maintained that spirit is non-existent' (S.T., I, q. 50, art. 1).
(355) Hermias Philosophi, Gentilium Philosophorum irrisio, n. 2.
(356) Aristotle, De Anima, 2.