Chapter 4

The concept of human death

670. We have excluded these errors as a result of understanding animal death. We can now investigate the nature of human death.
Common sense tells us that this consists in the separation of soul from body. This is indeed correct, but what is this separation?
After having seen where the union of the rational soul and the body lies, we can go on to understand their disunion. Once we know the bond that forms human life, we know what loosens that bond; we can explain its cessation.
The bond tying the intellective soul to the body consists, we said, in a natural, immanent, intellective perception of the fundamental feeling and, consequently, of the body. When this primal perception of the fundamental feeling ceases, the human soul is cut off from the body, the body is dead, the human being is dissolved.

671. To further clarify this truth, let us sum up the fact comprising the composition of the human being, and its conditions.

1. A subject exists whose act is provided with two terms, one of which is felt and extended, and the other, intelligible being. This subject is called a) sensitive principle, or animal, in so far as its term is that which is felt and extended, and b) intellective principle in so far as its term is intelligible being.

2. The intellective principle has being as term. Its object, therefore, is every entity comprised in being in general. It even has feeling as object under the relationship of entity. The intellective principle, which to this extent, has feeling as entity for its object, is called principle or rational soul. Feeling, however, contains the sentient animal principle and what it feels, that is, the body, the felt. Thus, the first perception of the fundamental feeling includes the perception(357) of body, that is, the union of the intellective soul with the body and simultaneously with its proximate animating principle.

3. But what is the condition according to which the subject, besides being animal, becomes intelligent? The requirement, as we said, is the acquisition on the part of animal feeling of greater specific perfection, greater unity and harmony, through the most suitable organisation. Determining this unity and harmony is a profound investigation which I do not intend to undertake here. Moreover, I do not think I am capable of it.

Notes

(357) We have already noted that this first perception is first-level perception, that is, simple apprehension without any explicit, actual affirmation (cf. 268-271). Actual affirmation is an operation which follows much later when the rational soul becomes aware that the body is an ens per se, distinct from the sentient principle. At this point, affirmation does not add cognition; it confirms the previous apprehension. Moreover, this confirmation is not something added as objective, but a new disposition taken by the subject relative to what is known. Completing the perception by raising it to its final level simply requires activity on the part of the subject which produces in itself an actual state of persuasion.