Chapter 2
'First class' -
Erroneous systems about the nature of the soul
which confused the soul with matter
8. Free movement of the human understanding began in Asia Minor amongst the Ionians. Material nature was the first object which offered itself to speculation. This is what we would expect. The first natural operation of reason is the perception of bodies which, as the object of this perception, must also have been the first object to enter the sphere of philosophical reflection.
9. The impulse and occasion for such a movement came especially from the corruption of traditional truths about God which had degenerated into myths and idolatry. After the loss of the sure guide of primal revelation, human beings felt the need to search for another, and hoped to find it in the free exercise of their own thought. The disciple became his own master.(1) The East, which was close to primal wisdom, and especially the Hebrew nation where wisdom had been maintained without a break and to which the positive oracles of the Divinity had been consigned and deposited, did not feel the same need. Philosophy either did not arise there or arose without clamour or pride. Dialectics, the standard bearer and instrument of philosophy, was not reduced to a rigorous science.
At the western confines of Asia, however, the echo of tradition weakened and became confused; uncertainty and in part the absurdity of their social teaching caused individuals to hesitate. They took stock of their position and set to work once more. The sublime counsel proper to Providence had permitted this to allow the creation of systematic knowledge.
10. However, the first philosopher and his immediate successors were unable to transfer in an instant all their direct and popular knowledge into the order of systematic knowledge and the field of individual reflection. They first transferred and thought about bodies. This was the origin of the teaching about the elements.(2)
11. I. Thales (c. 600 BC) and Pherecy desposited water as the principle of all things. — Hippon of Rhegium put the substance of the soul in the sperm which he considered as alive.(3)
There is no doubt that these philosophers found this principle in the tradition which maintained that all things came forth from liquid because matter was initially created in liquid form. Suidas, Eustathius and others testify that Pherecydes could have been familiar with certain occult books of the Phoenicians. Hernius proved that these books were the books of Moses.(4) Thales, who came from a Phoenician family, that is, from a nation bordering on Hebrew territory, must have been confirmed in his opinion from observing that all generation begins with something liquid and that nutriment itself must be rendered liquid in order to be defused in the living body and share its very life. This is Aristotle's conjecture about the opinion of Thales:
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Perhaps he held this opinion because he saw that what is humid nourishes all things, that it is the source of heat and that on it the animal lives. It is, therefore, the principle of all things. This would account for his opinion. |
He adds that ancient traditions would have supported this:
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There are some who think that even the most ancient people of all, who first THEOLOGISED and are now so remote from our present generation, considered nature in this way. Their songs proclaimed that Oceanus and Thetis are the source of generation. The gods themselves swear their oaths by water, which the poets call Styx. Indeed, what is most ancient is most honourable. And an oath is most honourable of all. It is not clear therefore whether this opinion about nature is old and venerable. But it is said that Thales spoke about the first cause in this way.(5) |
That Thales received his principle of water as the origin of things from sacred tradition seems confirmed when we note that he added spirit (*) to water as principal mover.(6) This spirit is indicated in the most ancient book of all as that which 'was borne over the waters'. This harmonises with the profane tradition which Probus refers as follows:
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He (Virgil and Orpheus) tells us that this entire form of nature, first scattered in a tenuous, huge mass, was brought together into four elements. According to the Stoics Zeno of Citium, Speusippus Soleanus and Cleantes of Assus, who were followers of Empedocles of Agrigentum, all things were afterwards made from these elements.(7) |
12. Hippon, according to Aristotle, is a crude philosopher:
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Some of the cruder philosophers,(8) such as Hippon, said that it (the soul) was water. They seem to have been persuaded of this from their consideration of generation, which depends in its entirety upon humidity. Because blood is not water, he reproved those who said that the soul was blood. Water, according to them, is the first soul.(9) |
13. II. Aristotle says that man, according to the Orphic poems, draws his soul from the universe through respiration;(10) Anaximander, a contemporary of Thales, Anaximenes (c. 557 BC), Anaxagoras(11) (c. 440 BC), Archelaus(12) (c. 460 BC) and Diogenes of Apollonia(13) (c. 440 BC) posited the nature of the soul in air in various ways. In other words, they still considered it a fluid, and agreed more or less with their predecessors. Amongst the Romans, Varro followed this ancient opinion and defined the soul as follows: 'The soul is air conceived in the mouth, warmed in the lungs, heated in the heart and diffused in the body'.(14)
14. This opinion was obviously suggested to philosophers through their observation of respiration. According to Cicero:
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Our people tell us that spirit (animus) is named after soul (anima). You see, we say that the anima acts and speaks, and that we are animated, and suitably animated, and that our opinions come from our animus. But animus itself comes from the word anima.(15) |
Lactantius says the same:
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But those who think it (the soul) to be wind are mistaken. They think we live as though our 'spirit' was drawn from air.(16) |
Aristotle offers another reason for this opinion: the philosophers in question, in order to explain the soul through the quality which made it the most mobile being of all, wanted the substance of the soul to be the most mobile and refined substance.(17) This, however, seems to me to be more systematic an explanation than a true one, as we often find in Aristotle. In other words, it is an explanation invented posterior to the true explanation.
15. According to Pythagoras,
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The soul is an emanation of the central fire.(18) It is composed of hot and cold ether, capable of uniting itself to any body whatsoever, but obliged by fate to pass through a predefined series of bodies. |
Nevertheless, there seems no doubt that Pythagoras, who had a great regard for the intellective soul, distinguished it from the ethereal soul, as I shall show later.
16. Heraclitus of Ephesus first posited fire as the principle of things.(19) Democritus reduced the soul to spherical atoms of fire.(20). Leucippus did the same.(21) Zeno followed the same teaching with his Stoic disciples.(22) Macrobius attributes the same opinion to Hipparchus.(23)
17. This opinion arose from observation of the great effects of heat, especially those of steam, which were known to the ancients. It also sprang from observation of the effects of electricity throughout nature, and in a special way from observation of the kind of heat that develops in the animal through breathing. I mentioned elsewhere the long period during which medical people made heat the vital principle of the animal.(24)
18. Aristotle, who is not altogether trustworthy because he tends to reduce ancient systems to certain determined classes and sometimes interprets them by forcing them into these pre-established classes, claims to explain the opinion positing the nature of the soul in fire as though it depends on the mobility and refinement of the soul. He reduces all the ancient systems about the soul to three kinds: those which define the soul by means of motion; those that define it through means of sense; and those that define it by means of something incorporeal.(25)
The opinion about fire is, according to him, an attempt to explain spontaneous movement:
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Some say that the first and greatest characteristic of the soul is that it moves. Moreover, considering that what does not move cannot move anything else, they thought that the soul must be something that moved. For Democritus, therefore, it is a kind of fire, or heat. He says that amongst infinite shapes and atoms, the round shapes are fire and soul — rather like those tiny shapes which we see floating in the air when rays of sun come through the windows. He says that the elements of the whole of nature are a mixture of these round shapes.(26) |
But elsewhere Aristotle himself maintains that this opinion comes from the way in which such a popular opinion is expressed in language:
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This depends on the way they (these philosophers) use words. Some say the soul is hot, and want it to be called (*) , that is, life; others say the soul is cold and, granted respiration and refrigeration, want it to be called (*), that is, air.(27) |
19. Nevertheless, it is not certain that these ancients posited the soul as entirely material. On the contrary, they tended to spiritualise the elements, especially fire, and spoke of what is animated in place of the pure soul [anima], of which they still had no clear idea. I think it probable that crude materialism has to be attributed to baser, corrupt times such as the age of Strato and later personages.(28)
20. III. According to Aristotle, certain philosophers said that the soul was every element except earth. Only those who posited the soul from all the elements together were of this opinion.(29) The reference, if it has not been interpolated, renders suspect the verse attributed by several ancient authors(30) to Xenophanes: 'All things come from earth; all things dissolve into earth.'(31) However, Macrobius testifies that Xenophanes made the soul 'from earth and water',(32) while his disciple Parmenides made it 'from earth and fire'.(33)
21. Perhaps Macrobius is speaking of the soul in the way such philosophers had spoken about human beings. This conjecture arises from Diogenes Laertius' opinion that Zeno of Elea, a disciple of Parmenides, makes man issue from earth and says that the soul is a mixture of elements, that is, of cold and hot, of dry and humid, but so balanced that none of these elements dominates the others.(34)
22. Reflection has already taken a step forward when the soul is made to consist of all the elements (rather than a single element) held together in order and harmony. In this case, reflection has already accepted that no single material element can explain the activities of the soul,(35) and, by having recourse to harmony, has begun to add unity and something spiritual to the concept of soul. Harmony presupposes a simple ens containing in itself something multiple. According to Plutarch, Dicaearchus was one of the more celebrated philosophers who maintained this: 'Dicaearchus thought the soul was a harmony of the four elements'.(36)
23. Aristoxenus, the musician, also posited the soul as harmony, although I
think he was referring to the harmony of the organs and the senses rather than
that of the elements.
Cicero describes the opinion of this philosopher:
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Aristoxenus, the musician and philosopher, says that the understanding of the body itself comes about through various movements such as we find in song and in playing on the lyre. The whole nature and shape of the body is like the sounds heard in song.(37) |
24. But it was still too difficult to conceive the noble truth that harmony could not be present except in a simple, spiritual principle. As a result, those who posited the nature of the soul in harmony, without understanding what the seat of harmony should be, concluded that the soul was nothing. This is what Cicero says of Dicaearchus:
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Dicaearchus places many interlocutors in the first of the three books with which he expounds the arguments between learned men at Corinth. He describes Pherecrates, an old man of Phthiota, whom he says came from Deucalion, as he talks with two others and asserts that the spirit (animus) is nothing, and that the word itself is totally useless. Calling things 'animal' and 'animating' is a waste of time. Nor is there in human beings or beasts any spirit or soul. All the force by which we do or feel anything is equally diffused in all living bodies, nor is it separable from the body. This force is non-existent; it is nothing except a single, simple body so shaped that it flourishes and feels by the tempering proper to nature.(38) |
In this teaching, we sense in its entirety the stumbling block impeding the
person who errs. A force is posited as equally diffused in all living bodies
from which it is inseparable. This force would correspond on the one hand to
the elementary soul which feels space (I spoke about this in
Psychology [Essence of the Human Soul, 663-664]) and to an
arrangement of such bodies, that is, an organisation (hence organic
soul) which is diffused through the organism. On the other hand, the soul
is also said to be nothing. Perhaps he means that the soul is nothing if
separated from the body. If so, he overlooks the impossibility of subsistence
on the part of the sensitive soul or sentient principle without the felt
element. Moreover, our thinker does not rise even to the nature of the
intellective soul, nor understand how the sentient element (soul) is not the
felt element (body).
Lactantius affirms the same about Aristoxenus:
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What about Aristoxenus, who totally denied the presence of any soul even when it lives in the body? Just as a concordant sound or song, which musicians call harmony, is produced by the strings of lyres, so in bodies a force for feeling exists as a result of the composition of the viscera and the strength of the members. Nothing could be dafter than this.(39) |
It is as though music were hearing and not heard and, in order to be heard, had no need of other ears or souls who might hear it!
25. IV. Finally, it was thought that the soul consisted of some substance composed of elements, but in a determined manner. Here we find 1. people like Critias(40) who made the soul blood. I shall speak of Empedocles later.
26. 2. This is also the place for the system proper to those of whom Cicero says: 'For others, a certain part of the brain is thought to be the principle of the spirit.'(41) This corresponds to the modern, materialistic opinion which confuses the soul with the brain or the nervous system, or even goes so far as to divide the soul according to the parts of the brain.
Notes
(1) The Italian school however made profitable use of tradition because Italy has always been a religious and even, perhaps, a sacred country. Cf. NE, vol. 1, 275-277.
(2) For the ancients, 'element' meant what is unchangeable in things. Ultimately this is substance. However many ancient thinkers interested themselves almost solely in material things and dealt, for a long time, only with material elements, as Aristotle testifies: 'Very many of the first philosophers considered that the principles present in the species of matter were the sole cause of everything. For them, the element and principle of all entia is that by which all entia are, and are first formed, and to which corruption ultimately reduces them. The substance remains, but the entia change in accordance with the passions to which they are subject' (Metaph., bk. 1). Nevertheless, it seems closer to truth that the ancient thinkers did not in fact deny the spiritual elements; they simply paid little attention to them — for example we know that Thales added spirit to water.
(3) Aristotle, De Anima, I; Hermias, Philosophorum Irrisio I.
(4) In a paper published in Memorie dell'Accademia di Berlino, 1747.
(5) Metaph., bk. 1, c. 3. Who are these very ancient authors who write about theology? Sigismund Gerdil says, 'According to Alexander, Aristotle meant Homer and Hesiod. But St. Thomas and the Coimbrians think he meant Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus, who were certainly very ancient and called theologians par excellence because in their poems they had dealt expressly with divine things. We can in fact take it that Aristotle meant both groups. Indeed, his opinion that these theologians had made Oceanus and Thetis the fathers of generation clearly refers to Homer who, in the very fine episode of the fourteenth canto of the Iliad, makes Juno say the very same thing: keann te qen gnesin, ka mhtra Thqn (vv. 201, 361). Plutarch himself, after mentioning Thales' opinion in the same way as Aristotle, concludes that Homer also supposes generation from water, and quotes verse 246: 'Oceanus, who is the origin of all things' (De Placit. Philo., bk. 1, c. 3). Diogenes Laertius, in his preface, tells us that Musaeus was considered the first to make a theogony and a sphere and to say that all things were generated from and returned to one principle (Introduzione allo Studio della religione, pt. 1, bk. 2, c. 1, §2).
(6) J. H. Mller, De aquae principio Thaleris.
(7) Ad Virg. Ecl., v. 6, t. 31.
(8) In Metaph., bk. 1, c. 3., after speaking about Thales, he adds that 'Hippon, granted the simplicity of his intellect, could not be classed with Thales.'
(9) De Anima, bk. 1.
(10) De Anima, bk. 1.
(11) Plutarch, De Placit. Philos., 4, 3. — Stobaeus.
(12) Theodoret, Graecar. Affect., bk. 5: 'Anaximenes, Anaximander, Anaxagoras and Archelaus said that the nature of the soul is air.'
(13) Stobaeus, Eclog. Physic., bk. 1, De animae naturae.
(14) Lactantius, De Opif. Dei, c. 17.
(15) Tusc., 1, 9; Isidore, Orig., bk. 11, c. 1; Nonnius Marcellus, c. 4; Heyne, In Aene., bk. 8, vv. 403.
(16) De Opif. Dei, c. 17.
(17) 'Diogenes and many others thought that the soul was air. According to them, therewas nothing subtler than air. Hence the soul knew and moved itself, because knowledge, as the principle of other things, came from air, as did movement, which was subtler than all other things' (De Anima, bk. 1).
(18) Diog. Laertius, 8: 7.
(19) It seems that this fire which, according to Heraclitus, constituted the soul, was embodied in moisture, that is, was VAPOUR. Aristotle attributes to Heraclitus the opinion that the soul is vapour (De Anima, bk. 1). According to Macrobius, Heraclitus the naturalist maintained that the soul is 'a spark of the essence of the stars' (In Somn. Scip., bk. 1, c. 14); according to Stobaeus, Heraclitus gave the soul the nature of light (Eclog. Phys., bk. 1). Plutarch explains Heraclitus' opinion in the following way: 'Heraclitus said that the soul of the world is an exhalation from the moist bodies present in the world. The soul of animals is generated with and similar to it, and consists of an exterior and interior exhalation' (De Placit., bk. 4, c. 3). However, according to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus despaired of ever being able to find the true nature of the soul (8: 7).
(20) Plutarch explains the opinion of this philosopher as follows: 'Democritus [makes the soul] a compaction of fiery bodies which are understood only by the mind, (*) Being spherical in form and having the power of fire, it is therefore a body' (De Placit., bk. 4, c. 3). Corsini says that Stobaeus' words, (*), should be corrected.
(21) Aristotle, De Anima, bk. 1.
(22) 'According to Zeno the Stoic, the soul is fire' (Cicero, Tusc., bk. 1, n. 10). Plutarch says that in the opinion of the Stoics the soul is a warm spirit, and according to Stobaeus, 'a warm, intellectual soul' (De Placit., bk. 4, c. 2). Hence Hermias attributes to the Stoics the view that the soul is air (Philosoph. Irrisio).
(23) In Somn. Scip., 1, 14.
(24) It is extraordinary to see how such an opinion can be accepted even by an ecclesiastical author, for example, Lactantius (cf. De Instit., bk. 2, cc. 10, 13). Hildegard, a 12th century author, discusses and tries to prove the opinion in her Esposizione del Simbolo di S. Atanasio: 'The soul is fire, and its fire pervades the whole body in which it is; it pervades the veins and their blood, the bones and their marrow, the flesh and its colour; it cannot be extinguished. The fire of the soul burns its energy in rationality by which it is able to speak. If the soul were not fire, it would not heat what is frozen, nor build up the body with veins of blood. Aired in rationality, the soul disperses its heat evenly throughout the body so that the body does not burn up. But when the soul withdraws from the body, the body becomes deficient, just as wood does not burn when it lacks the energy of fire.'
(25) De Anima, bk. 1.
(26) Ibid.
(27) Ibid.
(28) 'There were authors who rejected Strato's hypothesis. According to them, the soul is simply some thinking power of matter or a created, material spirit' (Brucker, H. Ph., pt. 3, pt. 2, bk. 2, c. 3, §6). The following passage from Plutarch can be used as proof that not all the opinions of the ancients were totally material, even if they seem so: 'Democritus makes the soul a mass of fiery bodies INTELLIGIBLE BY THE MIND, spherical in shape and having the power of fire. It is therefore a body' (De Placit. Phil., bk. 4, c. 6). There can be no clearer statement that the soul is a body, but in saying that this corporeal fire which constitutes the substance of the soul is intelligible by the mind, Democritus already separates mind from body. Mind thus remains incorporeal.
(29) De Anima, bk. 1.
(30) Sext. Emp., Adv. Mathem., 10, 313; Stobaeus, Eclog. Phys., bk. 1, p. 294; Plutarch, Homer. vit. Cf. Karsten, Philosoph. Graecor. Veter. reliquiae, Xenophanis rel., 8, who writes: 'The assertion that earth is the matter of all nature must be taken in a general sense, otherwise it is completely foreign to Xenophanes' own preference and opinion.'
(31) '(*).'
(32) Sext. Emp., Adv. Mathem., 9. 361, 10, 313. Eustathius (Ad Iliad., n. 99) attributes the following verse to Xenophanes: 'We are all born of earth and water'. Simplicius (Ad Arist. Phys., 1, p. 258) and John Philiponus (ad eundem, 1) quote another verse, on the authority of Porphyry (although Simplicius attributes it wrongly to Anaximenes):Everything made or bornIs from earth and water.Cf. Karsten's critical observations about these passages, Xenoph. reliquiae, 9 and 10.
(33) The opinion about fire but not about earth is attributed by Theodoret to Parmenides: 'Parmenides, Hippasius and Heracletus called (the soul) fiery and bright' (Graec. Affect., bk. 5). Also Stobaeus: 'Parmenides and Leucippus (say that the soul has) a fiery nature' (Eclog. Phys., bk. 1).
(34) Diogenes, bk. 9, c. 30.
(35) According to Aristotle, those who posited only one element drew the soul from it, but those who posited more, considered the soul as a composite of them all (De Anima, bk. 1).
(36) De Placit. Phil., bk. 4, c. 2. Corsini notes that in Numenius the word 'Dinarcus'is given incorrectly; the same is true of 'Clearcus' in Theodoret (Graec. Affect., bk. 5).
(37) Tusc., bk. 1, c. 10.
(38) Ibid.
(39) Instit., bk. 7, c. 13.
(40) Aristotle, De Anima, bk. 1; Nemesius, De nat., 4, p.38. Theodoret says that according to Critias the soul is 'made of blood and moisture'.
(41) Tusc ., bk. 22, cc. 1, 9.