Chapter 6

'Fifth class' —
Erroneous systems which posit the nature of the soul in the subject,
but err in determining it

173. Aristotle is amongst these, but a great number of observations have to be made about his system. First, is he totally immune from the error I have attributed to Plato? In other words, does he confuse the soul with the idea, the subject with the object illuminating the soul?
This system has two facets. It is transcendental idealism in so far as it retains the divine attributions of ideas and attributes them to the soul with which they are confused; it is subjectivism in so far as the qualities of the soul are retained, and attributed to the ideas confused with the soul.
The first facet of the system is seen in Plato; its second in Aristotle.

174. Indeed, Aristotle maintains that 'the soul becomes in some way all things' and that intellectus est ea quae intelliguntur [the intellect is those things which are understood]. (193) I have spoken about this in the Rinnovamento.(194)

175. However, it is one thing to confuse the soul with ideas by attributing to it the nature of ideas; it is altogether different to confuse ideas with the soul by attributing to them the nature of the soul. This, I believe, is the case with Aristotle. Although he does not err by positing the nature of the soul in the subject, his error is much more serious than that of Plato. Aristotle degrades ideas by bringing them down to earth from heaven. It is worthwhile examining this opinion of Aristotle with greater attention.

176. Although Aristotle has no hesitation in censuring all his predecessors, and gives the impression of professing welldefined knowledge, his works, in the state in which they have come down to us, furnish very solid grounds for doubt about his certainty.
No balanced judgment about Aristotle's teaching was possible during the domination of Scholasticism when it was a philosophical sacrilege to question whether the 'master of those who know' could be in contradiction with himself. The biased human spirit could offer no impartial criticism of Aristotle's works. This impediment, imposed on clever minds by undue authority, provoked the usual violent reaction from those to whom it finally became intolerable. They reacted as angry people do; the blind rage following upon their outburst was the necessary outcome of the unjust yoke laid upon intelligence by philosophical authority. Their ire gave rise to an age which itself was not able to offer a balanced judgment about Aristotelian philosophy. But now, in our time, when such has ceased and overpowering authority has been rendered impossible, it seems desirable for learned men to undertake finally a truly critical assessment of the teaching which has come down to us from Aristotle in the books which remain. So far, this work is lacking.

177. As far as I am concerned, I have no doubt that the damage done to those books by the extraordinary events to which they were subject and by their ancient lineage are greater than we believe. However, it is not necessary to investigate what Aristotle genuinely thought nor am I in a position to do so; the object of my research is the content of the books which bear his name. At this point, however, I have to confess my shock and declare that these books seem to me bundles of the most contrary teachings, a tissue or rather patchwork, cut up and hastily sewn together, of all preceding philosophical systems. My opinion is confirmed when I see that Aristotle was understood in very different ways by his interpreters who attributed totally different systems to him. Some considered him a materialist, others a sensist, others seriously tried to reconcile him with Plato and even maintained that he differed only in word from his master.(195)

178. Nevertheless, I think I can assert that the Aristotelian system about the nature of the soul pertains to the numerous class of subjectivists. My conclusion is the result of the following considerations.

1. The definition which Aristotle gives of the soul has been referred to elsewhere (EHS, 223-224): 'The first entelechy of a natural body(196) which virtually possesses life'.(197)

A great deal has been said about the meaning of the word entelechy. Nevertheless, its etymology (*) clearly shows that it signifies completion, the act which renders complete, perfection, etc.(198) There is no doubt, therefore, that Aristotle conceived the soul as an act of the body, an act by which the body is perfected. He says, too, that a body has life 'virtually', which means more than 'potentially'. Mere potency could be taken as capacity, receptivity or passive potency. The Greek word, (*), however, signifies more than this. It indicates a productive potency, that is, one suitable for passing to act as, for example, force relative to motion. His understanding of a body which virtually possesses life is that of 'an organic body which has the faculty for nourishing itself (through intus susceptionem), and thus for increasing and diminishing itself.'(199)

According to Aristotle, this perfection of body, which he calls soul, consists in a form or species which he defines in counter-position to matter. 'Matter is something which cannot be called this (determined) something; the form or species is that through which something is said to be something' (determined).(200) The soul, therefore, is that which is found in a body, making that body something determined through which it is given a name. In our case, it is called animal. The soul, therefore, is not an accidental act of the body,(201) but a specific act through which the body receives a new substantive name. Aristotle, therefore, places the soul amongst substances of which he distinguishes three kinds: matter, form and the composite.(202) But the Aristotelian soul should more properly be called 'substantial form'.(203) Indeed, in all substances composed of form and matter, it is impossible to understand how form, as form, can stand on its own, separated from matter.

To do this, it must be something more than mere form; it cannot be substance, which stands of itself. If consideration is given to bodies, from which the words 'matter' and 'form' are taken, and if substance is defined as 'that which exists per se in an ens' (a definition which implies the relationship of substance with accidents that exist through a substance — in other words, substance is the act through which the essence subsists), the condition of substance pertains to matter rather than to form. Here, form is the act, matter is the subject of the form.(endnote) Consequently, it is impossible in the Aristotelian system to conceive the soul separate from the body, just as it is impossible to consider an act without the subject of which it is an act.

179. It is not to be wondered, therefore, that Aristotle is uncertain and in difficulties when he applies these teachings to the intellective soul. The philosophers who preceded him had already shown that the operations of pure intelligence are carried out without the instrumentality of any corporeal organ. Aristotle could neither deny this nor disavow the consequence, that is, that the soul as intelligent is not an act of the body, and could therefore subsist without the body. Having said that the soul cannot be separated from the body, just as an image impressed on wax cannot be separated from the wax, he then speaks of the intellect in a very uncertain fashion: 'Nothing has yet been said about the intellect and the contemplative potency. But it seems to be another kind of soul and this happens because it can be separated from the body as that which is eternal can be separated from that which is corruptible.'(205) Note: Aristotle did not say that the intellect was separable from the body, but separable in the way that the eternal is separable from the corruptible. To understand Aristotle's mind, we have to investigate the meaning he gives to eternal and corruptible. We also have to see how, according to him, these two things are separable.

180. This has to be investigated first of all because Aristotle will seem to contradict himself a few lines later. If the intellect is separable because it is not an act of the body, or of a corporeal organ, then the intellective soul cannot be the form of the body because the form or species of the body is defined as the act and perfection of the body itself. Nevertheless, Aristotle says almost immediately that the soul, even as thinking, is the species or form of the body: 'The soul then is that with which we first live and feel and think. Consequently, while there is no doubt that the soul is a kind of intention or species, it is not like matter and subject in this respect.'(206) He denies that the intellective soul is subject and matter; this he attributes to body. For him, soul is only species, form, intention, act, perfection of body.

There is no doubt that he is speaking here of the intellect because in the third book he expressly defines intellect in this way: 'I call intellect that through which the soul thinks and judges.'(207) Consider, too, that in the second book of the Posterior Analytics, he speaks of the cognitive faculties of perfect animals (erroneously attributing to them also some kind of knowledge) and then, passing to perfect animals, to human beings, begins to speak of the intellect. In other words, the intellective soul is considered as form in perfect animals; it is a degree above that which forms the soul of brutes, although of the same genus. So what does Aristotle mean when he says that something is eternal? What does he mean when he says that the eternal separates from the corruptible.

181. First, we need to note that Aristotle denies the separate ideas and forms of Plato. He recognises only forms which are in particulars, and just as he does not separate form from matter, so he does not separate matter from the form of which it is subject. He attributes acts, and consequently action and generation, to particular forms but, precisely because form is inseparable from matter, denies that they produce forms or composites. Matter is eternal and must therefore possess an eternal form which is cause of all other forms. Moreover, separating matter from forms and thus removing them from their incessant vicissitudes is proper to the mind. Mentally abstracted matter and forms are incorruptible and eternal relative to the mind contemplating them, as Aristotle explains in the books, Posterior Analytics.

In other words, for Aristotle it is matter and form taken in the abstract which are eternal. Although these things do not exist in reality in the soul, but in exterior things, the soul has the potency for receiving them from outside itself. In this way the mind, which comes from outside, is separable because it is innate only in potency. Here we see that the word 'mind' or 'intellect' is confused with species which are acquired from outside. This confusion of subject with object is the very error that we noted. The point can be proved by referring to certain places in Aristotle.

First, there is a very obvious remark in the second book on the Generation of Animals,(208) where he explains generation which takes place through sexual union. He distinguishes the soul in potency from the soul in act. The soul is not said to be generated and to truly exist unless it is in act. But the vegetative, sensitive and intellective soul come into act successively, rather like the way in which the different tubes of a telescope are drawn out from one another. Aristotle says, therefore, that there is a spirit in the seed. In this spirit lies nature, that is, the vital, ethereal principle (proportione respondens elemento stellarum [proportionately corresponding to the element of the stars]) which is still the soul in potency. The vegetative soul is made from this soul in potency at the act of conception. The characteristic of the vegetative soul consists in the power an organic body has of receiving nourishment and, through nourishment, of increasing and then decreasing by internal activity. Thus, after a certain time, another act, the sensitive soul, comes forth from the nourished body. Finally the intellective soul arises from the mature, sensitive soul.

As Aristotle says:

The masculine seed(210) contains the soul in potency but the conceived being, which is posited as soon as the female is fecundated, already contains the soul in act. This, however, is only the vegetative soul. He says:

Then, he adds:

Aristotle makes the intellective soul emerge just as he makes the sensitive soul emerge, and before that the vegetative soul; they all come from the same seed-like body in which vital heat is enclosed.(211)

He says:

The human species, and the species of horse, and of every other animal is treated in the same way. This shows clearly enough that Aristotle was ignorant of the other element enclosed in the intelligence. We see why for him the body, a potency possessing life, that is, having vital heat (the seed is an example of this) and in vital heat the nature or vital principle (the masculine seed), passes to the act of nutrition as soon as it is organised. It then immediately develops the animal soul which is followed successively by the other two acts of feeling and understanding.

He says:

Now, after having said that the three souls arise as three successive acts of a developing body which possesses a vital principle, he goes on to confirm his teaching by proving that none of the three souls can come from outside the body.

He says:

But having said all this and made the three souls inseparable, and having made the intellective soul emerge from the body as the other souls do, he adds:

At this point, several writers interpreted this mind, which Aristotle makes arrive from without, as the intellective soul. This, however, cannot be Aristotle's thought because he has already made all three of his souls, or the parts and functions of the soul, come from the body itself which possesses them in potency. The life of this body is actuated in successive steps, beginning from vegetative life, then passing to sensitive life and finally to intellective life. Indeed, he adds immediately in confirmation of what he had said:

We have to investigate the nature of this mind which comes from without, despite the fact that the intellective soul itself is an act and a perfection of the body.

182. The mind can only be the special faculty or quality which the intellective soul draws from without, that is, from its communication with the exterior world.
But it is precisely from the exterior world that Aristotle requires us to draw ideas and universals. We have to see, therefore, how he wants to explain their production in us. He does this, as I said, towards the end of the second book of Posterior Analytics, where we have to seek an explanation for Aristotle's opinion.

He sets out to explain how we possess immediate knowledge of principles. First, he denies that this knowledge can be innate in us. If it were, we would be conscious of it(213) — the normal reason given by sensists. I have already shown how unsubstantial this is.(214) He then says that SOME POTENCY is necessary if principles are to be acquired. However, admitting a potency for acquiring the principles of reason still does not explain anything about the way in which they are acquired. A much more profound question is left undecided: 'Can there be some potency for acquiring the principles of reason, some potency which itself does not possess any principle, or any idea, which reason can use and by which it can be directed in its own operation?'

As I have shown, this is totally impossible.(215) Aristotle continues by asserting that all animals possess this potency because all possess sense. Thus he furnishes sense with the function of forming the principles of reasoning. But what is the difference between feeling and understanding which Aristotle recognises? Although he censures the first philosophers for overlooking this difference when they confused sense with intelligence, Aristotle finally posits a difference (and here he acts in exactly the same way as our modern subjectivists, who are sensists despite their reluctance to be so) which still does not exceed the sphere of sensitivity. In fact, he locates understanding in the permanence proper to what is felt.

This clearly explains how, according to Aristotle, reason or mind comes to certain animals, such as human beings, from without. We are dealing with equal or similar feeling experiences which come from without, many of which leave the same permanent impression. This impression, remaining in the soul as a result of many such experiences, is for Aristotle the origin of mind or reason which has unity as its characteristic, that is, the power to contemplate many things in one alone. But it is one thing for many feeling experiences to leave an equal impression in the soul (this happens even in brute animals in which the experiences are similar); it is another thing for the soul to make use of that single impression remaining in the internal sense as a kind of type by which to recognise all the feeling experiences which correspond to it and moreover ALL POSSIBLE FEELING EXPERIENCES; this is possible only to the human being.

Only the human being can think WHAT IS POSSIBLE; only WHAT IS POSSIBLE constitutes the UNIVERSAL, the sole difficulty requiring explanation in this question. This difficulty, however, is passed over very easily by Aristotle who shows himself ignorant of the fact that the nature of the universal is wholly present in the concept of what is possible, that is, in purely ideal being.
He then goes on to declare how the feeling experience remains in the spirit where it leaves a constant element.

He says:

183. I have already said in the Ideology that this place in Aristotle's works is the closest to the true theory of the origin of ideas because he speaks here of a universal quiescent in the soul, and says: 'The One, as ens, is the principle of knowledge.' But, all things considered, I have to confess that it remains at least doubtful whether Aristotle abandons sensism with this remark. First, quiescent universal is translated by Abram de Balmes and Giovanni Francesco Burana as a universal constituted and established in the soul by many memories or preceding reminiscences. In other words, it is not the universal in the soul that gives unity to many memories, but the many memories that furnish the soul with unity, and through unity with the universal.
This is also the way in which the Arab commentator understood these words.

It is clear, however, that although sense can leave images in the phantasm after sensations, and associated images and images united with new sensations can produce an instinct for acting in a way which simulates rational activity through instinctive expectation of similar cases (as I have explained when offering reasons for order in brute activity similar to that which arises in human activity),(218) it will never explain the universal concept with which the mind intuits the object in its possibility. The phantasm does not separate itself from the reality of past and present things; it does not produce anything more than an inclination and expectation of similar things (without the idea of likeness).

184. Consequently, more acute commentators, such as Thomas Aquinas, held that the universal quiescent in the soul is something new, introduced here almost furtively by Aristotle; it is not the unity springing from the effect of phantasms left in the soul by various memories or images. These commentators maintained that Aristotle's true understanding of the quiescent universal implied a principle truly existing in the soul through which the experience or effect of the memories — an effect which remained in the soul — was extended into the future and, properly speaking, to possible things. This came about when it rendered itself universal in act. Indeed, if we consider that Aristotle always posits in potency in the soul that which afterwards will be there in act, it is not at all improbable that he understands the quiescent universal as the universal in potency.

But let us look at Aquinas' own words.

According to this interpretation:

Notes

(193) De Anima, bk. 1. Coelius Rhodiginus thinks that the passible intellect of the Peripatetics corresponds to the Platonists' reason: 'We know indirectly that what the Platonists call reason in the soul is called possible intellect by the Peripatetics, and what the Platonists call mind, is called acting intellect by the Peripatetics' (Lect. Antiq., bk. 3, c. 1). In Rinnovamento (bk. 3, c. 44, p. 472), I said that Plato's reason corresponds to Aristotle's 'acting intellect'. But we must note another place of Rhodiginus: 'According to Theophrastes, who bases himself on Iamblichus and Plutarch, some thinkers believe that there is a double possible intellect in us. The first is ALWAYS IN ACT and, as long as it understands itself, knows all other things within its own ambit (here we see Aristotelian subjectivism). The second is reason passing from potency to act' (ibid., bk. 3, c. 1). But the acting intellect is always in act according to Aristotle, and draws the possible intellect into act. The acting intellect is that which does everything (in the order of cognition); the passive intellect that which becomes or is made everything.

(194) Rinnovamento, bk. 3, c. 27.

(195) The form proper to philosophy was established by the Academicians and Peripatetics. However, although they agreed about things, they differed about names' (Cicero, Acad., 1).

(196) What does 'natural body' mean? Aristotle says that natural bodies are the principles of other bodies (De Anima, bk. 2). Averroes explains them as 'the principles of artificial bodies'.

(197) De Anima, bk. 2, c. 1.

(198) Motion is thus the entelechy of what is mobile as mobile.

(199) De Anima, bk. 2, c. 1.

(200) De Anima, bk. 2, c. 2.

(201) In Book 1 of De Anima Aristotle excludes the opinion that the soul is an accident.

(202) De Anima, bk. 2, c. 1.

(203) EHS, 52.

(204) See Endnote

(205) De Anima, bk. 2, c. 2. Later, he classes the faculty of opinion, which differs from that of intellect, among faculties inseparable from the body.

(206) De Anima, bk. 2, c. 2.

(207) De Anima, bk. 3, c. 1.

(208) Chapter 3.

(209) De Gener. Anim., bk. 2, c. 3. This very old opinion that seminal bodies are formed from an ethereal element of which the heavenly bodies are composed is demonstrated only once in Aristotle by the fecundity imparted to the earth by the sun's rays. According to him, no other heat would do this: 'Fire does not generate animals; nor does it seem that anything is constituted by what is dense or moist or dry. Only the heat of the sun and of animals, both in their seed and in anything excreted (although different in nature), contains the VITAL PRINCIPLE' (De Gener. Anim., bk. 2, c. 3). We see here how Aristotle, despite what he says, has retained a good deal from previous philosophers: he posits the principle of life in a kind of heat, not the heat of fire, however, but of the sun and animal excrement. Hence Aristotle's soul in potency, which in its development becomes successively vegetable, sensitive, intellective.

(210) Ibid.

(211) A little earlier in the same chapter, he had defined the animal as 'that which exists through the sensitive part of the soul'. In other words, he considers sense only as a part of the soul, not as a soul itself, that is, he considers it as a specific act of the body, not the subject of the act.

(212) He means that the body, through every specific act which it attains, becomes specifically different from what it was previously.

(213) This is a consequence of Aristotle's definition of intelligence in the 12th book, chapter 9, of Metaphysics: 'Intelligence is intelligence of intelligence' which, as I have pointed out (EHS, 79), implies a clear contradiction.

(214) Rinnovamento, bk. 1, c. 3.

(215) NE, vol. 1, 234-235, 278-299.

(216) Bk. 2, last chapter.

(217) F. Burana translates this as 'observation'. Averroes comments: 'It is called memory when the sensible thing remains in the soul, after the removal of the sensible object.' But this is simply the enduring phantasm; we are still in the sphere of sense.

(218) AMS, 416-494.

(219) NE, vol. 1, 180-187.