Conclusion

205. These, Giuseppe, are the principal opinions of the ancients about the nature of the soul. I have tried to explain them either in their own words, or through the principal writings in which the opinions have come down to us. You will have to judge if I have succeeded. But I did not want to present them to you just as they are, without comment. I have tried to provide them with some foundation and, unlike other authors, have attempted to express their content in my own words. I cannot see any point in destroying without building, nor anything honourable in correcting without contributing something of one's own.

In fact, having written and published four books about the nature of the soul, I hope I have acquired some right to develop on your behalf this work in which the collected opinions of others are compared and interlocked with my own.

What a price has been paid for these opinions by great and noble minds! Long vigils, much sweat and endless meditation! Even so, no agreement about them has been reached despite the common search lasting so many centuries. Truth unites us, it would seem, but knowledge divides.

Modern authors, who fell head over heels into the same opinions, are also divided into various groups, although I doubt whether any of them has produced a new opinion, or at least one better than those I have mentioned. Indeed, for more than a century now, our fathers have sacrificed their spirit in investigating the nature of things and declaring it impenetrable on the one hand, while on the other deploring the rash crudeness of the ancients who devoted their studies to it. Our own more cultivated age, on the contrary, has delicately refrained from searching out the nature of the soul, and remained content with a transient description of its sensible operations. But while the generous labours of ancient philosophy did not always hit the mark, they at least remain as a lasting monument of the supreme ardour with which the first sages tried to define the nature, characteristics and condition of this spirit which enlivens and ennobles us, and finally raises us up to the throne of God.

All of this was ignored by the last century, full as it was of philosophers bowing before the voice of John Locke and other masters and leaders who persuaded themselves that philosophy should be made easy and its precious, sublime, and noble burdens rejected. Like the crew of a ship in peril, they threw overboard, before the winds of sense and passion, the cargo accumulated over the centuries. In our own days, some authors have set out to salvage something of these riches. In this book, as in others, I willingly become their companion in this noble labour. But although the instruments and furnishings which they drag ashore and expose to people's admiration are not all pure gold (as the assaying to which little by little I have subjected them shows only too well), do remember, Giuseppe, that philosophical travail is not enriched solely by the discovery of truth, but by all the mental study and work required to uncover truth. The great questions which have been entabled, the thought needed to solve them, and mistakes themselves, are all useful for developing and enriching philosophical exchange.

But why, you ask, has the human mind strayed so far from the truth that a description of its thoughts seems rather a description of its errors? You will have no difficulty in understanding this fact, constant throughout the entire annals of philosophy, if you consider that although the human mind by its direct acts reaches the truth (which, thus received, is securely enshrined in the depth of the soul), reflection, which then wishes to read this truth laid out before it, is often unsighted. Under the unfortunate direction of imagination and its phantasies, reflection reads one word for another. Reflection, instead of leading and governing the imagination, follows animal laws; reflection, it would seem, is often like a blind, old master guided by the hand of a capricious, untrustworthy servant. In this way, reflection, on which philosophy depends, wants to gaze at the soul, to know its nature and to investigate its nature and condition. It even thinks it sees the soul while in fact it is looking sometimes at matter, sometimes at corporeal feeling, sometimes at the idea, and sometimes at God. These, it tells itself, are the soul. This gave rise to the first four classes of entirely erroneous systems about the nature of the soul. These systems, which I have explained for you, are proper to materialists, sensists, false objectivists and theosophists.

The fifth system is Aristotle's. As I showed, it does in part avoid the errors of Aristotle's predecessors. Aristotle saw that the soul could not be any of the four things which are terms of its activity. But in attempting to explain the intellect, he fell into a system of subjectivism contrary to the other four. In particular, Aristotle's system was totally contrary to that of the false objectivists who wished to exalt the soul by granting it the divine qualities proper to ideas. Aristotle dragged ideas down from their sublime condition and reduced them to the level of the soul and subjective things. He may not have done this expressly, but it follows nevertheless from his system which without hesitation places what is one, that is, what is common, in real, subjective things. What is objective or ideal is, for Aristotle, nothing more than an appurtenance of what is subjective or real. Every real thing, if we wish to consider it directly, is reduced to the subject. But examine what I have said for yourself, Giuseppe, by comparing the nature of the soul with others' opinions about it; make up your own mind whether my opinion is preferable to that of others, and whether my meditations have brought any benefit to philosophy, which never progresses without advantage to wisdom and religion.