by Aristotle
If the circular movement is eternal, there must be something which thought is always thinking—what can this be? For all practical processes of thinking have limits—they all go on for the sake of something else, and all theoretical processes come to a close in the same way as accounts do. For every account is a definition or a [25] demonstration: demonstration has both a starting-point and may be said to end in a conclusion or inferred result (even if the process never reaches completion, at any rate it never returns upon itself again to its starting-point, it goes on assuming a fresh middle term or extreme, and moves straight forward, but circular movement returns to its starting-point); and definitions are all limited. [30]
Further, if the same revolution is repeated, mind must repeatedly think of the same object.
Further, thinking has more resemblance to a coming to rest or arrest than to a movement; the same may be said of inferring.
It might also be urged that what is difficult and enforced is incompatible with blessedness; if the movement of the soul is not6 of its essence, movement of the soul [407b1] must be contrary to its nature. It must also be painful for the soul to be inextricably bound up with the body; furthermore, if, as is frequently said and widely accepted, [5] it is better for thought not to be embodied, the union must be for it undesirable.
Further, the cause of the revolution of the heavens is left obscure. It is not the essence of soul which is the cause of this circular movement—that movement is only incidental to soul—nor is the body its cause. Again, it is not even asserted that it is better that soul should be so moved; and yet the reason for which God caused the [10] soul to move in a circle can only have been that movement was better for it than rest, and movement of this kind better than any other. But since this sort of consideration is more appropriate to another field of speculation, let us dismiss it for the present.
The view we have just been examining, in company with most theories about the soul, involves the following absurdity: they all join the soul to a body, or place it [15] in a body, without adding any specification of the reason of their union, or of the bodily conditions required for it. Yet such explanation can scarcely be omitted; for some community of nature is presupposed by the fact that the one acts and the other is acted upon, the one moves and the other is moved; but it is not the case that any two things are related to one another in these ways. All, however, that these thinkers do is to describe the specific characteristics of the soul; they do not try to determine [20] anything about the body which is to contain it, as if it were possible, as in the Pythagorean myths, that any soul could be clothed in any body—an absurd view, for each body seems to have a form and shape of its own. It is as absurd as to say [25] that the art of carpentry could embody itself in flutes; each art must use its tools, each soul its body.
4 · There is yet another opinion about soul, which has commended itself to many as no less probable than any of those we have hitherto mentioned, and has rendered public account of itself in the court of popular discussion. Its supporters [30] say that the soul is a kind of harmony; for harmony is a blend or composition of contraries, and the body is compounded out of contraries. Harmony, however, is a certain proportion or composition of the constituents blended, and soul can be neither the one nor the other of these. Further, the power of originating movement cannot belong to a harmony, while all concur in regarding this pretty well as a [408a1] principal attribute of soul. It is more appropriate to call health (or generally one of the good states of the body) a harmony than to predicate it of the soul. The absurdity becomes most apparent when we try to attribute the active and passive [5] affections of the soul to a harmony—it is difficult to harmonize them. Further, in using the word ‘harmony’ we have one or other of two cases in mind: the most proper sense is in relation to magnitudes which have motion and position, where harmony means their being compounded and harmonized in such a manner as to prevent the introduction of anything homogeneous; and the derived sense is that in which it means the ratio between the constituents so blended; in neither of these senses is it plausible to predicate it of soul. That soul is a harmony in the sense of the [10] composition of the parts of the body is a view easily refutable; for there are many and various compoundings of the parts; of what is thought or the sensitive or the appetitive faculty the composition? And what is the composition which constitutes each of them? It is equally absurd to identify the soul with the ratio of the mixture; [15] for the mixture of the elements which makes flesh has a different ratio from that which makes bone. The consequence of this view will therefore be that distributed throughout the whole body there will be many souls, since every one of the bodily parts is a mixture of the elements, and the ratio of mixture is in each case a harmony, i.e. a soul.
From Empedocles at any rate we might demand an answer to the following question—for he says that each of the parts of the body is what it is in virtue of a [20] ratio between the elements: is the soul identical with this ratio, or is it not rather something over and above this which is formed in the parts? Is love the cause of any and every mixture, or only of those that are in the right ratio? Is love this ratio itself, or is love something over and above this? Such are the problems raised by this [25] account. But, on the other hand, if the soul is different from the mixture, why does it disappear at one and the same moment with that relation between the elements which constitutes flesh or the other parts of the animal body? Further, if the soul is not identical with the ratio of mixture, and it is consequently not the case that each of the parts has a soul, what is that which perishes when the soul quits the body?
[30] That the soul cannot either be a harmony, or be moved in a circle, is clear from what we have said. Yet that it can be moved incidentally is, as we said above, possible, and even that it can move itself, i.e. in the sense that the vehicle in which it is can be moved, and moved by it; in no other sense can the soul be moved in space.
More legitimate doubts might remain as to its movement in view of the following facts. We speak of the soul as being pained or pleased, being bold or [408b1] fearful, being angry, perceiving, thinking. All these are regarded as modes of movement, and hence it might be inferred that the soul is moved. This, however, does not necessarily follow. We may admit to the full that being pained or pleased, [5] or thinking, are movements (each of them a being moved), and that the movement is originated by the soul. For example we may regard anger or fear as such and such movements of the heart, and thinking as such and such another movement of that organ, or of some other; these modifications may arise either from changes of place [10] in certain parts or from qualitative alterations (the special nature of the parts and the special modes of their changes being for our present purpose irrelevant). Yet7 to say that it is the soul which is angry is as if we were to say that it is the soul that weaves or builds houses. It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks, and rather to say that it is the man who does this with his soul. What we mean is not that the movement is in the soul, but that sometimes it [15] terminates in the soul and sometimes starts from it, sensation e.g. coming from without, and reminiscence starting from the soul and terminating with the movements or states of rest in the sense organs.
But thought seems to be an independent substance implanted within us and to be incapable of being destroyed. If it could be destroyed at all, it would be under the blunting influence of old age. What really happens is, however, exactly parallel to [20] what happens in the case of the sense organs; if the old man could recover the proper kind of eye, he would see just as well as the young man. The incapacity of old age is due to an affection not of the soul but of its vehicle, as occurs in drunkenness or disease. Thus it is that thinking and reflecting decline through the decay of some other inward part and are themselves impassible. Thinking, loving, and hating are [25] affections not of thought, but of that which has thought, so far as it has it. That is why, when this vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they were activities not of thoug
ht, but of the composite which has perished; thought is, no doubt, something more divine and impassible. That the soul cannot be moved is therefore clear from [30] what we have said, and if it cannot be moved at all, manifestly it cannot be moved by itself.
Of all the opinions we have enumerated, by far the most unreasonable is that which declares the soul to be a self-moving number; it involves in the first place all the impossibilities which follow from regarding the soul as moved, and in the second special absurdities which follow from calling it a number. How are we to imagine a [409a1] unit being moved? By what agency? What sort of movement can be attributed to what is without parts or internal differences? If the unit is both originative of movement and itself capable of being moved, it must contain difference.
Further, since they say a moving line generates a surface and a moving point a [5] line, the movements of the units must be lines (for a point is a unit having position, and the number of the soul is, of course, somewhere and has position).
Again, if from a number a number or a unit is subtracted, the remainder is another number; but plants and many animals when divided continue to live, and [10] each segment is thought to retain the same kind of soul.
It must be all the same whether we speak of units or corpuscles; for if the spherical atoms of Democritus became points, nothing being retained but their being a quantum, there must remain in each a moving and a moved part, just as there is in what is continuous; what happens has nothing to do with the size of the [15] atoms, it depends solely upon their being a quantum. That is why there must be something to originate movement in the units. If in the animal what originates movement is the soul, so also must it be in the case of the number, so that not the mover and the moved, but the mover only, will be the soul. But how is it possible for one of the units to fulfil this function? There must be some difference between such [20] a unit and all the other units, and what difference can there be between one unit-point and another except a difference of position? Thus if, on the one hand, these units within the body are different from the points, the units will be in the same place; for each unit will occupy a point. And yet, if there can be two in the same place, why cannot there be an infinite number? For if things can occupy an indivisible place, they must themselves be indivisible. If, on the other hand, the [25] points of the body are the number which is the soul, or if the number of the points in the body is the soul, why have not all bodies souls? For all bodies contain an infinity of points.
Further, how is it possible for these points to be isolated or separated from their [30] bodies, seeing that lines cannot be resolved into points?
5 · The result is, as we have said, that this view, while on the one side identical with that of those who maintain that soul is a subtle kind of body, is on the [409b1] other entangled in the absurdity peculiar to Democritus’ way of describing the manner in which movement is originated by soul. For if the soul is present throughout the whole percipient body, there must, if the soul be a kind of body, be two bodies in the same place; and for those who call it a number, there must be [5] many points at one point, or every body must have a soul, unless the soul be a different sort of number—other, that is, than the points existing in a body. Another consequence that follows is that the animal must be moved by its number precisely in the way that Democritus explained its being moved. For what difference does it make whether we speak of small spheres or of large units, or, quite simply, of units [10] in movement? One way or another, the movements of the animal must be due to their movements. Hence those who combine movement and number in the same subject lay themselves open to these and many other similar absurdities. It is impossible not only that these characters should give the definition of soul—it is impossible that they should even be incidental to it. The point is clear if the attempt [15] be made to start from this account and explain from it the affections and actions of the soul, e.g. reasoning, sensation, pleasure, pain, &c. For, to repeat what we have said earlier, it is not easy even to make a guess on that basis.
Such are the three ways in which soul has traditionally been defined: one group of thinkers declared it to be that which is most originative of movement because it [20] moves itself, another group to be the subtlest and most incorporeal of all kinds of body. We have now sufficiently set forth the difficulties and inconsistencies to which these theories are exposed. It remains now to examine the doctrine that soul is composed of the elements.
The reason assigned for this doctrine is that thus the soul may perceive and [25] come to know everything that is; but the theory necessarily involves itself in many impossibilities. Its upholders assume that like is known by like, as though they were assuming that the soul is identical with the objects. But the elements are not the only things; there are many others, or, more exactly, an infinite number of others, formed out of the elements. Let us admit that the soul knows and perceives the [30] elements out of which each of these composites is made up; but by what means will it know or perceive the composite whole, e.g. what god, man, flesh, bone (or any other compound) is? For each is, not merely the elements of which it is composed, [410a1] but those elements combined in a determinate mode or ratio, as Empedocles himself says of bone,
The kindly Earth in its broad-bosomed moulds
Won of clear Water two parts out of eight [5]
And four of Fire; and so white bones were formed.8
Nothing, therefore, will be gained by the presence of the elements in the soul, unless there be also present there the ratios and the composition. Each element will indeed know its like, but there will be no knowledge of bone or man, unless they too are present in it. The impossibility of this needs no pointing out; for who would suggest [10] that a stone or a man is in the soul? The same applies to the good and the not-good, and so on.
Further, things are said to be in many ways: ‘be’ signifies of a ‘this’ or substance, or a quantum, or a quale, or any other of the kinds of predicates we have distinguished. Does the soul consist of all of these or not? It does not appear that all [15] have common elements. Is the soul formed out of those elements alone which enter into substances? If so, how will it be able to know each of the other kinds of thing? Will it be said that each kind of thing has elements or principles of its own, and that the soul is formed out of these? In that case, the soul must be a quantum and a quale [20] and a substance. But all that can be made out of the elements of a quantum is a quantum, not a substance. These (and others like them) are the consequences of the view that the soul is composed of all the elements.
It is absurd, also, to say both that like is not capable of being affected by like, and that like is perceived and known by like; for perceiving, and also both thinking [25] and knowing, are, on their own assumption, ways of being affected or moved.
That there are many puzzles and difficulties raised by saying, as Empedocles does, that each set of things is known by means of its corporeal elements and by reference to something is shown by what we have just said which is like them; for all the parts of the animal body which consist wholly of earth such as bones, sinews, [410b1] and hair seem to be wholly insensitive and consequently not perceptive even of objects like themselves, as they ought to have been.
Further, each of the principles will have far more ignorance than knowledge; for though each of them will know one thing, there will be many of which it will be [5] ignorant—viz. all the others. Empedocles at any rate must conclude that his god is the least intelligent of all beings; for of him alone is it true that there is one element, Strife, which he does not know, while there is nothing which mortal beings do not know; for there is nothing which does not enter into their composition.
In general, why has not everything a soul, since everything either is an element, [10] or is formed out of one or several or all of the elements? Each must certainly know one or several or all.
The problem might also be raised, What is that which unifies the elements? The elements correspond, it would appear, to the matter; what uni
tes them, whatever it is, is the supremely important factor. But it is impossible that there should be something superior to, and dominant over, the soul (and a fortiori over thought); it is reasonable to hold that thought is by nature most primordial and [15] dominant, while their statement is that it is the elements which are first of all that is.
All, both those who assert that the soul, because of its knowledge and perception of what is, is compounded out of the elements, and those who assert that it is of all things the most originative of movement, fail to take into consideration all kinds of soul. In fact not all beings that perceive can originate movement; there [20] appear to be certain animals which are stationary, and yet local movement is the only one, so it seems, which the soul originates in animals. And the same objection holds against all those who construct thought and the perceptive faculty out of the elements; for it appears that plants live, and yet are not endowed with locomotion or9 perception, while a large number of animals are without discourse of reason. [25] Even if these points were waived and thought admitted to be a part of the soul (and so too the perceptive faculty), still, even so, there would be kinds and parts of soul of which they had failed to give any account.