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| The Arguments of the Platonists for the Soul's Incorporeality, Opposed, Perhaps Frivolously. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
VI.—The Arguments of the Platonists for the Soul’s
Incorporeality, Opposed, Perhaps Frivolously.
These conclusions the Platonists disturb more by
subtilty than by truth. Every body, they say, has necessarily either an
animate nature1528 or an inanimate
one.1529 If it has the inanimate nature, it receives
motion externally to itself; if the animate one, internally. Now the
soul receives motion neither externally nor internally: not externally,
since it has not the inanimate nature; nor internally, because it is
itself rather the giver of motion to the body. It evidently, then, is
not a bodily substance, inasmuch as it receives motion neither way,
according to the nature and law of corporeal substances. Now, what
first surprises us here, is the unsuitableness of a definition which
appeals to objects which have no affinity with the soul. For it is
impossible for the soul to be called either an animate body or an
inanimate one, inasmuch as it is the soul itself which makes the body
either animate, if it be present to it, or else inanimate, if it be
absent from it. That, therefore, which produces a result, cannot
itself be the result, so as to be entitled to the designation of an
animate thing or an inanimate one. The soul is so called in respect of
its own substance. If, then, that which is the soul admits not of being
called an animate body or an inanimate one, how can it challenge
comparison with the nature and law of animate and inanimate bodies?
Furthermore, since it is characteristic of a body to be moved
externally by something else, and as we have already shown that the
soul receives motion from some other thing when it is swayed (from the
outside, of course, by something else) by prophetic influence or by
madness, therefore I must be right in regarding that as bodily
substance which, according to the examples we have quoted, is moved by
some other object from without. Now, if to receive motion from some
other thing is characteristic of a body, how much more is it so to
impart motion to something else! But the soul moves the body, all
whose efforts are apparent externally, and from without. It is the soul
which gives motion to the feet for walking, and to the hands for
touching, and to the eyes for sight, and to the tongue for
speech—a sort of internal image which moves and animates the
surface. Whence could accrue such power to the soul, if it were
incorporeal? How could an unsubstantial thing propel solid objects? But
in what way do the senses in man seem to be divisible into the
corporeal and the intellectual classes? They tell us that the qualities
of things corporeal, such as earth and fire, are indicated by the
bodily senses—of touch and sight; whilst (the qualities) of
incorporeal things—for instance, benevolence and
malignity—are discovered by the intellectual faculties.
And from this (they deduce what is to them) the manifest conclusion,
that the soul is incorporeal, its properties being comprehended by the
perception not of bodily organs, but of intellectual faculties.
Well, (I shall be much surprised) if I do not at once cut away the very
ground on which their argument stands. For I show them how
incorporeal things are commonly submitted to the bodily
senses—sound, for instance, to the organ of hearing; colour, to
the organ of sight; smell, to the olfactory organ. And, just as
in these instances, the soul likewise has its contact with1530 the body; not to say that the incorporeal
objects are reported to us through the bodily organs, for the express
reason that they come into contact with the said organs. Inasmuch,
then, as it is evident that even incorporeal objects are embraced and
comprehended by corporeal ones, why should not the soul, which is
corporeal, be equally comprehended and understood by incorporeal
faculties? It is thus certain that their argument fails. Among their
more conspicuous arguments will be found this, that in their judgment
every bodily substance is nourished by bodily substances; whereas the
soul, as being an incorporeal essence, is nourished by incorporeal
aliments—for instance, by the studies of wisdom. But even this
ground has no stability in it, since Soranus, who is a most
accomplished authority in medical science, affords us as answer, when
he asserts that the soul is even nourished by corporeal aliments; that
in fact it is, when failing and weak, actually refreshed oftentimes by
food. Indeed, when deprived of all food, does not the soul entirely
remove from the body? Soranus, then, after discoursing about the soul
in the amplest manner, filling four volumes with his dissertations, and
after weighing well all the opinions of the philosophers, defends the
corporeality of the soul, although in the process he has robbed it of
its immortality. For to all men it is not given to believe the truth
which Christians are privileged to hold. As, therefore, Soranus has
shown us from facts that the soul is nourished by corporeal aliments,
let the philosopher (adopt a similar mode of proof, and) show that it
is sustained by an incorporeal food. But the fact is, that no one has
even been able to quench this man’s1531
1531 We follow
Oehler’s view of this obscure passage, in preference to
Rigaltius’. |
doubts and difficulties about the condition of the soul with the
honey-water of Plato’s subtle eloquence, nor to surfeit them with
the crumbs from the minute nostrums of Aristotle. But what is to become
of the souls of all those robust barbarians, which have had no nurture
of philosopher’s lore indeed, and yet are strong in untaught
practical wisdom, and which although very starvelings in philosophy,
without your Athenian academies and porches, and even the prison of
Socrates, do yet contrive to live? For it is not the soul’s
actual substance which is benefited by the aliment of learned study,
but only its conduct and discipline; such ailment contributing nothing
to increase its bulk, but only to enhance its grace. It is, moreover, a
happy circumstance that the Stoics affirm that even the arts have
corporeality; since at the rate the soul too must be corporeal, since
it is commonly supposed to be nourished by the arts. Such,
however, is the enormous preoccupation of the philosophic mind, that it
is generally unable to see straight before it. Hence (the story of)
Thales falling into the well.1532
1532 See Tertullian’s
Ad Nationes (our translation), p. 33,
Supra.. | It very commonly,
too, through not understanding even its own opinions, suspects a
failure of its own health. Hence (the story of) Chrysippus and the
hellebore. Some such hallucination, I take it, must have occurred to
him, when he asserted that two bodies could not possibly be contained
in one: he must have kept out of mind and sight the case of those
pregnant women who, day after day, bear not one body, but even two and
three at a time, within the embrace of a single womb. One finds
likewise, in the records of the civil law, the instance of a certain
Greek woman who gave birth to a quint1533 of
children, the mother of all these at one parturition, the manifold
parent of a single brood, the prolific produce from a single womb, who,
guarded by so many bodies—I had almost said, a people—was
herself no less then the sixth person! The whole creation testifies how
that those bodies which are naturally destined to issue from bodies,
are already (included) in that from which they proceed. Now that which
proceeds from some other thing must needs be second to it. Nothing,
however, proceeds out of another thing except by the process of
generation; but then they are two (things).E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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