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| The Soul Variously Divided by the Philosophers; This Division is Not a Material Dissection.
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Chapter
XIV.—The Soul Variously Divided by the Philosophers; This
Division is Not a Material Dissection.
Being thus single, simple, and entire in itself,
it is as incapable of being composed and put together from external
constituents, as it is of being divided in and of itself, inasmuch as
it is indissoluble. For if it had been possible to construct it and to
destroy it, it would no longer be immortal. Since, however, it is not
mortal, it is also incapable of dissolution and division. Now, to be
divided means to be dissolved, and to be dissolved means to die. Yet
(philosophers) have divided the soul into parts: Plato, for instance,
into two; Zeno into three; Panætius, into five or six; Soranus,
into seven; Chrysippus, into as many as eight; and Apollophanes, into
as many as nine; whilst certain of the Stoics have found as many as
twelve parts in the soul. Posidonius makes even two more than these: he
starts with two leading faculties of the soul,—the
directing faculty, which they designate ἡγεμονικόν;
and the rational faculty, which they call λογικόν,—and
ultimately subdivided these into seventeen1581
| 1581 This is
Oehler’s text; another reading has twelve, which one would
suppose to be the right one. |
parts. Thus variously is the soul dissected by the different schools.
Such divisions, however, ought not to be regarded so much as parts of
the soul, as powers, or faculties, or operations thereof, even as
Aristotle himself has regarded some of them as being. For they are not
portions or organic parts of the soul’s substance, but functions
of the soul—such as those of motion, of action, of thought, and
whatsoever others they divide in this manner; such, likewise, as the
five senses themselves, so well known to all—seeing, hearing,
tasting, touching, smelling. Now, although they have allotted to the
whole of these respectively certain parts of the body as their special
domiciles, it does not from that circumstance follow that a like
distribution will be suitable to the sections of the soul; for even the
body itself would not admit of such a partition as they would have the
soul undergo. But of the whole number of the limbs one body is made up,
so that the arrangement is rather a concretion than a division. Look at
that very wonderful piece of organic mechanism by Archimedes,—I
mean his hydraulic organ, with its many limbs, parts, bands, passages
for the notes, outlets for their sounds, combinations for their
harmony, and the array of its pipes; but yet the whole of these details
constitute only one instrument. In like manner the wind, which breathes
throughout this organ at the impulse of the hydraulic engine, is not
divided into separate portions from the fact of its dispersion through
the instrument to make it play: it is whole and entire in its
substance, although divided in its operation. This example is not
remote from (the illustration) of Strato, and Ænesidemus, and
Heraclitus: for these philosophers maintain the unity of the soul, as
diffused over the entire body, and yet in every part the same.1582
Precisely like the wind blown in the pipes
throughout the organ, the soul displays its energies in various ways by
means of the senses, being not indeed divided, but rather distributed
in natural order. Now, under what designations these energies are to be
known, and by what divisions of themselves they are to be classified,
and to what special offices and functions in the body they are to be
severally confined, the physicians and the philosophers must consider
and decide: for ourselves, a few remarks only will be
proper.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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