CHAPTER XII.

DE ANIMÂ, ETC.

To understand Aristotle’s Psychology, we must look at it in comparison with the views of other ancient Greek philosophers on the same subject, as far as our knowledge will permit. Of these ancient philosophers, none have been preserved to us except Plato, and to a certain extent Epikurus, reckoning the poem of Lucretius as a complement to the epistolary remnants of Epikurus himself. The predecessors of Aristotle (apart from Plato) are known only through small fragments from themselves, and imperfect notices by others; among which notices the best are from Aristotle himself.

In the Timæus of Plato we find Psychology, in a very large and comprehensive sense, identified with Kosmology. The Kosmos, a scheme of rotatory spheres, has both a soul and a body: of the two, the soul is the prior, grander, and predominant, though both of them are constructed or put together by the Divine Architect or Demiurgus. The kosmical soul, rooted at the centre, and stretched from thence through and around the whole, is endued with self-movement, and with the power of initiating movement in the kosmical body; moreover, being cognitive as well as motive, it includes in itself three ingredients mixed together:—(1) The Same — the indivisible and unchangeable essence of Ideas; (2) The Diverse — the Plural — the divisible bodies or elements; (3) A Compound, formed of both these ingredients melted into one. As the kosmical soul is intended to know all the three — Idem, Diversum, and Idem with Diversum in one, so it must comprise in its own nature all the three ingredients, according to the received Axiom — Like knows like — Like is known by Like. The ingredients are blended together according to a scale of harmonic proportion. The element Idem is placed in an even and undivided rotation of the outer or sidereal sphere of the Kosmos; the element Diversum is distributed among the rotations, all oblique, of the seven interior planetary spheres, that is, the five planets, with the Sun and Moon. Impressions of identity and diversity, derived either 447from the ideal and indivisible, or from the sensible and divisible, are thus circulated by the kosmical soul throughout its own entire range, yet without either voice or sound. Reason and Science are propagated by the circle of Idem: Sense and Opinion, by those of Diversum. When these last-mentioned circles are in right movement, the opinions circulated are true and trustworthy.1

It is thus that Plato begins his Psychology with Kosmology: the Kosmos is in his view a divine immortal being or animal, composed of a spherical rotatory body and a rational soul, cognitive as well as motive. Among the tenants of this Kosmos are included, not only gods, who dwell in the peripheral or celestial regions, but also men, birds, quadrupeds, and fishes. These four inhabit the more central or lower regions of air, earth, and water. In describing men and the inferior animals, Plato takes his departure from the divine Kosmos, and proceeds downwards by successive stages of increasing degeneracy and corruption. The cranium of man was constructed as a little Kosmos, including in itself an immortal rational soul, composed of the same materials, though diluted and adulterated, as the kosmical soul; and moving with the like rotations, though disturbed and irregular, suited to a rational soul. This cranium, for wise purposes which Plato indicates, was elevated by the gods upon a tall body, with attached limbs for motion in different directions — forward, backward, upward, downward, to the right and left.2 Within this body were included two inferior and mortal souls: one in the thoracic region near the heart, the other lower down, below the diaphragm, in the abdominal region; but both of them fastened or rooted in the spinal marrow or cord, which formed a continuous line with the brain above. These two souls were both emotional; the higher or thoracic soul being the seat of courage, energy, anger, &c., while to the lower or abdominal soul belonged appetite, desires, love of gain, &c. Both of them were intended as companions and adjuncts, yet in the relation of dependence and obedience, to the rational soul in the cranium above; which, though unavoidably debased and perturbed by such unworthy companionship, was protected partially against the contagion by the difference of location, the neck being built up as an isthmus of separation between the two. The thoracic soul, the seat of courage, was placed nearer to the 448head, in order that it might be the medium for transmitting influence from the cranial soul above, to the abdominal soul below; which last was at once the least worthy and the most difficult to control. The heart, being the initial point of the veins, received the orders and inspirations of the cranial soul, transmitting them onward through its many blood-channels to all the sensitive parts of the body; which were thus rendered obedient, as far as possible, to the authority of man’s rational nature.3 The unity or communication of the three souls was kept up through the continuity of the cerebro-spinal column.

But, though by these arrangements the higher soul in the cranium was enabled to control to a certain extent its inferior allies, it was itself much disturbed and contaminated by their reaction. The violence of passion and appetite, the constant processes of nutrition and sensation pervading the whole body, the multifarious movements of the limbs and trunk, in all varieties of direction, — these causes all contributed to agitate and to confuse the rotations of the cranial soul, perverting the arithmetical proportions and harmony belonging to them. The circles of Same and Diverse were made to convey false information; and the soul, for some time after its first junction with the body, became destitute of intelligence.4 In mature life, indeed, the violence of the disturbing causes abates, and the man may become more and more intelligent, especially if placed under appropriate training and education. But in many cases no such improvement took place, and the rational soul of man was irrecoverably spoiled; so that new and worse breeds were formed, by successive steps of degeneracy. The first stage, and the least amount of degeneracy, was exhibited in the formation of woman; the original type of man not having included diversity of sex. By farther steps of degradation, in different ways, the inferior animals were formed — birds, quadrupeds, and fishes.5 In each of these, the rational soul became weaker and worse; its circular rotations ceased with the disappearance of the spherical cranium, and animal appetites with sensational agitations were left without control. As man, with his two emotional souls and body joined on to the rational soul and cranium, was a debased copy of the perfect rational soul and spherical body of the divine Kosmos, so the other inhabitants of the Kosmos proceeded from still farther debasement and disrationalization of the original type of man.

449Such is the view of Psychology given by Plato in the Timæus; beginning with the divine Kosmos, and passing downwards from thence to the triple soul of man, as well as to the various still lower successors of degenerated man. It is to be remarked that Plato, though he puts soul as prior to body in dignity and power, and as having for its functions to control and move body, yet always conceives soul as attached to body, and never as altogether detached, not even in the divine Kosmos. The soul, in Plato’s view, is self-moving and self-moved: it is both Primum Mobile in itself, and Primum Movens as to the body; it has itself the corporeal properties of being extended and moved, and it has body implicated with it besides.

The theory above described, in so far as it attributes to the soul rational constituent elements (Idem, Diversum), continuous magnitude, and circular rotations, was peculiar to Plato, and is criticized by Aristotle as the peculiarity of his master.6 But several other philosophers agreed with Plato in considering self-motion, together with motive causality and faculties perceptive and cognitive, to be essential characteristics of soul. Alkmæon declared the soul to be in perpetual motion, like all the celestial bodies; hence it was also immortal, as they were.7 Herakleitus described it as the subtlest of elements, and as perpetually fluent; hence it was enabled to know other things, all of which were in flux and change. Diogenes of Apollonia affirmed that the element constituent of soul was air, at once mobile, all-penetrating, and intelligent. Demokritus declared that among the infinite diversity of atoms those of spherical figure were the constituents both of the element fire and of the soul: the spherical atoms were by reason of their figure the most apt and rapid in moving; it was their nature never to be at rest, and they imparted motion to everything else.8 Anaxagoras affirmed soul to be radically and essentially distinct from every thing else, but to be the great primary source of motion, and to be endued with cognitive power, though at the same time not suffering impressions from without.9 Empedokles considered soul to be a compound of the four elements — fire, water, air, earth; with love and hatred as principles of motion, the former producing aggregation of elements, the latter, disgregation: by means of each element the soul became cognizant of the like element in the Kosmos. Some Pythagoreans looked 450upon the soul as an aggregate of particles of extreme subtlety, which pervaded the air and were in perpetual agitation. Other Pythagoreans, however, declared it to be an harmonious or proportional mixture of contrary elements and qualities; hence its universality of cognition, extending to all.10

A peculiar theory was delivered by Xenokrates (who, having been fellow-pupil with Aristotle under Plato, afterwards conducted the Platonic School, during all the time that Aristotle taught at the Lykeium), which Aristotle declares to involve greater difficulty than any of the others. Xenokrates described the soul as “a number (a monad or indivisible unit) moving itself.”11 He retained the self-moving property which Plato had declared to be characteristic of the soul, while he departed from Plato’s doctrine of a soul with continuous extension. He thus fell back upon the Pythagorean idea of number as the fundamental essence. Aristotle impugns, as alike untenable, both the two properties here alleged — number and self-motion. If the monad both moves and is moved (he argues), it cannot be indivisible; if it be moved, it must have position, or must be a point; but the motion of a point is a line, without any of that variety that constitutes life. How can the soul be a monad? or, if it be, what difference can exist between one soul and another, since monads cannot differ from each other except in position? How comes it that some bodies have souls and others not? and how, upon this theory, can we explain the fact that many animated bodies, both plants and animals, will remain alive after being divided, the monadic soul thus exhibiting itself as many and diverse? Besides, the monad set up by Xenokrates is hardly distinguishable from the highly attenuated body or spherical atom recognized by Demokritus as the origin or beginning of bodily motion.12

These and other arguments are employed by Aristotle to refute the theory of Xenokrates. In fact, he rejects all the theories then current. After having dismissed the self-motor doctrine, he proceeds to impugn the views of those who declared the soul to be a compound of all the four elements, in order that they might account for its percipient and cognitive faculties upon the maxim then very generally admitted13 — That like is perceived and known by like. This theory, the principal champion of which was Empedokles, appears to Aristotle inadmissible. You say (he remarks) that like knows like; how 451does this consist with your other doctrine, that like cannot act upon, or suffer from, like, especially as you consider that both in perception and in cognition the percipient and cognizant suffers or is acted upon?14 Various parts of the cognizant subject, such as bone, hair, ligaments, &c., are destitute of perception and cognition; how then can we know anything about bone, hair, and ligaments, since we cannot know them by like?15 Suppose the soul to be compounded of all the four elements; this may explain how it comes to know the four elements, themselves, but not how it comes to know all the combinations of the four; now innumerable combinations of the four are comprised among the cognita. We must assume that the soul contains in itself not merely the four elements, but also the laws or definite proportions wherein they can combine; and this is affirmed by no one.16 Moreover, Ens is an equivocal, or at least a multivocal, term; there are Entia belonging to each of the ten Categories. Now the soul cannot include in itself all the ten, for the different Categories have no elements in common; in whichever Category you rank the soul, it will know (by virtue of likeness) the cognita belonging to that category, but it will not know the cognita belonging to the other nine.17 Besides, even if we grant that the soul includes all the four elements, where is the cementing principle that combines all the four into one? The elements are merely matter; and what holds them together must be the really potent principle of soul; but of this no explanation is given.18

Some philosophers have assumed (continues Aristotle) that soul pervades the whole Kosmos and its elements; and that it is inhaled by animals in respiration along with the air.19 They forget that all plants, and even some animals, live without respiring at all; moreover, upon this theory, air and fire also, as possessing soul, and what is said to be a better soul, ought (if the phrase were permitted) to be regarded as animals. The soul of air or fire must be homogeneous in its parts; the souls of animals are not homogeneous, but involve several distinct parts or functions.20 The soul perceives, cogitates, opines, feels, desires, repudiates; farther, it moves the body locally, and brings about the growth and decay of the body. Here we have a new mystery:21 — Is the whole soul engaged in the performance 452of each of these functions, or has it a separate part exclusively consecrated to each? If so, how many are the parts? Some philosophers (Plato among them) declare the soul to be divided, and that one part cogitates and cognizes, while another part desires. But upon that supposition what is it that holds these different parts together? Certainly not the body (which is Plato’s theory); on the contrary, it is the soul that holds together the body; for, as soon as the soul is gone, the body rots and disappears.22 If there be anything that keeps together the divers parts of the soul as one, that something must be the true and fundamental soul; and we ought not to speak of the soul as having parts, but as essentially one and indivisible, with several distinct faculties. Again, if we are to admit parts of the soul, does each part hold together a special part of the body, as the entire soul holds together the entire body? This seems impossible; for what part of the body can the Noûs or Intellect (e.g.) be imagined to hold together? And, besides, several kinds of plants and of animals may be divided, yet so that each of the separate parts shall still continue to live; hence it is plain that the soul in each separate part is complete and homogeneous.23

Aristotle thus rejects all the theories proposed by antecedent philosophers, but more especially the two following:—That the soul derives its cognitive powers from the fact of being compounded of the four elements; That the soul is self-moved. He pronounces it incorrect to say that the soul is moved at all.24 He farther observes that none of the philosophers have kept in view either the full meaning or all the varieties of soul; and that none of these defective theories suffices for the purpose that every good and sufficient theory ought to serve, viz., not merely to define the essence of the soul, but also to define it in such a manner that the concomitant functions and affections of the soul shall all be deducible from it.25 Lastly, he points out that most of his predecessors had considered that the prominent characteristics of soul were — to be motive and to be percipient:26 while, in his opinion, neither of these two characteristics is universal or fundamental.

Aristotle requires that a good theory of the soul shall explain alike the lowest vegetable soul, and the highest functions of the human or divine soul. And, in commenting on those theorists who declared that the essence of soul consisted in movement, he 453remarks that their theory fails altogether in regard to the Noûs (or cogitative and intellective faculty of the human soul); the operation of which bears far greater analogy to rest or suspension of movement than to movement itself.27

We shall now proceed to state how Aristotle steers clear (or at least believes himself to steer clear) of the defects that he has pointed out in the psychological theories of his predecessors. Instead of going back (like Empedokles, Plato, and others) to a time when the Kosmos did not yet exist, and giving us an hypothesis to explain how its parts came together or were put together, he takes the facts and objects of the Kosmos as they stand, and distributes them according to distinctive marks alike obvious, fundamental, and pervading; after which he seeks a mode of explanation in the principles of his own First Philosophy or Ontology. Whoever had studied the Organon and the Physica of Aristotle (apparently intended to be read prior to the treatise De Animâ) would be familiar with his distribution of Entia into ten Categories, of which Essence or Substance was the first and the fundamental. Of these Essences or Substances the most complete and recognized were physical or natural bodies; and among such bodies one of the most striking distinctions, was between those that had life and those that had it not. By life, Aristotle means keeping up the processes of nutrition, growth, and decay.28

“To live” (Aristotle observes) is a term used in several different meanings; whatever possesses any one of the following four properties is said to live:29 (1) Intellect, (2) Sensible perception, (3) Local movement and rest, (4) Internal movement of nutrition, growth, and decay. But of these four the last is the only one common to all living bodies without exception; it is the foundation presupposed by the other three. It is the only one possessed by plants,30 and common to all plants as well as to all animals — to all animated bodies.

What is the animating principle belonging to each of these bodies, and what is the most general definition of it? Such is the problem that Aristotle states to himself about the soul.31 He explains it by a metaphysical distinction first introduced (apparently454) by himself into Philosophia Prima. He considers Substance or Essence as an ideal compound; not simply as clothed with all the accidents described in the nine last Categories, but also as being analysable in itself, even apart from these accidents, into two abstract, logical, or notional elements or principia — Form and Matter. This distinction is borrowed from the most familiar facts of the sensible world — the shape of solid objects. When we see or feel a cube of wax, we distinguish the cubic shape from the waxen material;32 we may find the like shape in many other materials — wood, stone, &c.; we may find the like material in many different shapes — sphere, pyramid, &c.; but the matter has always some shape, and the shape has always some matter. We can name and reason about the matter, without attending to the shape, or distinguishing whether it be cube or sphere; we can name and reason about the shape, without attending to the material shaped, or to any of its various peculiarities. But this, though highly useful, is a mere abstraction or notional distinction. There can be no real separation between the two: no shape without some solid material; no solid material without some shape. The two are correlates; each of them implying the other, and neither of them admitting of being realized or actualized without the other.

This distinction of Form and Matter is one of the capital features of Aristotle’s Philosophia Prima. He expands it and diversifies it in a thousand ways, often with subtleties very difficult to follow; but the fundamental import of it is seldom lost — two correlates inseparably implicated in fact and reality in every concrete individual that has received a substantive name, yet logically separable and capable of being named and considered apart from each other. The Aristotelian analysis thus brings out, in regard to each individual substance (or Hoc Aliquid, to use his phrase), a triple point of view: (1) The Form; (2) The Matter; (3) The compound or aggregate of the two — in other words, the inseparable Ens, which carries us out of the domain of logic or abstraction into that of the concrete or reality.33

455Aristotle farther recognizes, between these two logical correlates, a marked difference of rank. The Form stands first, the Matter second, — not in time, but in notional presentation. The Form is higher, grander, prior in dignity and esteem, more Ens, or more nearly approaching to perfect entity; the Matter is lower, meaner, posterior in dignity, farther removed from that perfection. The conception of wax, plaster, wood, &c., without amy definite or determinate shape, is confused and unimpressive; but a name, connoting some definite shape, at once removes this confusion, and carries with it mental pre-eminence, alike as to phantasy, memory, and science. In the logical hierarchy of Aristotle, Matter is the inferior and Form the superior;34 yet neither of the two can escape from its relative character: Form requires Matter for its correlate, and is nothing in itself or apart,35 just as much as Matter requires Form; though from the inferior dignity of Matter we find it more frequently described as the second or correlate, while Form is made to stand forward as the relatum. For complete reality, we want the concrete individual having the implication of both; while, in regard to each of the constituents per se, no separate real existence can be affirmed, but only a nominal or logical separation.

This difference of rank between Matter and Form — that the first is inferior and the last the superior — is sometimes so much put in the foreground, that the two are conceived in a different manner and under other names, as Potential and Actual. Matter is the potential, imperfect, inchoate, which the supervening Form actualizes into the perfect and complete; a transition from half-reality to entire reality or act. The Potential is the undefined or indeterminate36 — what may be or may not be — 456what is not yet actual, and may perhaps never become so, but is prepared to pass into actuality when the energizing principle comes to aid. In this way of putting the antithesis, the Potential is not so much implicated with the Actual as merged and suppressed to make room for the Actual: it is as a half-grown passing into a full-grown; being itself essential as a preliminary stage in the order of logical generation.37 The three logical divisions — Matter, Form, and the resulting Compound or Concrete (τὸ σύνολον, τὸ συνειλημμένον), are here compressed into two — the Potential and the Actualization thereof. Actuality (ἐνέργεια, ἐντελέχεια) coincides in meaning partly with the Form, partly with the resulting Compound; the Form being so much exalted, that the distinction between the two is almost effaced.38

Two things are to be remembered respecting Matter, in its Aristotelian (logical or ontological) sense: (1) It may be Body, but it is not necessarily Body;39 (2) It is only intelligible as the correlate of Form: it can neither exist by itself, nor can it be known by itself (i.e., when taken out of that relativity). This deserves notice, because to forget the relativity of a relative word, and to reason upon it as if it were an absolute, is an oversight not unfrequent. Furthermore, each variety of Matter has its appropriate Form, and each variety of Form its appropriate Matter, with which it correlates. There are various stages or gradations of Matter; from Materia Prima, which has no Form 457at all, passing upwards through successive partial developments to Materia Ultima; which last is hardly40 distinguishable from Form or from Materia Formata.

The distinction above specified is employed by Aristotle in his exposition of the Soul. The soul belongs to the Category of Substance or Essence (not to that of Quantity, Quality, &c.); but of the two points of view under which Essence may be presented, the soul ranks with Form, not with Matter — with the Actual, not with the Potential. The Matter to which (as correlate) soul stands related, is a natural body (i.e., a body having within it an inherent principle of motion and rest) organized in a certain way, or fitted out with certain capacities and preparations to which soul is the active and indispensable complement. These capacities would never come into actuality without the soul; but, on the other hand, the range of actualities or functions in the soul depends upon, and is limited by, the range of capacities ready prepared for it in the body. The implication of the two constitutes the living subject, with all its functions, active and passive. If the eye were an animated or living subject, seeing would be its soul; if the carpenter’s axe were living, cutting would be its soul;41 the matter would be the lens or the iron in which this soul is embodied. It is not indispensable, however, that all the functions of the living subject should be at all times in complete exercise: the subject is still living, even while asleep; the eye is still a good eye, though at the moment closed. It is enough if the functional aptitude exist as a dormant property, ready to rise into activity, when the proper occasions present themselves. This minimum of Form suffices to give living efficacy to the potentialities of body; it is enough that a man, though now in a dark night and seeing nothing, will see as soon as the sun rises; or that he knows geometry, though he is not now thinking of a geometrical problem. This dormant possession is what Aristotle calls the First Entelechy or Energy, i.e., the lowest stage of Actuality, or the minimum of influence required to transform Potentiality into Actuality. The Aristotelian definition of Soul is thus: The first 458entelechy of a natural organized body, having life in potentiality.42 This is all that is essential to the soul; the second or higher entelechy (actual exercise of the faculties) is not a constant or universal property.43

In this definition of Soul, Aristotle employs his own Philosophia Prima to escape the errors committed by prior philosophers. He does not admit that the soul is a separate entity in itself; or that it is composed (as Empedokles and Demokritus had said) of corporeal elements, or (as Plato had said) of elements partly corporeal, partly logical and notional. He rejects the imaginary virtues of number, invoked by the Pythagoreans and Xenokrates; lastly, he keeps before him not merely man, but all the varieties of animated objects, to which his definition must be adapted. His first capital point is to put aside the alleged identity, or similarity, or sameness of elements, between soul and body; and to put aside equally any separate existence or substantiality of soul. He effects both these purposes by defining them as essentially relatum and correlate; the soul, as the relatum, is unintelligible and unmeaning without its correlate, upon which accordingly its definition is declared to be founded.

The real animated subject may be looked at either from the point of view of the relatum or from that of the correlate; but, though the two are thus logically separable, in fact and reality they are inseparably implicated; and, if either of them be withdrawn, the animated subject disappears. “The soul (says Aristotle) is not any variety of body, but it cannot be without a body; it is not a body, but it is something belonging to or related to a body; and for this reason it is in a body, and in a body of such or such potentialities.”44 Soul is to body (we thus read), not as a compound of like elements, nor as a type is to its copy, or vice versâ, but as a relatum to its correlate; dependent upon the body for all its acts and manifestations, and bringing to consummation what in the body exists as potentiality only. Soul, however, is better than body; and the animated being is better than the inanimate by reason of its soul.45

459The animated subject is thus a form immersed or implicated in matter; and all its actions and passions are so likewise.46 Each of these has its formal side, as concerns the soul, and its material side, as concerns the body. When a man or animal is angry, for example, this emotion is both a fact of the soul and a fact of the body: in the first of these two characters, it may be defined as an appetite for hurting some one who has hurt us; in the second of the two, it may be defined as an ebullition of the blood and heat round the heart.47 The emotion, belonging to the animated subject or aggregate of soul and body, is a complex fact having two aspects, logically distinguishable from each other, but each correlating and implying the other. This is true not only in regard to our passions, emotions, and appetites, but also in regard to our perceptions, phantasms, reminiscences, reasonings, efforts of attention in learning, &c. We do not say that the soul weaves or builds (Aristotle observes48): we say that the animated subject, the aggregate of soul and body, the man, weaves or builds. So we ought also to say, not that the soul feels anger, pity, love, hatred, &c., or that the soul learns, reasons, recollects, &c., but that the man with his soul does these things. The actual movement throughout these processes is not in the soul, but in the body; sometimes going to the soul (as in sensible perception), sometimes proceeding from the soul to the body (as in the case of reminiscence). All these processes are at once corporeal and psychical, pervading the whole animated subject, and having two aspects coincident and inter-dependent, though logically distinguishable. The perfect or imperfect discrimination by the sentient soul depends upon the good or bad condition of the bodily sentient organs; an old man that has become shortsighted would see as well as before, if he could regain his youthful eye. The defects of the soul arise from defects in the bodily organism to which it belongs, as in cases of drunkenness or sickness; and this is not less true of the Noûs, or intellective soul, than of the sentient soul.49 Intelligence, as well as emotion, are phenomena, not of the bodily organism simply, nor of the Noûs simply, but of the community or partnership of which both are members; and, when intelligence460 gives way, this is not because the Noûs itself is impaired, but because the partnership is ruined by the failure of the bodily organism.

Respecting the Noûs (the theorizing Noûs), we must here observe that Aristotle treats it as a separate kind or variety of soul, with several peculiarities. We shall collect presently all that he says upon that subject, which is the most obscure portion of his psychology.

In regard to soul generally, the relative point of view with body as the correlate is constantly insisted on by Aristotle; without such correlate his assertions would have no meaning. But the relation between them is presented in several different ways. The soul is the cause and principle of a living body;50 by which is meant, not an independent and pre-existent something that brings the body into existence but, an immanent or indwelling influence which sustains the unity and guides the functions of the organism. According to the quadruple classification of Cause recognized by Aristotle — Formal, Material, Movent, and Final — the body furnishes the Material Cause, while the soul comprises all the three others. The soul is (as we have already seen) the Form in relation to the body as Matter, but it is, besides, the Movent, inasmuch as it determines the local displacement as well as all the active functions of the body — nutrition, growth, generation, sensation, &c.; lastly, it is also the Final Cause, since the maintenance and perpetuation of the same Form, in successive individuals, is the standing purpose aimed at by each body in the economy of Nature.51 Under this diversity of aspect, soul and body are reciprocally integrant and complementary of each other, the real integer (the Living or Animated Body) including both.

Soul, in the Aristotelian point of view — what is common to all living bodies, comprises several varieties. But these varieties are not represented as forming a genus with co-ordinate species under it, in such manner that the counter-ordinate species, reciprocally excluding each other, are, when taken together, co-extensive with the whole genus; like man and brute in regard to animal. The varieties of soul are distributed into successive stages gradually narrowing in extension and enlarging in comprehension; the first or lowest stage being co-extensive with the whole, but connoting only two or three simple attributes; the second, or next above, connoting all these and more besides, but 461denoting only part of the individuals denoted by the first; the third connoting all this and more, but denoting yet fewer individuals; and so on forward. Thus the concrete individuals, called living bodies, include all plants as well as all animals; but the soul, called Nutritive by Aristotle, corresponding thereto connotes only nutrition, growth, decay, and generation of another similar individual.52 In the second stage, plants are left out, but all animals remain: the Sentient soul, belonging to animals, but not belonging to any plants, connotes all the functions and unities of the Nutritive soul, together with sensible perception (at least in its rudest shape) besides.53 We proceed onward in he same direction, taking in additional faculties — the Movent, Appetitive, Phantastic (Imaginative), Noëtic (Intelligent) soul, and thus diminishing the total of individuals denoted. But each higher variety of soul continues to possess all the faculties of the lower. Thus the Sentient soul cannot exist without comprehending all the faculties of the Nutritive, though the Nutritive exists (in plants) without any admixture of the Sentient. Again, the Sentient soul does not necessarily possess either memory, imagination, or intellect (Noûs); but no soul can be either Imaginative or Noëtic, without being Sentient as well as Nutritive. The Noëtic Soul, as the highest of all, retains in itself all the lower faculties; but these are found to exist apart from it.54

We may remark here that the psychological classification of Aristotle proceeds in the inverse direction to that of Plato. In the Platonic Timæus we begin with the grand soul of the Kosmos, and are conducted by successive steps of degradation to men, animals, plants; while Aristotle lays his foundation in the largest, most multiplied, and lowest range of individuals, carrying us by successive increase of conditions to the fewer and the higher.

The lowest or Nutritive soul, in spite of the small number of conditions involved in it, is the indispensable basis whereon all the others depend. None of the other souls can exist apart from it.55 It is the first constituent of the living individual — the implication of Form with Matter in a natural body suitably 462organized; it is the preservative of the life of the individual, with its aggregate of functions and faculties, and with the proper limits of size and shape that characterize the species;56 it is, moreover, the preservative of perpetuity to the species, inasmuch as it prompts and enables each individual to generate and leave behind a successor like himself; which is the only way that an individual can obtain quasi-immortality, though all aspire to become immortal.57 This lowest soul is the primary cause of digestion and nutrition. It is cognate with the celestial heat, which is essential also as a co-operative cause; accordingly, all animated bodies possess an inherent natural heat.58

We advance upwards now from the nutritive soul to that higher soul which is at once nutritive and Sentient; for Aristotle does not follow the example of Plato in recognizing three souls to one body, but assigns only one and the same soul, though with multiplied faculties and functions, to one and the same body. Sensible perception, with its accompaniments, forms the characteristic privilege of the animal as contrasted with the plant.59 Sensible perception admits of many diversities, from the simplest and rudest tactile sensation, which even the lowest animals cannot be without, to the full equipment of five senses which Aristotle declares to be a maximum not susceptible of increase.60 But the sentient faculty, even in its lowest stage, indicates a remarkable exaltation of the soul in its character of form. The soul, quâ sentient and percipient, receives the form of the perceptum without the matter; whereas the nutritive soul cannot disconnect the two, but receives and appropriates the nutrient substance, form and matter in one and combined.61 Aristotle illustrates this characteristic feature of sensible perception by recurring to his former example of the wax and the figure. Just as wax receives from a signet the impression engraven thereon, whether the matter of the signet be iron, gold, stone, or wood; as the impression stamped has no regard to the matter, but reproduces only the figure engraven on the signet, 463the wax being merely potential and undefined, until the signet comes to convert it into something actual and definite;62 so the percipient faculty in man is impressed by the substances in nature, not according to the matter of each but, according to the qualitative form of each. Such passive receptivity is the first and lowest form of sensation,63 not having any magnitude in itself, but residing in bodily organs which have magnitude, and separable from them only by logical abstraction. It is a potentiality, correlating with, and in due proportion to, the exterior percipibile, which, when acting upon it, brings it into full actuality. The actuality of both (percipiens and perceptum) is one and the same, and cannot be disjoined in fact, though the potentialities of the two are distinct yet correlative; the percipiens is not like the percipibile originally, but becomes like it by being thus actualized.64

The sentient soul is communicated by the male parent in the act of generation,65 and is complete from the moment of birth, not requiring a process of teaching after birth; the sentient subject becomes at once and instantly, in regard to sense, on a level with one that has attained a certain actuality of cognition, but is not at the moment reflecting upon the cognitum. Potentiality and Actuality are in fact distinguishable into lower and higher degrees; the Potential that has been actualized in a first or lower stage, is still a Potential relatively to higher stages of Actuality.66 The Potential may be acted upon in two opposite ways; either by deadening and extinguishing it, or by developing and carrying it forward to realization. The sentient soul, when asleep or inert, requires a cause to stimulate it into actual seeing or hearing; the noëtic or cognizant soul, under like circumstances, must also be stimulated into actual meditation on its cognitum. But there is this difference between the two. The sentient soul communes with particulars; the noëtic soul with 464universals. The sentient soul derives its stimulus from without, and from some of the individual objects, tangible, visible, or audible; but the noëtic soul is put into action by the abstract and universal, which is in a certain sense within the soul itself; so that a man can at any time meditate on what he pleases, but he cannot see or hear what he pleases, or anything except such visible or audible objects as are at hand.67

We have already remarked, that in many animals the sentient soul is little developed; being confined in some to the sense of touch (which can never be wanting),68 and in others to touch and taste. But even this minimum of sense — though small, if compared with the variety of senses in man — is a prodigious step in advance of plants; it comprises a certain cognition, and within its own sphere it is always critical, comparing, discriminative.69 The sentient soul possesses this discriminative faculty in common with the noëtic soul or Intelligence, though applied to different objects and purposes; and possesses such faculty, because it is itself a mean or middle term between the two sensible extremes of which it takes cognizance, — hot and cold, hard and soft, wet and dry, white and black, acute and grave, bitter and sweet, light and darkness, visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, &c. We feel no sensation at all when the object touched is exactly of the same temperature with ourselves, neither hotter nor colder; the sentient soul, being a mean between the two extremes, is stimulated to assimilate itself for the time to either of them, according as it is acted upon from without. It thus makes comparison of each with the other, and of both with its own mean.70 Lastly, the sentient faculty in the soul is really one and indivisible, though distinguishable logically or by abstraction into different genera and species.71 Of that faculty the central physical organ is the heart, which contains the congenital or animal spirit. The Aristotelian psychology is here remarkable, affirming as it does the essential relativity of all 465phenomena of sense to the appreciative condition of the sentient; as well as the constant implication of intellectual and discriminative comparison among them.

All the objects generating sensible perception, are magnitudes.72 Some perceptions are peculiar to one sense alone, as colour to the eye, &c. Upon these we never make mistakes directly; in other words, we always judge rightly what is the colour or what is the sound, though we are often deceived in judging what the thing coloured is, or where the sonorous object is.73 There are, however, some perceivables not peculiar to any one sense alone, but appreciable by two or more; though chiefly and best by the sense of vision; such are motion, rest, number, figure, magnitude. Here the appreciation becomes less accurate, yet it is still made directly by sense.74 But there are yet other matters that, though not directly affecting sense, are perceived indirectly, or by way of accompaniment to what is directly perceived. Thus we see a white object; nothing else affecting our sense except its whiteness. Beyond this, however, we judge and declare, that the object so seen is the son of Kleon. This is a judgment obtained indirectly, or by way of accompaniment; by accident, so to speak, inasmuch as the same does not accompany all sensations of white. It is here that we are most liable to error.75

Among the five senses, Aristotle distinguishes two as operating by direct contact between subject and object (touch, taste); three as operating through an external intervening medium (vision, smell, taste). He begins with Vision, which he regards as possessing most completely the nature and characteristics of a sense.76 The direct and proper object of vision is colour. Now colour operates upon the eye not immediately (for, if the coloured object be placed in contact with the eye, there will be no vision), but by causing movements or perturbations in the external intervening medium, air or water, which affect the sense through an appropriate agency of their own.77 This 466agency is, according to Aristotle, the Diaphanous or Transparent. When actual or in energy, the transparent is called light; when potential or in capacity only, it is called darkness. The eye is of watery structure, apt for receiving these impressions.78 It is the presence either of fire, or of something analogous to the celestial body, that calls forth the diaphanous from the state of potentiality into that of actuality or light; in which latter condition it is stimulated by colour. The diaphanous, whether as light or as darkness, is a peculiar nature or accompaniment, not substantive in itself, but inherent chiefly in the First or Celestial Body, yet also in air, water, glass, precious stones, and in all bodies to a greater or less degree.79 The diaphanous passes at once and simultaneously, in one place as well as in another, from potentiality to actuality — from darkness to light. Light does not take time to travel from one place to another, as sound and smell do.80 The diaphanous is not a body, nor effluvium from a body, nor any one of the elements: it is of an adjective character — a certain agency or attribute pervading or belonging to bodies, along with their extension.81 Colour marks and defines the surface of the body quâ diaphanous, as figure defines it quâ extended. Colour makes the diaphanous itself visible, and its own varieties visible through the diaphanous. Air and water are transparent throughout, though with an ill-defined superficial colour. White and black, as colours in solid bodies, correspond to the condition of light or darkness in air. There are some luminous objects visible in the dark, as fire, fungous matter, eyes, and scales of fish, &c., though they have no appropriate colour.82 There are 467seven species or varieties of colours, but all of them proceed from white and black, blended in different proportions, or seen one through another; white and black are the two extremes, the other varieties being intermediate between them.

The same necessity for an intervening medium external to the subject, as in the case of vision, prevails also in the senses of hearing and smell. If the audible or odorous object be placed in contact with its organ of sense, there will be no hearing or smell. Whenever we hear or smell any object, there must be interposed between us and the object a suitable medium that shall be affected first; while the organ of sense will be affected secondarily through that medium. Air is the medium in regard to sound, both air and water in regard to smell; but there seems besides (analogous to the transparent in regard to vision) a special agency called the Trans-Sonant, which pervades air and enables it to transmit sound; and certainly another special agency called the Trans-Olfacient, which pervades both air and water, and enables them to transmit smell.83 (It seems thus that something like a luminiferous ether — extended, mobile, and permeating bodies, yet still incorporeal in itself — was an hypothesis as old as Aristotle; and one other ether besides, analogous in property and purpose — an odoriferous ether; perhaps a third or soniferous ether, but this is less distinctly specified by Aristotle.)

Sound, according to Aristotle, arises from the shock of two or more solid bodies communicated to the air. It implies local movement in one at least of those bodies. Many soft bodies are incapable of making sound; those best suited for it are such as metals, hard in structure, smooth in surface, hollow in shape. The blow must be smart and quick, otherwise the air slips away and dissipates itself before the sound can be communicated to it.84 Sound is communicated through the air to the organ of hearing; the air is one continuum (not composed of adjacent particles with interspaces), and a wave is propagated from it 468to the internal ear, which contains some air enclosed in the sinuous ducts within the membrane of the tympanum, congenitally attached to the organ itself, and endued with a certain animation.85 This internal air within the ear, excited by the motion propagated from the external ear, causes hearing. The ear is enabled to appreciate accurately the movements of the external air, because it has itself little or no movement within. We cannot hear with any other part of the body; because it is only in the ear that nature has given us this stock of internal air. If water gets into the ear, we cannot hear at all; because the wave generated in the air without, cannot propagate itself within. Nor can we hear, if the membrane of the ear be disordered; any more than we can see, when the membrane of the eye is disordered.86

Voice is a kind of sound peculiar to animated beings; yet not belonging to all of them, but only to those that inspire the air. Nature employs respiration for two purposes: the first, indispensable to animal life, — that of cooling and tempering the excessive heat of the heart and its adjacent parts; the second, not indispensable to life, yet most valuable to the higher faculties of man, — significant speech. The organ of respiration is the larynx; a man cannot speak either when inspiring or expiring, but only when retaining and using the breath within. The soul in those parts, when guided by some phantasm or thought, impels the air within against the walls of the trachea, and this shock causes vocal sounds.87

Aristotle seems to have been tolerably satisfied with the above explanation of sight and hearing; for, in approaching the sense of Smell with the olfacients, he begins by saying that it is less definable and explicable. Among the five senses, smell stands intermediate between the two (taste and touch) that operate by 469direct contact, and the other two (sight and hearing) that operate through an external medium. Man is below other animals in this sense; he discriminates little in smells except the pleasurable and the painful.88 His taste, though analogous in many points to smell, is far more accurate and discriminating, because taste is a variety of touch; and in respect to touch, man is the most discriminating of all animals. Hence his great superiority to them in practical wisdom. Indeed the marked difference of intelligence between one man and another, turns mainly upon the organ of touch: men of hard flesh (or skin) are by nature dull in intelligence, men of soft flesh are apt and clever.89 The classifying names of different smells are borrowed from the names of the analogous tastes to which they are analogous — sweet, bitter, tart, dry, sharp, smooth, &c.90 Smells take effect through air as well as through water; by means of a peculiar agency or accompaniment (mentioned above, called the Trans-Olfacient) pervading both one and the other. It is peculiar to man that he cannot smell except when inhaling air in the act of inspiration; any one may settle this for himself by making the trial.91 But fishes and other aquatic animals, which never inhale air, can smell in the water; and this proves that the trans-olfacient agency is operative to transmit odours not less in water than in air.92 We know that the sense of smell in these aquatic animals is the same as it is in man, because the same strong odours that are destructive to man are also destructive to them.93 Smell is the parallel, and in a certain sense the antithesis of taste; smell is of the dry, taste is of the moist: the olfactory matter is a juicy or sapid dryness, extracted or washed out from both air and water by the trans-olfacient agency, and acting on the sensory potentialities of the nostrils.94 470This olfactory inhalation is warm as well as dry. Hence it is light, and rises easily to the brain, the moisture and coldness of which it contributes to temper; this is a very salutary process, for the brain is the wettest and coldest part of the body, requiring warm and dry influences as a corrective. It is with a view to this correction that Nature has placed the olfactory organ in such close proximity to the brain.95 There are two kinds of olfactory impressions. One of them is akin to the sense of taste — odour and savour going together — an affection (to a great degree) of the nutritive soul; so that the same odour is agreeable when we are hungry, disagreeable when our hunger is fully satisfied. This first kind of impression is common to men with other animals; but there is a second, peculiar to man, and disconnected from the sense of taste, viz., the scent of flowers, unguents, &c., which are agreeable or disagreeable constantly and per se.96 Nature has assigned this second kind of odours as a privilege to man, because his brain, being so large and moist, requires to be tempered by an additional stock of drying and warming olfactory influence.

Taste is a variety of touch, and belongs to the lower or nutritive soul, as a guide to the animal in seeking or avoiding different sorts of food. The object of taste is essentially liquid, often strained and extracted from dry food by warmth and moisture. The primary manifestation of this sensory phenomenon is the contrast of drinkable and undrinkable.97 The organ of taste, the tongue, is a mean between dryness and moisture; when either of these is in excess, the organ is disordered. Among the varieties of taste, there are two fundamental contraries (as in colour, sound, and the objects of the other senses except touch) from which the other contrasts are derived. These fundamentals in taste are sweet and bitter; corresponding to white and black, acute and grave, in colours and sounds. The sense of taste is potentially sweet 471or bitter; the gustable object is what makes it sweet or bitter in actuality.98

The sense of touch, in which man surpasses all other animals, differs from the other senses by not having any two fundamental contraries giving origin to the rest, but by having various contraries alike fundamental. It is thus hardly one sense, but an aggregate of several senses. It appreciates the elementary differences of body quâ body — hot, cold, dry, moist, hard, soft, &c. It is a mean between each of these two extremes; being potentially either one of them, and capable of being made to assimilate itself actually to either.99 In this sense, the tangible object operates when in contact with the skin; and, as has been already said, much of the superiority of man depends upon his superior fineness and delicacy of skin.100 Still Aristotle remarks that the true organ of touch is not the skin or flesh, but something interior to the flesh. This last serves only as a peculiar medium. The fact that the sensation arises when the object touches our skin, does not prove that the skin is the true organ; for, if there existed a thin exterior membrane surrounding our bodies, we should still feel the same sensation. Moreover, the body is not in real contact with our skin, though it appears to be so; there is a thin film of air between the two, though we do not perceive it; just as, when we touch an object under water, there is a film of water interposed between, as is seen by the wetness of the finger.101 The skin is, therefore, not the true organ of touch, but a medium between the object and the organ; and this sense does in reality agree with the other senses in having a certain medium interposed between object and organ. But there is this difference: in touch the medium is close to and a part of ourselves; in sight and hearing it is exterior to ourselves, and may extend to some distance. In sight and hearing the object does not affect us directly; it affects the external medium, which again affects us. But in touch the object affects, at the same time and by the same influence, both the medium and the interior organ; like a spear that, with the same thrust, pierces the warrior’s shield and wounds the warrior himself.102 472Apparently, therefore, the true organ of touch is something interior, and skin and flesh is an interposed medium.103 But what this interior organ is, Aristotle does not more particularly declare. He merely states it to be in close and intimate communication with the great central focus and principle of all sensation — the heart;104 more closely connected with the heart (he appears to think) than any of the other organs of sense, though all of them are so connected more or less closely.

Having gone through the five senses seriatim, Aristotle offers various reasons to prove that there neither are, nor can be, more than five; and then discusses some complicated phenomena of sense. We perceive that we see or hear;105 do we perceive this by sight or by hearing? and if not, by what other faculty?106 Aristotle replies by saying that the act of sense is one and the same, but that it may be looked at in two different points of view. We see a coloured object; we hear a sound: in each case the act of sense is one; the energy or actuality of the visum, and videns, of the sonans and audiens, is implicated and indivisible. But the potentiality of the one is quite distinct from the potentiality of the other, and may be considered as well as named apart.107 When we say: I perceive that I see — we look at the same act of vision from the side of the videns; the visum being put out of sight as the unnoticed correlate. This is a mental fact distinct from, though following upon, the act of vision itself. Aristotle refers it rather to that general sentient soul or faculty, of which the five senses are partial and separate manifestations, than to the sense of vision itself.108 He thus considers what would now be termed consciousness of a sensation, as being merely the subjective view of the sensation, distinguished by abstraction from the objective.

473It is the same general sentient faculty, though diversified and logically distinguishable in its manifestations, that enables us to conceive many sensations as combined into one; and to compare or discriminate sensations belonging to different senses.109

White and sweet are perceived by two distinct senses, and at two distinct moments of time; but they must be compared and discriminated by one and the same sentient or cogitant act, and at one moment of time.110 This mental act, though in itself indivisible, has yet two aspects, and is thus in a certain sense divisible; just as a point taken in the middle of a line, while indivisible in itself, may be looked upon as the closing terminus of one-half of the line, and as the commencing terminus of the other half. The comparison of two different sensations or thoughts is thus one and the same mental fact, with two distinguishable aspects.111

Aristotle devotes a chapter to the enquiry: whether we can perceive two distinct sensations at once (i.e. in one and the same moment of time). He decides that we cannot; that the sentient soul or faculty is one and indivisible, and can only have a single energy or actuality at once.112 If two causes of sensation are operative together, and one of them be much superior in force, it will render us insensible to the other. He remarks that, when we are pre-occupied with loud noise, or with deep reflection, or with intense fright, visual objects will often pass by us unseen and unnoticed.113 Often the two simultaneous sensations will combine or blend into one compound, so that we shall feel neither of them purely or separately.114 One single act of sensational energy may however have a double aspect; as the same individual object may be at once white and sweet, though its whiteness and its sweetness are logically separable.115

To the sentient soul, even in its lowest manifestations, belong the feelings of pleasure and pain, appetite and aversion.116 The 474movements connected with these feelings, as with all sensation, begin and close with the central organ — the heart.117 Upon these are consequent the various passions and emotions; yet not without certain faculties of memory and phantasy accompanying or following the facts of sense.

Aristotle proceeds by gradual steps upward from the Sentient soul to the Noëtic (Cogitant or Intelligent) soul, called in its highest perfection Noûs. While refuting the doctrine of Empedokles, Demokritus, and other philosophers, who considered cogitation or intelligence to be the same as sensible perception, and while insisting upon the distinctness of the two as mental phenomena, he recognizes the important point of analogy between them, that both of them include judgment and comparison;118 and he describes an intermediate stage called Phantasy or Imagination, forming the transition from the lower of the two to the higher. We have already observed that, in the Aristotelian psychology, the higher functions of the soul presuppose and are built upon the lower as their foundation, though the lower do not necessarily involve the higher. Without nutrition, there is no sense; without sense, there is no phantasy; without phantasy, there is no cogitation or intelligence.119 The higher psychical phenomena are not identical with the lower, yet neither are they independent thereof; they presuppose the lower as a part of their conditions. Here, and indeed very generally elsewhere, Aristotle has been careful to avoid the fallacy of confounding or identifying the conditions of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself.120

He proceeds to explain Phantasy or the Phantastic department of the soul, with the phantasms that belong to it. It is not sensible perception, nor belief, nor opinion, nor knowledge, nor cogitation. Our dreams, though affections of the sentient soul, are really phantasms in our sleep, when there is no visual sensation; even when awake, we have a phantasm of the sun, as of a disk one foot in diameter, though we believe the sun to be larger than the earth.121 Many of the lower animals have sensible perception without any phantasy: even those among 475them that have phantasy have no opinion; for opinion implies faith, persuasion, and some rational explanation of that persuasion, to none of which does any animal attain.122 Phantasy is an internal movement of the animated being (body and soul in one); belonging to the sentient soul, not to the cogitant or intelligent; not identical with the movement of sense, but continued from or produced by that, and by that alone; accordingly, similar to the movement of sense and relating to the same matters.123 Since our sensible perceptions may be either true or false, so also may be our phantasms. And, since these phantasms are not only like our sensations, but remain standing in the soul long after the objects of sense have passed away, they are to a great degree the determining causes both of action and emotion. They are such habitually to animals, who are destitute of Noûs; and often even to intelligent men, if the Noûs be overclouded by disease or drunkenness.124

In the chapter now before us, Aristotle is careful to discriminate phantasy from several other psychological phenomena wherewith it is liable to be confounded. But we remark with some surprise, that neither here, nor in any other part of his general Psychology, does he offer any exposition of Memory, the phenomenon more nearly approaching than any other to phantasy. He supplied the deficiency afterwards by a short but valuable tract on Memory and Reminiscence; wherein he recognizes, and refers to, the more general work on Psychology. Memory bears on the past, as distinguished both from the present and future. Memory and phantasy are in some cases so alike, that we cannot distinguish clearly whether what is in our minds is a remembrance or a phantasm.125 Both of them belong to the same psychological department — to the central sentient principle, and not to the cogitant or intelligent Noûs. Memory as well as phantasy are continuations, remnants, or secondary consequences, of the primary movements of sense; what in itself is a phantasm, may become an object of remembrance directly and per se; matters of cogitation, being included or implicated in phantasms, may also become objects of remembrance, indirectly and by way of accompaniment.126 We 476can remember our prior acts of cogitation and demonstration; we can remember that, a month ago, we demonstrated the three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right angles; but, as the original demonstration could not be carried on without our having before our mental vision the phantasm of some particular triangle, so neither can the remembrance of the demonstration be made present to us without a similar phantasm.127 In acts of remembrance we have a conception of past time, and we recognize what is now present to our minds as a copy of what has been formerly present to us, either as perception of sense or as actual cognition;128 while in phantasms there is no conception of past time, nor any similar recognition, nor any necessary reference to our own past mental states; the phantasm is looked at by itself, and not as a copy. This is the main point of distinction between phantasm and remembrance:129 what is remembered is a present phantasm assimilated to an impression of the past. Some of the superior animals possess both memory and phantasy. But other animals have neither; their sensations disappear, they have no endurance; while endurance is the basis both of phantasy and memory.130

But though some animals have memory, no animal except man has Reminiscence. Herein man surpasses them all.131 Aristotle draws a marked distinction between the two; between the (memorial) retentive and reviving functions, when working unconsciously and instinctively, and the same two functions, when stimulated and guided by a deliberate purpose of our own — which he calls reminiscence. This last is like a syllogism or course of ratiocinative inference, performable only by minds capable of taking counsel and calculating. He considers memory as a movement proceeding from the centre and organs of sense to the soul, and stamping an impression thereupon; while reminiscence is a counter-movement proceeding from the soul to the organs of sense.132 In the process of reminiscence, movements of the soul and movements of the body are conjoined,133 477more or less perturbing and durable according to the temperament of the individual. The process is intentional and deliberate, instigated by the desire to search for and recover some lost phantasm or cognition; its success depends upon the fact that there exists by nature a regular observable order of sequence among the movements of the system, physical as well as psychical. The consequents follow their antecedents either universally, or at least according to customary rules, in the majority of cases.134

The consequent is either (1) like its antecedent, wholly or partially; or (2) contrary to it; or (3) has been actually felt in juxtaposition with it. In reminiscence, we endeavour to regain the forgotten consequent by hunting out some antecedent whereupon it is likely to follow; taking our start either from the present moment or from some other known point.135 We run over many phantasms until we hit upon the true antecedent; the possibility of reminiscence depends upon our having this within our mental reach, among our accessible stock of ideas: if such be not the case, reminiscence is impracticable, and we must learn over again.136 We are most likely to succeed, if we get upon the track or order wherein events actually occurred; thus, if we are trying to recollect a forgotten verse or sentence, we begin to repeat it from the first word; the same antecedent may indeed call up different consequents at different times, but it will generally call up what has habitually followed it before.137

The movements of Memory and of Reminiscence are partly corporeal and partly psychical, just as those of Sensation and Phantasy are. We compare in our remembrance greater and less (either in time or in external magnitudes) through similar internal movements differing from each other in the same, proportion, but all on a miniature scale.138 These internal movements often lead to great discomfort, when a person makes fruitless efforts to recover the forgotten phantasm that he desires; especially with excitable men, who are much disturbed by their own phantasms. They cannot stop the movement once begun; 478and, when their sensitive system is soft and flexible, they find that they have unwittingly provoked the bodily movements belonging to anger or fear, or some other painful emotion.139 These movements, when once provoked, continue in spite of the opposition of the person that experiences them. He brings upon himself the reality of the painful emotion; just as we find that, after we have very frequently pronounced a sentence or sung a song, the internal movements left in our memories are sometimes so strong and so persistent, that they act on our vocal organs even without any volition on our parts, and determine us to sing the song or pronounce the sentence over again in reality.140 Slow men are usually good in memory, quick men and apt learners are good in reminiscence: the two are seldom found together.141

In this account of Memory and Reminiscence, Aristotle displays an acute and penetrating intelligence of the great principles of the Association of Ideas. But these principles are operative not less in memory than in reminiscence: and the exaggerated prominence that he has given to the distinction between the two (determined apparently by a wish to keep the procedure of man apart from that of animals) tends to perplex his description of the associative process. At the same time, his manner of characterizing phantasy, memory, and reminiscence, as being all of them at once corporeal and psychical — involving, like sensation, internal movements of the body as well as phases of the consciousness, sometimes even passing into external movements of the bodily organs without our volition — all this is a striking example of psychological observation, as well as of consistency in following out the doctrine laid down at the commencement of his chief treatise: Soul as the Form implicated with Body as the Matter, — the two being an integral concrete separable only by abstraction.

We come now to the highest and (in Aristotle’s opinion) most honourable portion of the soul — the Noûs or noëtic faculty, whereby we cogitate, understand, reason, and believe or opine under the influence of reason.142 According to the uniform scheme 479of Aristotle, this highest portion of the soul, though distinct from all the lower, presupposes them all. As the sentient soul presupposes the nutrient, so also the cogitant soul presupposes the nutrient, the sentient, the phantastic, the memorial, and the reminiscent. Aristotle carefully distinguishes the sentient department of the soul from the cogitant, and refutes more than once the doctrine of those philosophers that identified the two. But he is equally careful to maintain the correlation between them, and to exhibit the sentient faculty not only as involving in itself a certain measure of intellectual discrimination, but also as an essential and fundamental condition to the agency of the cogitant, as a portion of the human soul. We have already gone through the three successive stages — phantastic, memorial, reminiscent — whereby the interval between sensation and cogitation is bridged over. Each of the three is directly dependent on past sensation, either as reproduction or as corollary; each of them is an indispensable condition of man’s cogitation; moreover, in the highest of the three, we have actually slid unperceived into the cogitant phase of the human soul; for Aristotle declares the reminiscent process to be of the nature of a syllogism.143 That the soul cannot cogitate or reason without phantasms — that phantasms are required for the actual working of the human Noûs — he affirms in the most explicit manner.144

The doctrine of Aristotle respecting Noûs has been a puzzle, even from the time of his first commentators. Partly from the obscurity inherent in the subject, partly from the defective condition of his text as it now stands, his meaning cannot be always clearly comprehended, nor does it seem that the different passages can be completely reconciled.

Anaxagoras, Demokritus, and other philosophers, appear to have spoken of Noûs or Intellect in a large and vague sense, as equivalent to Soul generally. Plato seems to have been the first to narrow and specialize the meaning; distinguishing pointedly (as we have stated above) the rational or encephalic soul, in the cranium, with its circular rotations, from the two lower souls, thoracic and abdominal. Aristotle agreed with him in this distinction (either of separate souls or of separate functions in the same soul); but he attenuated and divested it of all connexion with separate corporeal lodgment, or with peculiar movements of 480any kind. In his psychology, the brain no longer appears as the seat of intelligence, but simply as a cold, moist, and senseless organ, destined to countervail the excessive heat of the heart: which last is the great centre of animal heat, of life, and of the sentient soul. Aristotle declares Noûs not to be connected with, or dependent on, any given bodily organs or movements appropriated to itself: this is one main circumstance distinguishing it from the nutrient soul as well as from the sentient soul, each of which rests indispensably upon corporeal organs and agencies of its own.

It will be remembered that we stated the relation of Soul to Body (in Aristotle’s view) as that of Form to Matter; the two together constituting a concrete individual, numerically one; also that Form and Matter, each being essentially relative to the other, admitted of gradations, higher and lower; e.g. a massive cube of marble is already materia formata, but it is still purely materia, relative to the statue that may be obtained from it. Now, the grand region of Form is the Celestial Body — the vast, deep, perceivable, circular mass circumscribing the Kosmos, and enclosing, in and around its centre, Earth with the other three elements, tenanted by substances generated and perishable. This Celestial Body is the abode of divinity, including many divine beings who take part in its eternal rotations, viz. the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c., and other Gods. Now, every soul, or every form that animates the matter of a living being, derives its vitalizing influence from this celestial region. All seeds of life include within them a spiritual or gaseous heat, more divine than the four elements, proceeding from the sun, and in nature akin to the element of the stars. Such solar or celestial heat differs generically from the heat of fire. It is the only source from whence the principle of life, with the animal heat that accompanies it, can be obtained. Soul, in all its varieties, proceeds from hence.145

But though all varieties of Soul emanate from the same celestial source, they possess the divine element in very different degrees, and are very unequal in comparative worth and dignity. The lowest variety, or nutritive soul — the only one possessed by plants, among which there is no separation of sex146 — is contained potentially in the seed, and is thus transmitted when 481that seed is matured into a new individual. In animals, which possess it along with the sensitive soul and among which the sexes are separated, it is also contained potentially in the generative system of the female separately; and the first commencement of life in the future animal is thus a purely vegetable life.147 The sensitive soul, the characteristic of the complete animal, cannot be superadded except by copulation and the male semen. The female, being comparatively impotent and having less animal heat, furnishes only the matter of the future offspring; form, or the moving, fecundating, cause, is supplied by the male. Through the two together the new individual animal is completed, having not merely the nutritive soul, but also the sentient soul along with it.148

Both the nutritive and the sentient souls have, each of them respectively, a special bodily agency and movement belonging to them. But the Noûs, or the noëtic soul, has no partnership with any similar bodily agency. There is no special corporeal potentiality (to speak in Aristotelian language) which it is destined to actualize. It enters from without, and emanates from a still more exalted influence of that divine celestial substance from which all psychical or vitalizing heat proceeds.149 It is superinduced upon the nutritive and sentient souls, and introduces itself at an age of the individual later than both of them. Having no part of the bodily organism specially appropriated to it, this variety of soul — what is called the Noûs — stands distinguished from the other two in being perfectly separable from the body;150 that is, separable from the organized body which it is the essential function of the two lower souls to actualize, and with which both of them are bound up. The Noûs is not separable from the body altogether; it belongs essentially to the divine celestial body, and to those luminaries and other divine beings by whom portions of it are tenanted. Theorizing contemplation — the perfect, unclouded, unembarrassed, exercise of the theoretical Noûs — is the single mental activity of these divinities; contemplation of the formal regularity of the Kosmos, with its eternal and faultless rotations, 482and with their own perfection as participating therein. The celestial body is the body whereto Noûs, or the noëtic soul, properly belongs;151 quite apart from the two other souls, sentient and nutritive, upon which it is grafted in the animal body; and apart also from all the necessities of human action, preceded by balanced motives and deliberate choice.152

From this celestial body, a certain influence of Noûs is transferred to some of the mortal inhabitants of earth, water, and air. Thus a third or noëtic soul — or rather a third noëtic function — is added to the two existing functions, sensitive and nutrient, of the animal soul, which acquires thereby an improved aptitude for, and correlation with, the Formal and Universal. We have already stated that the sensitive soul possesses this aptitude to a certain extent; it receives the impression of sensible forms, without being impressed by the matter accompanying them. The noëtic function strengthens and sharpens the aptitude; the soul comes into correlation with those cogitable or intellective forms which are involved in the sensible forms;153 it rises from the lower generalities of the Second Philosophy, to the higher generalities of the First Philosophy.

As the sentient or percipient soul is the form or correlate of all perceivables, and thus identified with them in nature, all of them having existence only in relation to it, — so the cogitant or intellective soul is the form or correlate of all cogitables, all of which exist relatively to it, and only relatively.154 It is in fact the highest of all forms — the Form of Forms; the mental or subjective aspect of all formal reality.

Such at least is the tendency and purpose of that noëtic influence which the celestial substance imparts to the human soul; but it is realized only to a very small degree. In its characteristic theorizing efficacy, the godlike Noûs counts for a small fraction of the whole soul, though superexcellent in quality.155 There are but few men in whom it is tolerably developed, and even in those few it is countervailed by many other agencies.156 The noëtic function in men and animals exists 483only in companionship with the two other psychical functions. It is subservient to the limits and conditions that they impose, as well as to the necessities of individual and social action; to all that is required for “acting like a man,” according to the Aristotelian phrase. Man’s nature is complex, and not self-sufficing for a life of theorizing contemplation, such as that wherein the celestial inmates pass their immortality of happiness.157

We have thus to study the noëtic function according to the manifestations of it that we find in man, and to a certain extent in some other privileged animals. Bees, for example, partake in the divine gift to a certain extent; being distinguished in this respect from their analogues — wasps and hornets.158

In these and other animals, and in man to a still greater degree, the theorizing activity exists; but it is either starved, or at least has to deal with materials obscure, puzzling, conflicting; while, on the other hand, the practical intellect becomes largely developed, through the pressure of wants and desires, combined with the teaching of experience. In Aristotle’s view, sensible perception is a separate source of knowledge, accompanied with judgment and discrimination, independent of the noëtic function. Occasionally, he refers the intellectual superiority of man to the properly attempered combination and antagonism of heat in the heart with cold in the brain, each strong and pure;159 all the highly endowed animals (he says) 484have greater animal heat, which is the essential condition of a better soul;160 he reckons the finer sense of touch possessed by man as an essential condition of the same intellectual result.161 Sensible perception in its five diverse manifestations, together with its secondary psychical effects — phantasy and memory, accumulates in the human mind (and in some animals) a greater or less experience of particular facts; from some of which inferences are drawn as to others unknown, directing conduct as well as enlarging knowledge.162

All this process — a perpetual movement of sense and memory — begins from infancy, and goes on independently of Noûs or the noëtic function properly so called; which grows up gradually at a later age, aided by the acquisition of language and by instruction conveyed through language. The supervening Noûs presupposes and depends upon what has been thus treasured up by experience. Though, in the celestial body. Noûs exists separately from human beings, and though it there operates proprio motu apart from sense, such is not the case with the human Noûs; which depends upon the co-operation, and is subject to the restrictions, of the complicated soul and body wherewith it is domiciled — restrictions differing in each individual case. Though the noëtic process is distinct from sense, yet without sense it cannot take place in man. Aristotle expressly says: “You cannot cogitate without a phantasm or without a continuous image.” Now the phantasm has been already explained as a relic of movements of sense — or as those movements themselves, looked at in another point of view.163 “When we cogitate” (he says), “our mental affection is the same as when we draw a triangle for geometrical study; for there, though we do not make use of the fact that the triangle is determinate in its magnitude, we still draw it of a determinate magnitude. So in cogitation, even when we are not cogitating a determinate quantum, we nevertheless set before our eyes a determinate quantum, but we do not cogitate it quatenus determinate.”164 We 485cannot even (he goes on to say) remember the cogitabilia without “a phantasm or sensible image; so that our memory of them is only by way of concomitance” (indirect and secondary).165 Phantasy is thus absolutely indispensable to cogitation: first to carrying on the process at all; next to remembering it after it is past. Without either the visible phantasm of objects seen and touched, or the audible phantasm of words heard and remembered, the Noûs in human beings would be a nullity.166

We see that, though Aristotle recognizes a general distinction between phantasy and cogitation, and alludes to many animals as having the former without attaining to the latter, yet he also declares that in man, who possesses both, not only is cogitation dependent upon phantasy, but phantasy passes into cogitation by gradations almost imperceptible. In regard to the practical application of Noûs (i.e. to animal movements determined either by appetite or by reason), he finds a great difficulty in keeping the distinction clearly marked. Substantially, indeed, he lets it drop. When he speaks of phantasy as being either calculating or perceptive, we are unable to see in what respect calculating phantasy (which he states not to belong to other animals) differs from an effort of cogitation.167 Indeed, he speaks with some diffidence respecting any distribution of parts in the same soul, suspecting that such distribution is not real but logical: you may subdivide as much as you choose.168

It thus appears clear that Aristotle restricts the Noûs or noëtic function in man to the matters of sense and experience, physical or mental, and that he considers the phantasm to be an essential accompaniment of the cogitative act. Yet this does not at all detract from his view of the grandeur, importance, and wide range of survey, belonging to the noëtic function. It is the portion of man’s nature that correlates with the abstract and universal; but it is only a portion of his nature, and must work in conjunction and harmony with the rest. The abstract cannot be really separated from the concrete, nor the universal from one or other of its particulars, nor the essence from that whereof it is 486the essence, nor the attribute from that of which it is the attribute, nor the genus and species from the individuals comprehended therein; nor, to speak in purely Aristotelian language, the Form from some Matter, or the Matter from some Form. In all these cases there is a notional or logical distinction, impressing the mind as the result of various comparisons, noted by an appropriate term, and remembered afterwards by means of that term (that is, by means of an audible or visible phantasm); but real separation there neither is nor can be. This is the cardinal principle of Aristotle, repeated in almost all his works — his marked antithesis against Plato. Such logical distinctions as those here noticed (they might be multiplied without number) it belongs to Noûs or the noëtic function to cognize. But the real objects, in reference to which alone the distinctions have a meaning, are concrete and individual; and the cognizing subject is really the entire man, employing indeed the noëtic function, but employing it with the aid of other mental forces, phantasms and remembrances, real and verbal.

The noëtic soul is called by Aristotle “the place of Forms,” “the potentiality of Forms,” “the correlate of things apart from Matter.”169 It cogitates these Forms in or along with the phantasms: the cogitable Forms are contained in the sensible Forms; for there is nothing really existent beyond or apart from visible or tangible magnitudes, with their properties and affections, and with the so-called abstractions considered by the geometer. Hence, without sensible perception, a man can neither learn nor understand anything; in all his theoretical contemplations, he requires some phantasm to contemplate along with them.170

Herein lies one of the main distinctions between the noëtic and the sentient souls. The sentient deals with particulars, and correlates with external bodies; the noëtic apprehends universals, which in a certain sense are within the soul: hence a man can cogitate whenever or whatever he chooses, but he can see or touch only what is present.171 Another distinction is, that the sentient soul is embodied in special organs, each with determinate capacities, and correlating with external objects, themselves alike determinate, acting only under certain conditions of locality. The possibilities of sensation are thus from the beginning limited; moreover, a certain relative proportion must be maintained between the percipient and the perceivable; for extreme or violent sounds, colours, &c., produce no sensation; on the contrary, they deaden the sentient organ.172 But the noëtic soul (what is called the “Noûs of the soul,” to use Aristotle’s language)173 is nothing at all in actuality before its noëtic function commences, though it is everything in potentiality. It is not embodied in any corporeal organ of its own, nor mingled as a new elementary ingredient with the body; it does not correlate with any external objects; it is not so specially attached to some particulars as to make it antipathetic to others. Accordingly its possibilities of cogitation are unlimited; it apprehends with equal facility what is most cogitable and what is least cogitable. It is thoroughly indeterminate in its nature, and is in fact at first a mere unlimited cogitative potentiality;174 like a tablet, upon which no letters have as yet been written, but upon which all or any letters may be written.175

We have already said that the Noûs of the human soul emanates from a peculiar influence of the celestial body, which is the special region of Form in the Kosmos. Through it we acquire an enlarged power of apprehending the abstract and universal; we can ascend above sensible forms to the cogitable forms contained therein; we can consider all forms in themselves, without paying attention to the matter wherein they are embodied. Instead of considering the concrete solid or liquid before us, we can mentally analyse them, and thus study solidity in the abstract, fluidity in the abstract. While our senses judge of water as hot and cold, our noëtic function enables us to appreciate water in the abstract — to determine its essence, and to furnish a definition of it.176 In all these objects, as combinations of Form with Matter, the cogitable form exists potentially; and is abstracted or considered abstractedly, by the cogitant Noûs.177 Yet this last (as we have already seen) cannot operate except along with and by aid of phantasms — of impressions revived or remaining from sense. It is thus immersed in the materials of sense, and has no others. But it handles them in a way of its own, and under new points of view; comparing and analysing; recognizing the abstract in the concrete, and the universal in the particular; 488discriminating mentally and logically the one from the other; and noting the distinction by appropriate terms. Such distinctions are the noümena, generated in the process of cogitation by Noûs itself. The Noûs, as it exists in any individual, gradually loses its original character of naked potentiality, and becomes an actual working force, by means of its own acquired materials.178 It is an aggregate of noümena, all of them in nature identical with itself; and, while cogitating them, the Noûs at the same time cogitates itself. Considered abstractedly, apart from matter, they exist only in the mind itself; in theoretical speculation, the cognoscens and the cognitum are identical. But they are not really separable from matter, and have no reality apart from it.

The distinction, yet at the same time correlation, between Form and Matter, pervades all nature (Aristotle affirms), and will be found in the Noûs as elsewhere. We must recognize an Intellectus Agens or constructive, and an Intellectus Patiens or receptive.179 The Agens is the great intellectual energy pervading the celestial body, and acting upon all the animals susceptible of its operation; analogous to light, which illuminates the diaphanous medium, and elevates what was mere potential colour into colour actual and visible.180 The Patiens is the intellectual receptivity acted upon in each individual, and capable of being made to cogitate every thing; anterior to the Agens, in time, so far as regards the individual, yet as a general fact (when we are talking of man as a species) not anterior even in time, but correlative. Of the two, the Intellectus Agens is the more venerable; it is pure intellectual energy, unmixed, unimpressible from without, and separable from all animal body. It is this, and nothing more, when considered apart from animal body; but it is then eternal and immortal, while the Intellectus Patiens perishes with the remaining soul and with the body. Yet though the Intellectus Agens is thus eternal, and though we have part in it, we cannot remember any of its operations anterior to our own maturity; for the concurrence of the Intellectus Patiens, which 489begins and ends with us, is indispensable both to remembrance and to thought.181

We see here the full extent of Aristotle’s difference from the Platonic doctrine, in respect to the immortality of the soul. He had defined soul as the first actualization of a body having potentiality of life with a determinate organism. This of course implied, and he expressly declares it, that soul and body in each individual case were one and indivisible, so that the soul of Sokrates perished of necessity with the body of Sokrates.182 But he accompanied that declaration with a reserve in favour of Noûs, and especially of the theorizing Noûs; which he recognized as a different sort of soul, not dependent on a determinate bodily organism, but capable of being separated from it, as the eternal is from the perishable.183 The present chapter informs us how far such reserve is intended to go. That the theorizing Noûs is not limited, like the sentient soul, to a determinate bodily organism, but exists apart from that organism and eternally — is maintained as incontestable: it is the characteristic intellectual activity of the eternal celestial body and the divine inmates thereof. But the distinction of Form and Matter is here pointed out, as prevailing in Noûs and in Soul generally, not less than throughout all other Nature. The theorizing Noûs, as it exists in Sokrates, Plato, Demokritus, Anaxagoras, Empedokles, Xenokrates, &c., is individualized in each, and individualized differently in each. It represents the result of the Intellectus Agens or Formal Noûs, universal and permanent, upon the Intellectus Patiens or noëtic receptivity peculiar to each individual; the co-operation of the two is indispensable to sustain the theorizing intellect of any individual man. But the Intellectus Patiens, or Receptivus, perishes along with the individual. Accordingly, the intellectual life of Sokrates cannot be continued farther. It cannot be prolonged after his sensitive and nutritive life has ceased; the noëtic function, as it exists in him, is subject to the same limits of duration as the other functions of the soul. The intellectual man is no more immortal than the sentient man.

490Such is the opinion here delivered by Aristotle. And it follows indeed as a distinct corollary from his doctrine respecting animal and vegetable procreation in general. Individuality (the being unum numero in a species) and immortality are in his view incompatible facts; the one excludes the other. In assigning (as he so often does) a final cause or purpose to the wide-spread fact of procreation of species by animals and vegetables, he tells us that every individual living organism, having once attained the advantage of existence, yearns and aspires to prolong this for ever, and to become immortal. But this aspiration cannot be realized; Nature has forbidden it, or is inadequate to it; no individual can be immortal. Being precluded from separate immortality, the individual approaches as near to it as is possible, by generating a new individual like itself, and thus perpetuating the species. Such is the explanation given by Aristotle of the great fact pervading the sublunary, organized world184 — immortal species of plants, animals, and men, through a succession of individuals each essentially perishable. The general doctrine applies to Noûs as well as to the other functions of the soul. Noûs is immortal; but the individual Sokrates, considered as noëtic or intellectual, can no more be immortal than the same individual considered as sentient or reminiscent.

We have already stated that Noûs — Intellect — the noëtic function — is that faculty of the soul that correlates with the abstract and universal; with Form apart from Matter. Its process is at once analytical, synthetical, and retentive. Nature presents to us only concretes and particulars, in a perpetual course of change and reciprocal action; in these the abstract and universal are immersed, and out of these they have to be disengaged by logical analysis. That the abstract is a derivative from the concrete, and the universal from particulars — is the doctrine of Aristotle. Ascending from particulars, the analysis is carried so far that at length it can go no farther. It continues to divide until it comes to indivisibles, or simple notions, the highest abstractions, and the largest universals. These are the elements out of which universal propositions are formed, the first premisses or principia of demonstration. Unphilosophical minds do not reach these indivisibles at all: but it is the function of the theorizing Noûs to fasten on them, and combine them into true propositions. In so far as regards the indivisibles themselves, falsehood is out of the question, and 491truth also, since they affirm nothing. The mind either apprehends them, or it does not apprehend them: there is no other alternative.185 But, when combined into affirmative propositions, they then are true or false, as the case may be. The formal essence of each object is among these indivisibles, and is apprehended as such by the intellect; which, while confining itself to such essence, is unerring, as each sense is in regard to its own appropriate perceivables.186 But, when the intellect goes father, and proceeds to predicate any attribute respecting the essence, then it becomes liable to error, as sense is when drawing inferences.

One of the chief functions that Aristotle assigns to Noûs, or the noëtic function, is that the principia of demonstration and knowledge belong to it; and not merely the principia, but also, in cases of action preceded by deliberation and balance of motives, the ultimate application of principia to action. So that he styles Noûs both beginning and end; also the beginning of the beginning; and, moreover, he declares it to be always right and unerring — equal to Science and even more than Science.187 These are high praises, conveying little information, and not reconcilable with other passages wherein he speaks of the exercise of the noëtic function (τὸ νοεῖν) as sometimes right, sometimes wrong.188 But, for the question of psychology, the point to be determined is, in what sense he meant that principia belonged to Noûs. He certainly did not mean that the first principles of reasoning were novelties originated, suggested, or introduced into the soul by noëtic influence. Not only he does not say this, but he takes pains to impress the exact contrary. In passages cited a few pages back, he declares that Noûs in entering the soul brings nothing whatever with it; that it is an universal potentiality — a capacity in regard to truth, but nothing more;189 that it is in fact a capacity not merely for comparing and judging (to both of which he recognizes even the sentient soul as competent), but also for combining many into one, and resolving the apparent one into several; for abstracting, generalizing, 492and selecting among the phantasms present, which of them should be attended to, and which should be left out of attention.190 Such is his opinion about the noëtic function; and he states explicitly that the abstract and universal not only arise from the concrete and particular, but are inseparable from the same really — separable only logically.

He describes, at the end of the Analytica Posteriora and elsewhere, the steps whereby the mind ascends gradually from sense, memory, and experience, to general principles. And he indicates a curious contrast between these and the noëtic functions. Sense, memory, phantasy, reminiscence, are movements of the body as well as of the soul; our thoughts and feelings come and go, none of them remaining long. But the noëtic process is the reverse of this; it is an arrest of all this mental movement, a detention of the fugitive thoughts, a subsidence from perturbation — so that the attention dwells steadily and for some time on the same matters.191 Analysis, selection, and concentration of attention, are the real characteristics of the Aristotelian Noûs. It is not (as some philosophers have thought) a source of new general truths, let into the soul by a separate door, and independent of experience as well as transcending experience.

Passing now to the Emotions, we find that these are not systematically classified and analysed by Aristotle, as belonging to a scheme of Psychology; though he treats them incidentally, with great ability and acuteness, both in his Ethics, where he regards them as auxiliaries or impediments to a rational plan of life, and in his Rhetoric, where he touches upon their operation as it bears on oratorical effect. He introduces however in his Psychology some answer to the question, What is it that produces local movement in the animal body? He replies that movement is produced both by Noûs and by Appetite.

Speaking strictly, we ought to call Appetite alone the direct producing cause, acted upon by the appetitum, which is here the Primum Movens Immobile. But this appetitum cannot act without coming into the intellectual sphere, as something seen, imagined, cogitated.192 In this case the Noûs or Intellect is stimulated through appetite, and operates in subordination thereto. 493Such is the Intellect, considered as Practical, the principle or determining cause of which is the appetitum or object of desire; the Intellect manifesting itself only for the sake of some end, to be attained or avoided. Herein it is distinguished altogether from the Theoretical Noûs or Intellect, which does not concern itself with any expetenda or fugienda and does not meddle with conduct. The appetitum is good, real or apparent, in so far as it can be achieved by our actions. Often we have contradictory appetites; and, in such cases, the Intellect is active generally as a force resisting the present and caring for the future. But Appetite or Desire, being an energy including both soul and body, is the real and appropriate cause that determines us to local movement, often even against strong opposition from the Intellect.193

Aristotle thus concludes his scheme of Psychology, comprehending all plants as well as all animals; a scheme differing in this respect, as well as in others, from the schemes of those that had preceded him, and founded upon the peculiar principles of his own First Philosophy. Soul is to organized body as Form to Matter, as Actualizer to the Potential; not similar or homogeneous, but correlative; the two being only separable as distinct logical points of view in regard to one and the same integer or individual. Aristotle recognizes many different varieties of Soul, or rather many distinct functions of the same soul, from the lowest or most universal, to the highest or most peculiar and privileged; but the higher functions presuppose or depend upon the lower, as conditions; while the same principle of Relativity pervades them all. He brings this principle prominently forward, when he is summing up194 in the third or last book of the treatise De Animâ:—“The Soul is in a certain way all existent things; for all of them are either Perceivables or Cogitables; and the Cogitant Soul is in a certain way the matters cogitated, while the Percipient Soul is in a certain way the matters perceived.” The Percipient and its Percepta — the Cogitant and its Cogitata — each implies and correlates with the other: the Percipient is the highest Form of all Percepta; the Cogitant is the Form of Forms, or the highest of all Forms, cogitable or perceivable.195 The Percipient or Cogitant Subject is thus conceived 494only in relation to the Objects perceived or cogitated, while these Objects again are presented as essentially correlative to the Subject. The realities of Nature are particulars, exhibiting Form and Matter in one: though, for purposes of scientific study — of assimilation and distinction — it is necessary to consider each of the two abstractedly from the other.

[END OF CHAPTER XII]

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