LECTIO TEN

             § 146. After stating and criticising the arguments of those who thought that, because the soul moves the body, it must itself be in movement, the Philosopher is next concerned to show that a stronger support for the assertion that the soul was in movement might be drawn from considering the activities proper to it.  Dividing his treatment into two parts, he first states the hypothesis that the soul's activities are evidence of its movement; and then settles the problem so far as his present purpose requires, this part beginning at 'This, however, . . .'.

             First, then, he says that whereas the philosophers, of whom he has been speaking, thought that the soul might be in movement from considering the fact that it moved the body, a more rational, i.e. a more plausible, argument might be drawn 'by considering such facts as these', i.e. as the activities of the soul itself. For from these one might build up a very plausible argument in favour of the soul's being in movement. For we say that the soul 'is sad, pleased, confident (i.e. daring) and frightened'; and we say that it gets angry and senses and understands. And since all these are activities of the soul, and also types of movement, it would seem that the soul moves. And this is a more plausible suggestion than the one already discussed. For the latter argued the soul's movement from the body's, according to the principle that every mover is itself moved; so that if soul moves body the soul itself is moved. But the theory now to be considered regards the movement of the soul from the standpoint of the soul's own activities.

             § 147. Next, at 'This, however,' he clears up the difficulty. Here we should note that when Aristotle is searching for truth by a process of stating and answering objections, he will sometimes employ this method after having already demonstrated the truth in question; and then his objections and solutions are governed by the opinion he has already formed for himself. But sometimes he does all this before demonstrating the truth, and then he bases his objections and solutions on the views of others and not on his own opinion or on what he believes to be the truth. For example, in Book III of the Physics, where he argues against those who maintained the existence of an infinite, he employs a number of principles false in themselves but considered true by his opponents, e.g. that every body is both light and heavy. For he had not yet decided about the lightness and heaviness of bodies; this he did later on in the De Coelo, where, in consequence, he reopens the question of the infinite. And such is his method here. His criticism rests upon presupposing as true the views of his opponents.

             § 148. These latter, especially the Platonists, thought that sorrow, joy, anger, sensation and thought, and so forth, were movements in the soul, and that each of these activities, not excepting thought, had its own particular organ; so that in this respect there was no difference between sensitivity and intelligence; and every kind of soul, not the intellectual soul only, was immortal. All of which Aristotle concedes, presupposing that all such activities, even thinking, are organic, and that all souls are immortal. He only denies that such activities as sensation and joy are movements in the soul, asserting that they belong rather to the compound of body and soul. This alone he makes the point at issue.

             § 149. And here he does two things. First, he shows that the activities in question are not movements of the soul; secondly, he proves this with a special argument beginning at 'But intellect'. His opponents, he says, maintain two points: (1) that joy and sorrow and so forth are movements; (2) that these movements are to be attributed to the soul; which therefore moves. But the conclusion does not necessarily follow; and in any case both propositions are false--the activities in question are not movements, nor are such things as anger, joy, sensation, to be attributed to the soul. But even granted, for the sake of argument, that they are movements, they should not be attributed to the soul; nor the soul, in consequence, be held to move in and with them.

             § 150. For it is obvious that, even if these activities are movements and are of the soul, they are not of the soul except with respect to certain definite parts of the body: thus sensation only takes place in certain parts of the body, such as the eye, the organ of sight; and anger in the heart; and so with the rest. It is clear that they are movements not of the soul alone, but of soul and body together. Yet they are from the soul; for example, when the soul thinks that anything is worthy of anger, the animal organ called the heart is disturbed and the blood gets heated around it. So also with fear; it makes a definite part of the body contract and change. And likewise with the rest. In these cases, then, the soul in itself does not move, but only moves in the movement of another thing, e.g. the heart. But in view of a point which Aristotle is going to prove later on, namely that understanding is an act of the soul alone, in which the body has no share, he observes here that perhaps understanding should be distinguished from all those activities which occur in the compound of soul and body. He says 'perhaps' because he is speaking tentatively. But in asserting that the other activities are of soul and body together he implies that they do arise from the soul.

             § 151. So, when he says 'Of these, etc.', he means to show that these movements arise from the soul to the accompaniment of certain local changes; as in the case of anger, which occurs in the soul when parts of the body in and around the heart are moved: the blood heated by the heart is dispelled towards the extremities of the body. There may also be an 'alteration' or qualitative movement, as in fear, when the heart contracts and grows cold and one turns pale. What these passions are, and how they come about, is another question; but it is clear that as movements they are not in the soul alone, but in soul and body together.

             § 152. Hence just as any animal's bodily activities spring not from its soul alone but from its body, or from the compound of soul and body, so too sense-perception and joy and so forth should not be attributed to the soul alone, but to body and soul together. To say that the soul gets angry and is thereby moved is like saying that the soul weaves or builds or plays the harp. The soul indeed is the cause of these activities; for the acquired ability to build or weave or play the harp is in the soul, and the exercise of the ability in each case springs from the soul. But, as it is better to say that the builder, not the art of building, builds, though the builder builds by his art, so perhaps it is better to say that it is not the soul that feels pity or learns or thinks, but the man who does these things with his soul. He says 'perhaps etc.' for the reason given above.

             § 153. But since the statement that the soul does not move, but man with his soul, might be taken to mean that movement exists in the soul as its subject, to forestall this Aristotle explains that when he says that man moves with his soul he means that movement is derived, as it were, from the soul, not that it is found in the soul itself.

             § 154. For when I say 'this moves with that', my statement can be taken in two senses: either that the source of a given movement is itself moving, as when I say that a man moves with his feet, the feet themselves moving; or that something motionless in itself moves another thing; and it is in this latter sense that a man is said to move with his soul.

             § 155. Now this movement is two-fold. Sometimes the soul represents the term, to which the movement tends, as in sensation; for in the act of the soul's apprehending exterior sense-objects, the sensitive faculty in the bodily organ is aroused and, moving, transmits 'to it', i.e. to the soul, images and notions of sensible things. But sometimes the soul behaves as the starting point of movement, as in remembering, when the latent, buried images and notions of things are brought to light, in order that sensible things may be understood through them. Whether the inward storing away of images should itself be called a movement or a resting is not immediately relevant.

             § 156. Movements of this sort, then, are not to be attributed to the soul, but to the soul and body together; if they spring from the soul, this does not imply movement in the soul.

             § 157. But observe that this solution of the problem is only provisional; it does not leave us with the truth perfectly defined. For movement is attributed to the soul's activities in different ways by different people. In fact, three kinds of movement are discernible therein. In some of these activities movement in the strict sense is found. In others it is found in a less exact sense of the term. And in others in a still looser sense.

             § 158. For movement proper occurs in the activities of the vegetative soul and in sensuous desire. In vegetative activity the material substance itself moves, in consequence of assimilating food. This movement is growth; wherein the vegetative soul plays the active part, the body a passive one. In sensuous desire also movement proper occurs, both through qualitative alterations and also through changes of place. No sooner does a man desire anything than he is affected by certain changes--becoming angry, as in the desire for revenge, or glad as in the pursuit of pleasure. And, accompanying this, the blood moves outwards from the heart to the extremities of the body; besides the fact that the whole man moves from one place to another in pursuit of what he desires.

             § 159. In a less strict sense, however, movement occurs in the acts of the sensitive soul. Here there is no movement of the material substance itself, but only a 'spiritual' movement of cognition: for example, the act of seeing is not a material modification; it is 'spiritual' reception into the eye of sensible forms. Yet it does involve some material change, because the faculty of sight is lodged in the body: and to this extent it involves movement, though it is not movement in the strict sense. Movement in the strict sense is not ascribed to the soul's activities except when a modification of the material substance is the direct term of the activity.

             § 160. Least strictly of all, and indeed only by a metaphor, is movement to be ascribed to the act of the intellect, in which there is no movement of the material substance, as in the case of vegetative activities, nor even any alteration of the subject of 'spiritual' operations, as in the case of sense-awareness. There is only an activity which is called movement simply because the mind goes from potency into act. This differs from movement proper; for whereas the latter connotes an imperfection in the moving subject, this activity proceeds from the subject as already perfect and complete.

             § 161. Clearly then the acts of the vegetative and sensitive souls are not exclusively of the soul, but of soul and body together; while those of the intellect are only called movements metaphorically, and are exclusively of the soul, without the use of any particular bodily organ.

             § 162. Note too that, as desire and cognition are both found in the sensitive part, the same division appears in the intellectual part also. Hence love, hatred, delight and so forth can be understood either as sensitive, and in this sense they are accompanied by a bodily movement; or as exclusively intellectual and volitional, without any accompanying sensuous desire; and understood in this sense they are not movements, for they involve no accompanying bodily change. In this latter sense they pertain even to immaterial substances, as will be shown more clearly later.

             § 163. Then, at 'But intellect', Aristotle sets out to prove what has been shown, namely that even if activities of this kind are movements (as the philosophers he is discussing maintained) still they are not movements of the soul alone, but involve the body also. So he takes one of their opinions (famous in his time), namely that not the intellect only, but every kind of soul without exception, is immortal. According to this view the intellect was a substance in the making, still incomplete, and was immortal. For it is a fact of experience that all the weakening and decay that affect the intellect or the senses come from the side of the bodily organ, not from the soul itself. Whence it would seem to follow that the intellect and every other sort of soul was incorruptible; if its activities grow feeble that does not imply its own decay, but the decay of the organs of the body.

             § 164. If the soul itself decayed it would decay especially in old age; that is when the organs of sense grow feeble. Yet in fact the soul itself is unaffected by old age; if an old man could be given a young man's eye he would see just as well as a young man. The decline of old age, then, is not due to a decline in the soul or in the faculties of sense, but to the body; just as in sickness or drunkenness it is the body, not the soul, that is enfeebled. Hence 'understanding', i.e. simple apprehension, and 'thinking', i.e. the intellectual activity of combining and distinguishing ideas, grow weak, not through a weakness in the intellect, but through 'the decay of something else within', i.e. the intellect's organ or instrument. Understanding 'in itself cannot be affected'.

             § 165. Now in saying this Aristotle is not giving it as his opinion that the intellect has a special bodily organ, but, in the manner already explained, he is arguing on the supposition that the views of the philosophers whom he is criticising are sound; and it was their view, as we have seen, that each of the soul's activities, and even intellect itself, had its special bodily organ. Assuming this, therefore, he gives as the reason for the decay of the understanding that it is one of those activities (like hating and loving) which are not of the soul alone, but of 'that which has it', i.e. of the compound of body and soul, or the bodily organ--precisely, he adds, in so far as this compound has 'it', i.e. understanding, and so forth. Consequently when 'this' (i.e. the bodily organ) 'decays' its activities, such as loving or understanding, decay likewise, and the soul itself neither remembers nor loves any more. The reason is that such processes did not only involve the soul, but 'that which was common', i.e. the whole compound being; which has now  decayed and passed away. Clearly, then, if all such movements and activities decay through the body's decay, not the soul's, they are not themselves exclusively of the soul, but of the soul and body together; and not the soul, but soul and body together, is what moves.

             § 166. But to remove any impression that he himself believes the intellect to be what the argument he is using supposes it to be, he adds these words, 'Perhaps intellect is something more godlike and unalterable', i.e. some sort of nobler power than any we are considering now, whose activity is exclusively of the soul. He says 'perhaps' because the question has not been decided yet; it will be cleared up in Book III. So much to show that he is arguing on a supposition.

             § 167. Finally, he concludes from all this that it is now clear that the soul itself cannot be the subject of movement. And if so, then the soul is obviously not a self-mover with movements of the kinds here discussed, as the philosophers he is criticising had maintained.

408b 32-409b 18

SOUL AS A SELF-MOVING NUMBER

             MUCH the most unreasonable thing said about the soul is that it is a number moving itself. In this there are several impossibilities. First, what follows upon 'being moved', as they say; and then the special difficulties that follow their assertion that it is a number. How is one to conceive a unity, indivisible and undifferentiated in itself, as moving? Or by what? Or in what way? For if it is both moved and mover, there must be some difference in itself.§§ 168-9

             Further, since they say that a line, being moved, makes a plane, and a point, being moved, a line, the movements of the units will be lines. Now a point is unit having position; so that the number of a soul must be in some place and have position.§ 170

             Further, if one subtracts from a number a number or a unit, another number is left. Plants, however, and many animals, live on after being divided, and seem to retain specifically the same soul.§ 171

             It would seem to be a matter of indifference whether one says 'units' or 'small bodies'. For if the spheres of Democritus were to become points, and only quantity remained, there would remain in them a moving and a moved, as in extended matter. For the distinction spoken of is not due to largeness or smallness, but to quantity as such. Hence there must necessarily be something moving the units. But if it is the soul which moves the animal, so also in the case of number: then the soul is not a moving thing which is also moved, but a mover only.§ 172

             Now this would have somehow to be a unit. If so, it must have some principle of differentiation from other units. But how can one isolated point differ from others, but in position? But if there are many different units and points in a body, they will be units in the same subject, and will occupy space as points. But, if there are two in the same place, what is there to prevent an infinity of them together? That of which the place is indivisible is itself such. But if the points in the body are the 'numbers' of the soul, or if the 'number' of body-points is that of the soul, why are there not souls in all bodies? For in all things there seem to be points, even to infinity.§ 173

             Furthermore, how is it possible for these points to be separated and released from the body? Since lines cannot be divided up into points?§ 174