Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/27

 on the first book of the Analytica Priora, on the Topica, Meterology [sic], de sensu, the first five books of the Metaphysics and an abridgment of the other books of the Metaphysics, as well as treatises on the soul, etc. Over and over again his treatise on the soul and his commentaries are translated into Arabic, paraphrased, and made the subject of further commentaries, until it seems that his psychology is the very nucleus of all Arabic philosophy, and it is this which forms the main point of the Arabic influence on Latin scholasticism. It becomes indeed absolutely essential that we understand the Alexandrian interpretation of the Aristotelian psychology if we are to follow the oriental development of Greek science.

The first point is to understand what is to be implied in the term "soul." Plato was really a dualist in that he regards the soul as a separate entity which animates the body and compares it to a rider directing and controlling the horse he rides. But Aristotle makes a more careful analysis of psychological phenomena. In the treatise de anima he says "there is no need to enquire whether soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the imprint are one; or, in general, whether the matter of a thing is the same with that of which it is the matter." (Aristot: de anima. II. i. 412. b. 6.) Aristotle defines the soul as "the first actuality of a natural body having in it the capacity of life" (id. 412. b. 5), in which "first" denotes that the soul is the primary form by which the substance of the body is