Page:The whole familiar colloquies of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam.djvu/239

 THE LYING-IN WOMAN. 235 ancients did not think fit to call them so, and we must not deviate from their ordinances, nor does it signify much as to what we are upon. Fa. But I cannot bear the thoughts of it, that the soul of a beetle and of a man should be the same. En. Good madam, it is not the same, saving in some respects ; your soul animates, vegetates, and renders your body sensible ; the soul of the beetle animates his body : for that some things act one way, and some another, that the soul of a man acts differently from the soul of a beetle, partly proceeds from the matter ; a beetle neither sings nor speaks, because it wants organs fit for these actions. Fa. Why, then, you say, that if the soul of a beetle should pass into the body of a man, it would act as the human soul does. Eu. Nay, I say not, if it were an angelical soul. And there is no difference between an angel and a human soul, but that the soul of a man was formed to act a human body composed of natural organs ; and as the soul of a beetle will move nothing but the body of a beetle, an angel was not made to animate a body, but to be capable to under- stand without bodily organs. Fa*. Can the soul do the same thing 1 Eu. It can, indeed, when it is separated from the body? Fa. Is it not at its own disposal while it is in. the body 1 Eu. No, indeed, except something happen beside the common course of nature. Fa,. In truth, instead of one soul you have given me a great many an animal, a vegetative, a sensitive, an intelligent, a remembering, a willing, an angry, and desiring : one was enough for me. Eu. There are different actions of the same soul, and these have different names. Fa,. I do not well understand you. Eu. Well, then, I will make you understand me. You are a wife in the bed-chamber, in your workshop a weaver of hangings, in your warehouse a seller of them, in your kitchen a cook, among your servants a mistress, and among your children a mother ; and yet you are all these in the same house. Fa. You philosophise very bluntly. Is, then, the soul so in the body as I am in my house 1 Eu. It is. Fa. But while I am weaving in my workshop I am not cooking in my kitchen. Eu. Nor are you all soul, but a soul carrying about a body, and the body cannot be in many places at the same time ; but the soul, being a simple form, is so in the whole body, though it does not act the same in all parts of the body, nor after the same manner, how differently affected soever they are. For it understands and remembers in the brain, it is angry in the heart, it lusts in the liver, it hears with the ears, sees with the eyes, smells with the nose, it tastes in the palate and tongue, and feels in all the parts of the body which are adjoined to any nervous part. But it does not feel in the hair, nor the ends of the nails ; neither do the lungs feel of themselves, nor the liver, nor perhaps the milt neither. Fa. So that in certain parts of the body it only animates and vegetates. Eu. It should seem so. Fa. If one and the same soul does all these things in one and the same man, it follows of consequence that the foetus in the ,womb of the mother both feels and understands as soon as it begins to grow ; which, is a sign of life, unless a man in his formation has more souls than one, and afterwards the rest giving place, one acts all. So that at first a man is a plant, then an animal, and lastly a man. Eu. Perhaps Aristotle would not think what you say absurd : I think it is more probable that the rational soul is infused with the life, and that, like a