The Philosophy and Psychology of Pietro Pomponazzi/Chapter I

CHAPTER I
ARISTOTLE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

thought is not easy to understand, either in its strength or in its weakness. In its earlier stages especially it eludes our comprehension, and baffles every effort of a modern mind to grasp its presuppositions or follow its processes with anything like sympathy or intelligence. Perhaps we shall best be enabled to comprehend it by approaching it, not at its obscure beginnings, but backwards from its end; and by observing the fabric in its dissolution. It is not unreasonable to expect that a great deal may be learned about the scholastic period by taking our stand with those who stood upon its nearer verge. They may reveal to us whatever was true and valuable in mediaeval ideas by expressing them in language that is closer to our own. We shall also be helped to unravel the fallacies of a scholasticism which still clings at many points to popular thought, by the experience of those who were undergoing a personal emancipation from its grosser errors.

In Pomponazzi we have precisely that admixture of the old and the new which from this point of view it is interesting to study. In various parts of his works we are able to perceive the dawn of ideas and methods of thought which have since prevailed. On one page he is occupied with questions and controversies whose interest has long ago perished and whose presuppositions have disappeared with the change of the standpoint of thought; on the next, he employs and even expounds positive and empirical methods of reasoning which are the permanent foundation of science. And, once again, in the application even of true methods, he is misled by meagre or erroneous information, and remains the victim of innumerable superstitions. Pomponazzi may be called one of the earliest of the moderns; but it is even more instructive to observe that he was one of the last of the schoolmen.

Pomponazzi is especially memorable as one of the first to receive Aristotle’s doctrine of the Soul in its simplicity, and to escape from the monstrous shadows of Averroism. For a priori speculations as to the nature of intelligence and of spiritual substances, speculations which had attained to mythological dimensions, he substituted an attempt, imperfect yet genuine, at direct observation and analysis of the character of intelligence in man.

The change which he made is not sufficiently accounted for by the influence upon him of the Greek commentators on Aristotle, since in his conception of human intelligence Pomponazzi rose almost as far above Alexander as above Averroes; and it is on this account completely misleading to represent the controversy which divided the Italian universities in the 16th century, simply as a dispute between the followers of Averroes and those of Alexander of Aphrodisias in the interpretation of Aristotle. We shall see upon closer examination that this account of the matter is altogether too simple. Meanwhile two observations may be made. On the one hand, many or most of those who invoked the authority of Averroes had introduced a garbled Averroism which really travestied the doctrine of the Arabian and turned it upside down. Not only did they employ his dogma of an eternal Intelligence of collective humanity to support individual immortality, which Averroes probably did not profess to hold, and at any rate could not hold consistently; but, in order to do this, they had abandoned the most characteristic tenet of Averroism, namely that individual men do not naturally possess true reason, but receive it by “union” with the common Intelligence. On the other hand Pomponazzi was not merely a follower of Alexander. While largely influenced by Alexander, he presented that commentator’s doctrine of the soul with a difference of which he may himself have been more or less unconscious, but which is of material consequence to the comparison of ancient and modern thought. Pomponazzi’s doctrine of man’s participation in intelligence is something quite different from Alexander’s doctrine of Divine “assistance”—of the νοϋς ποιητικός in a theological sense, acting from without upon the human soul: Pomponazzi is less dualistic and theological, more positive and humanistic than Alexander. And corresponding to this difference, there is a different conception of the soul; since to Alexander no more than to Averroes did the human soul naturally or in itself possess true intelligence.

The psychology of Pomponazzi, accordingly, had in reality a deeper root than his reading of Alexander, since in an essential point he refused Alexander’s guidance and indeed on that issue diverged alike from Alexander and from Averroes in a manner which is of the greatest interest to those who seek to trace the growth and origin of modern modes of thought. The truth is that Pomponazzi, largely neglecting baseless speculations, concerned himself with intelligence as it exists in man. Abandoning the search after “separate substances,” at least so far as man is concerned, he examined intelligence as it is actually manifested in human nature. It was in virtue of this method of positive analysis that he approximated so closely to the original doctrine of Aristotle. Following Alexander, he held that such an analysis discovered no soul existing in separation from the body; but then he did not, like Alexander, distinguish true intelligence from the soul of man as something above it, and only visiting it from without; on the contrary, he held that the “intellectual soul” of man was possessed of true intelligence.

This way of approaching the issues concerning intelligence and the soul seems, when compared with mediaeval modes of thought, to indicate a new standpoint and a new mental attitude. In reality it was an old standpoint that had been recovered again—the original standpoint of Aristotle.

It is true that Pomponazzi still speaks of the soul’s “participation” in intelligence, and so far uses the language of dualism which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. It is true also that he adopts, though only after a conventional and perfunctory manner, in relation to a mythical world of superior Intelligences, the notion of intelligence as “separate substance” independent of body and matter. But these are not the elements in Pomponazzi’s mind which are of most interest to the historian tracing in him the onward movement of thought. They are part of the furniture of his mind, not without historical significance; but it is not in these traditional features of his belief, but in more personal mental activities exercised apart from them and in spite of them, that we find the spirit of the time expressed, and that immanent logic at work, to trace which is to write the history of philosophy. It is in the spirit of Aristotle that Pomponazzi considers human intelligence, which is the real subject of his interest and of his personal contribution to thought. He finds by a positive analysis that the soul of man is possessed of intelligence; and the soul is known to us in body, is never manifested to us except in body, and is indeed but the highest aspect and true being of that body. There is, he contends, no evidence of any “separate” existence of the soul. We have no knowledge of any other mode of being for a soul, which thus, and only thus, presents itself to us.

Now, whatever we are to think of the conclusions at which Pomponazzi arrived as to the constitution of the human being, and as to the worth, significance, and prospect of human life, this is the only scientific method of approaching the study of man.

Every mediaeval and every later Alexandrian interpretation of Aristotle had been coloured by Neo-Platonism. The idea of the individual soul as a substance, separate and self-existent, which prevailed with practical uniformity in the orthodox schools from patristic down to modern times, can be traced historically through the theology of Augustine back to the influence of the Alexandrian thinkers who first expressed Platonic conceptions in the forms of the Aristotelian logic. So also with that separation of intelligence from the soul, which is so characteristic of the Arabians, and which gave rise to the fantastic speculations as to the real nature of human intelligence conceived as substantially separate from the soul of man, and to the interminable, because fictitious, question about the soul’s participation in intelligence. This false abstraction was likewise derived from the Neo-Platonic metaphysics of those early discussions in which Arab Peripateticism took its rise. And certainly, among the commentators on Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias was no exception to this rule: although a predecessor of Neo-Platonism in the official sense, he interpreted Aristotle in accordance with the postulates of a metaphysical dualism.

It cannot of course be said that the original doctrine of Aristotle about the intellectual soul of man (ψυχή νοητική) is free from obscurity or even from ambiguity. The contradictions, at least in appearance, of that doctrine have been abundantly illustrated by Zeller and others. The soul of man is the “form” of his body; that is the standpoint from which Aristotle’s investigation of human nature starts; and within the conception thus determined the whole enquiry moves. Soul and body are one as the wax and the form into which it is impressed are one; the body is what it is only in virtue of the soul, as an eye is an eye only in virtue of the power of seeing, and an axe is an axe only in virtue of its power of cutting: the eye is “the pupil and the vision.” But then Reason (νοϋς), which is the faculty of the soul as intellectual (νοητική), is spoken of as something essentially separate from the body. It does not first come into existence when it “enters into” the body; nor does it perish with the body; although of its previous or subsequent existence we, whose thought is conditioned by sense and sensuous representation, can form no idea. Yet is reason as in man not to be identified with a Divine or extramundane Reason; it is a true part of the human soul. Again, there seems to be a contradiction between the conceptions of “active” and “passive” reason; and although the process described as “passive reason”—the operation of thought upon the data of sense—is psychologically verifiable, and it was important that it should thus be signalised, it is not easy to reconcile the actual facts of that process with the definition given of thought under the name of “active reason.” Finally, there is on this view of reason no ground for the determination of personality. Personal identity cannot be supposed to be determined by the lower faculties of the soul; but reason as defined is essentially impersonal, its imperishability, for instance, by no means implying personal immortality.

When Aristotle comes to the most difficult point, the transition namely from particular data of sense to the unity of a “thought,” he introduces a principle of thought to explain the change; thought, he simply says, brings the universal conception from its potentiality (in “sense” and “imagination”) to actuality. Psychologically, of course, this is no explanation. It does not explain for example why thought emerges in human experience only gradually, and at a certain stage.

Such was the deficiency of Aristotle’s attempt at a psychological account of human thought as thought. The distinction and proper correlation of a metaphysical and a psychological or historical view of thought, were achievements not to be expected of ancient philosophy. At the same time, even if he could not properly account for reason in the soul of man, or say why in him reason has just this history, Aristotle preferred to leave this difficulty standing, rather than, with Democritus and Epicurus, to underestimate the rational factor in human life. He determined fully to recognise the peculiar character of thought as such in the soul of man.

The achievement of Aristotle with reference to the soul of man may be summed up in three particulars.

(a) In advance on Plato he substituted science—a method of empirical observation and genetic biological analysis—for mythology in psychology.

(b) He recognised at the same time the true nature of thought and of thought as it exists in man.

In his view of reason Aristotle remained an idealist. His failure to balance his doctrine of universal and timeless reason with any deduction of personality has already been referred to.

(c) He attributes the power of thought, so understood, to the essential nature of man. The νοϋς ποιητικός is a part of the soul of that soul which is the “form of the body” of man. It is neither a separate substance existing outside of the man as man, nor an emanation or communication of a superior spiritual being not himself. It is εν τή ψυχή. The distinction between active and potential reason is a distinction within the soul itself. Reason is a part of the soul (μόριον τής ψυχής): it is said to be a higher aspect or kind of the soul—ψυχής γένος έτερον (which does not in reality mean another soul): and this although in another point of view it is χωριστός. Whether the apparent contradiction in these terms is really a contradiction, and whether in ascribing reason to the soul of man Aristotle passed beyond the scope of his original enquiry into man as a natural being, is the question to which all philosophy seeks an answer. It may be repeated again that Aristotle’s affirmation of reason in man was to a large extent a dogmatic affirmation.

Aristotle, however, cannot at any rate be held responsible for the notion of the soul as a “separate substance” or for the separation of “intelligence” from the soul, although both these corruptions of his doctrine soon sprang up within his school, and both may partly be attributed to the dogmatic introduction of a timeless principle of reason into the nature of man, and to the abrupt juxtaposition of intelligence beside the lower powers of the soul. On the one hand the soul being identified with reason might be separated from the physical nature of man; or, on the other hand, if the soul were still regarded as the form of body, “reason” might be distinguished from the “soul”: and as a matter of fact the doctrine of Aristotle came to be perverted in both of these directions by those who considered themselves his followers. Under various influences the idea took shape of the soul, the organ of intelligence, as a separate substance metaphysically distinguished from the body; and this conception prevailed largely throughout the Middle Ages, even when combined with a nominal adherence to the Aristotelian formula that soul is the “form” of body. In other minds the Aristotelian language about νοϋς, reinforced by more or less of Platonic influence, suggested a metaphysical separation of intelligence and the natural soul. A tendency to this mode of dualism shewed itself very early among would-be interpreters of Aristotle; it was essentially characteristic of Alexander of Aphrodisias; and it reached its full development in the speculations of the Arabians. To Alexander the Intelligence productive of true knowledge in the human soul might be the Divine Reason, to Averroes an intermediate intellectual Power; both alike, while holding with more or less comprehension and consistency that “soul” was the “form of body,” denied to soul as such the natural possession of “intelligence.”

The earliest disciples of Aristotle began, like him, with man as a physical being; but they failed to follow him further, and, missing the impulse which urged their master to unify the life of man and to attribute to the soul which was all the while the “form of the body” the possession of reason (ψυχή νοητική), they relapsed into a practical materialism. Even they however could not ignore the νοϋς χωριστός of the master’s system, though they relegated it as far as possible to a higher sphere and denied its part in the actual life of the soul of man. Stoic influences doubtless co-operated in this early materialistic tendency.

With the reaction against such an interpretation of Aristotle began the development of the two dualistic theories that have been referred to—the theory of the separateness from the body of the soul in its higher functions, and the theory of the separation of intelligence from the soul. Yet each of these attempts to escape from materialism was also a natural outgrowth from what had gone before; for the doctrine of an “assisting” Intelligence, in the simple form in which it was held by thinkers like Alexander, was only a more consistent application of the dualistic scheme which lay behind the naturalism of the earliest Peripatetics; and, on the other hand, the corporeal notion of soul current in the Stoic schools was a large factor in the conception of the soul as a “spiritual” substance.

The physical and quasi-physical theories of the Stoics, and of those who mingled Stoicism with the doctrines of Aristotle, helped the formation of the “substantial” notion of the soul.

The conception was widely current and popularly influential which regarded soul as one form or manifestation of “spirit” (πνεϋμα) body being another. This was in intention an effort to distinguish soul from body, while at the same time accounting for the connection between the two. The use thus made of the conception of πνεϋμα might be traced back to its remote origin in the primitive notion of a peculiar power residing in air, wind, and breath, and exercised both in the universe generally and in the body of man. This primitive idea under went an interesting theological development in Hebrew thought; among the Greeks it played a great part in physiological theory. Hence the universal role in the mechanics of life assigned by early medicine to breath, which was in the body as it were the organising power. Aristotle himself gives this place to πνεϋμα in the mechanism of the body, connecting it especially with vital heat: it was used by him, and still more by his successors, as a convenient explanation of unknown physiological processes (such, for example, as the functions of the nerves or the arteries). There had also been an early idea of a connection between πνεϋμα and soul as mind, and early theories of air or breath connecting soul and body.

But it was in the Stoic philosophy of nature that the idea of πνεϋμα reached its fullest development, as an explanation of vital and psychical phenomena. In working out their half materialistic and half mystical pantheism, the Stoics made large use of the primitive notion of a universal fire-force and of the later medical theories of πνεϋμα. They avoided the materialism into which a section of the Peripatetic school fell: soul, they said, could not be simply a product of body. Yet as compared with the idealism of Aristotle’s doctrine—that body found in its psychical (and intellectual) aspect its true being and meaning—the πνεϋμα of the Stoics was essentially a physical principle, although it was intended to be something more, and, as the common source of body and soul, to combine in its potentialities the qualities of both.

“Spirit” then originally entered into psychology in a theory of the nature of the soul. It was not first introduced as a faculty or part of the soul, but by way of explaining its substantial nature. It may be said that to ancient thought ψυχή was the fact to be explained—organised matter, that is, and life, and the thinking being; and πνεϋμα represented a theory of that fact. Originally, it stood for a physical explanation; and it was by a curious course of changes in language and thought that the “spiritual” came at last to mean precisely that which is not physical, which is purely immaterial.

This conception of “spirit,” devised to form a common basis for soul and body, sprang from a sense of an antithesis between the two. From Aristotle’s standpoint it was unnecessary to seek this basis of union, since in concrete reality soul and body were already one as form and matter. But the “pneumatic” theory proposed to harmonise them in a common derivation from a single universal force—which should be at once, as it were, matter attenuated to the point of immateriality and soul on a physical basis. Really, the separation supposed was not overcome by this means; soul and body remained two different manifestations of the original principles. Accordingly, as has been suggested above, the πνεϋμα doctrine effectually prepared the way for the dualistic notion of body and soul as separate substances. On the other hand, the explanation given was in reality a physical one, and soul was reduced to terms of body. A dualistic account of soul and body cannot in fact be consistently maintained; soul and body are actually united; and if the true nature of their union be not discerned by a philosophical criticism like Aristotle’s of the two ideas in correlation, one will always be merged theoretically in the other. The “spiritual” or “pneumatic” theory really merged soul in body.

It was, however, through various refinements that the original “pneumatic” theory of the soul passed into the doctrine of the “separate spiritual substance.” A combination of influences, proceeding from very different sources, led to the gradual sublimation of the πνεϋμα ψυχικόν into something essentially immaterial.

There began, for example, very early, by reaction against the materialistic aspect of Stoicism, that reversion to Platonic modes of thought which eventually culminated in Neo-Platonism. A revived recollection of the Aristotelian doctrine of νοϋς χωριστός operated in the same direction, especially when Aristotle’s language was interpreted in a Platonic sense.

To this was added the influence of the Hebrew conception of “Spirit” when Hebrew thought, mainly through the Jewish and subsequently the Christian writers of Alexandria, found its way into the main stream of Western philosophy. Originally, no doubt, the conception of Ruach corresponded closely with that of πνεϋμα in the primitive stage of Greek thought. But as it presents itself within the historical period, the Hebrew doctrine has a distinctive stamp upon it. It is probable that from very early times, in accordance with the Hebrew’s conception of the relation between God and Nature, the breath was to him something dynamic, separate from the matter into which it was breathed. It was of course derived from God. There remained, indeed, a marked physical colouring in the conception of this derivation: first, in so far as Spirit was represented mythologically as a substance intermediate between God and the world, and, as it were, hyper-physical; and secondly, in the imaginations that were formed of the manner of its emergence from the Divine Being. Over against this, however, was a strongly ethical delineation of the Spirit’s fruits and operation, and in general of the nature of God and man, especially in the New Testament. The ethical emphasis of Hebrew and Christian anthropology wrought powerfully towards the metaphysical conception of the “spirit” of man The whole Biblical doctrine of “Spirit,” and especially that of the New Testament, is more theological and ethical than psychological. St Paul’s doctrine of πνεϋμα, in so far as it is a new doctrine, is theological and ethical. St Paul and other New Testament writers employ the language of the psychology accepted in their day, as indeed they could not but do; and in that language we may trace the survival of many Hebrew and Greek and indeed primitive ideas. (See Siebeck, op. cit. I. 2, pp. 156, 157.) But in so far as in his declarations about πνεϋμα St Paul develops a specific doctrine, it is a doctrine of man’s relation to God—of the relation to God, in particular, as the creative and indwelling Spirit, of those new and distinctive ethical experiences which he has as a Christian. Of physical effects of the Divine πνεϋμα he traces none. Nay, further, it is the very point of all his assertions about the life of the πνεϋμα in man that it has no relation at all to either ψυχή or νοϋς. His πνεϋμα, then, is a religious dogma; it is his expression for a reference to God of the higher religious life of man. Whether St Paul in this theology altogether escaped the physical associations of the word πνεϋμα is a question of great historical interest; it is certain that those who followed him in the doctrine of the Divine co-operation, and of grace, did not succeed in eliminating from it the physical element. (Cf. Hampden, Bampton Lectures, pp. 231, 235.) In St Paul’s case it is to be observed that the union of man with God is not described in physical terms: it is “by faith”; its effects also, the “fruits of the Spirit,” are ethical in their character. In conclusion it may be said that the New Testament doctrine of TrvfufJM had not much to do with the subsequent development of ideas about the soul of man, except in so far as these were influenced by theology. Indirectly, it will be gathered from the text that theological influence played a considerable part—the ethical deepening, for example, produced by Christianity, and the new value set upon the individual soul, accentuating the problem presented by man’s complex nature and requiring an analysis which should do justice to its higher elements; the Neo-Platonic theology, again, of the early Church corroborating the dogma of a “substantial” soul; or, once more, physical conceptions of grace or of the Divine Being, falling in with the physical aspect which those “spiritual” substances always retained. .

Speaking generally, theological ideas reacted on psychology. In the system of the Stoics, πνεϋμα had constituted the substance not only of the world, physical and psychical, but of God as well; for indeed the two were in substance indistinguishable. Consequently, when a reviving Platonism and a Christian theology conceived in the Platonic spirit substituted for this idea of God that of a Being separated from matter, the new idea of God came to be read into the meaning of πνεϋμα, and affected directly the conception of the nature of the soul as πνευματική. Thus we see the physical giving place to the immaterial signification of the words “spirit” and “spiritual.”

The ideas of Philo represent a well-marked stage in this development. Subject as he was to all of the various influences which have just been enumerated, he combined all the main ideas of antiquity upon the subjects of the Universal Spirit and the soul of man in a syncretism which, while possessing the least possible positive value, is nevertheless of extraordinary historical interest. The Jewish Alexandrian philosophy may be said in a word to have combined the Greek with the Hebrew idea of spirit, and to have found in both at once the Platonic and the Aristotelian reason (νοϋς). Philo adopts both the physical and the incorporeal conception of spirit (πνεϋμα), just as he seeks to combine in his own thought the λόγος of the Stoics and of Plato: πνεϋμα, in grosser or in finer form, is the nature of man as a living soul. The soul (ψυχή) Philo derives, following Aristotle on his naturalistic side, from the seed, but from a “pneumatic” element there. Again the νοϋς is implanted from without, and is not a part of the soul, having its ούσία in the Divine Nature; but it also is πνεϋμα in the finest form. This πνεϋμα Philo now attempts to explain in Stoic fashion as matter refined to the point of immateriality, and again treats as essentially immaterial. He attempts to mediate between the two notions by means of such conceptions as those of invisibility and infinite extensibility. But the truth is that Philo represents the stage of transition between the Stoic idea of the materiality of the substance of the soul and the Platonic idea of its immateriality.

The Divine Logos, for example, of which the νοϋς is an image, is immaterial and transcendent. The νοϋς itself (which is πνεϋμα in its finest form) he speaks of in opposition to matter as incorporeal, but in comparison with Divine spirituality as “ethereal”—that is something intermediate between the material and the immaterial.

Philo’s position at all events illustrates the development of the conception of a substance of the soul as separate from body. It is true that it is the νοϋς, which is not part of the soul, that attains or approaches most nearly to the attribute of immateriality; and that Philo, in whom we find everything of this sort, illustrates also that other corruption of Aristotle which metaphysically distinguishes soul from reason. But it is also evident that in Philo we make the transition to a Platonic or hyper-physical determination of the soul, with the final sublimation or rarefaction of πνεϋμα, of which ψυχή is a mode. The conception which begins to shew itself in Philo is at least some thing perfectly different from the πνεϋμα ψυχικόν of writers of the school of Galen. If πνεϋμα was still in a theoretical sense physical, the features of materiality had altogether disappeared from it: it had the attributes of immateriality.

It only needed the outbreak of Neo-Platonism to complete the process. Plotinus, with both subtlety and justice, argued against the possibility of explaining either life or thought by means of a physical (“pneumatic”) principle. He held himself bound indeed, in refusing a physical account of soul, to reject Aristotle’s doctrine that soul is the form of body. Certainly this was the exact opposite of the hypothesis of a separate physical substance; and it especially forbade a description of that substance in physical terms—of soul in terms of soul-less matter. The Neo-Platonist, however, turned the logical distinction between soul as such, and soul-less matter, into a metaphysical hypostasis of the informing soul. He changed a logical into an ontological question; and whereas in concrete reality soul and body are one being, he made an affirmation in the field of actual reality of that which could never possibly be verified as a fact—of the soul existing in abstract separation from the body.

Later Neo-Platonists declined into metaphysical and mythological speculations. The soul being abstractly conceived as independent of body, intermediate beings were invented to connect the two—for example, a “pneumatic” or ethereal body, or a material as well as an immaterial “part” of the soul. Similarly, the νοϋς ποιητικός being separated from the individual soul, inter mediate beings were ranged between the two.

Neo-Platonism appeared as a reaction against the πνεϋμα theory; and Plotinus even declares that the relation of individual souls to the universal soul is not to be expressed in physical terms as a division and a relation of parts to a whole, but in logical terms as a relation of species and genus: so that the whole World-Soul is in every individual, and in all multiplication remains itself. Nevertheless there remained a largely physical element in the conception of souls as separate spiritual substances, which Neo-Platonism did so much to foster.

This was in itself inevitable; for the very antithesis of soul and body implies a fundamentally physical conception of the former; to conceive of the two as entities, distinct yet related, is to imply some community of nature between them and to put them in some sense upon a level. To speak of the soul as “separate” from the body is to use a mechanical category; to call it a “substance” is to employ physical associations. As a matter of history, the conception of the soul as a separate substance, although finally shaped under Platonic influence, was also largely suggested by that physical account of the soul as a mode of πνεϋμα, whose history we have been occupied in tracing.

A dualism which was a fundamental departure from the Aristotelian standpoint had originally suggested the πνεϋμα speculation; and that dualism continued to characterise the resultant doctrine of the nature of the soul. The duality of soul and body was only more definitely affirmed by Neo-Platonism. And finally, the view that the denial of the concrete unity of soul and body involves the merging of one in the nature of the other is vindicated in the fact that the idea of soul as a separate substance was a really mechanical and physical conception of it.

This idea, however, dominated the orthodox schools in the Middle Ages. Among the early Christian fathers we find the πνεϋμα theory much in evidence, with the customary confusion of the physical and metaphysical meanings of the term; and writers like Lactantius and Tertullian definitely adopt the notion of the soul as refined matter, its rational part being the most refined of all. Augustine remained the ruling authority on the nature of the soul; and Augustine, while avoiding mythological extremes, was essentially a Neo-Platonist in this part of his doctrine. He follows the arguments of Plotinus for the immateriality of the soul; although still accepting the “pneumatic” physiology, and with it the belief in a refined physical medium through which soul acts on body. In itself, the soul is to him a single substance, with powers or faculties. He does not separate soul and reason. The soul as attached to body has sensitive and vegetative powers; as superior to body it exercises reason. How soul is united to body, it is impossible to explain: it is God’s appointment. There is no fresh reference on Augustine’s part to the original doctrine of Aristotle.

The emphasis laid by Christian belief upon the ethical side of life, and its estimate of the value of the individual soul, brought into view higher aspects of human nature of which a complete philosophy of man must take account. These interests naturally at that time led Christian thinkers to an alliance with Platonism, and generally, in the neglect of the true Aristotelian distinctions, tended towards dualism and an abstract isolation of the moral and reasonable soul. A great variety of influences also, of which Platonism was only one, betrayed the Church into the error of an ethical contrast between spirit and matter; and this again suggested a mutual independence of the two as substantial existences. The ethical value of matter in the development of spirit had not yet come into view for any one, although it might be unconsciously implied in the primitive spirit and characteristic genius of Christianity. Meanwhile, a common suspicion of matter formed a link between the Church and Platonism.

The earlier scholastic psychology was largely traditional, and inherited through Augustine a strong Platonic or Neo-Platonic cast. It is affirmed by Siebeck that in spite of the lapse of nearly a thousand years the development of thirteenth century from patristic psychology is almost continuous, as if there had been no break ; and this was mainly due to the influence of Augustine.

Throughout the earlier Middle Ages, Aristotle was known only in some of his logical writings. His name occurs in lists of the masters of the sciences, simply as that of the authoritative writer on dialectic. It is after the thirteenth century that he is “Princeps philosophorum .” The use, therefore, which was made of Aristotle in the earlier Middle Ages was chiefly formal. The question so persistently discussed, on the basis of a passage of Porphyry, about the real nature of “universals” no doubt involved far-reaching logical and ontological issues. But the prevalence of a crude “realism,” and the strong influence of certain Neo-Platonic writers, such as the Pseudo-Dionysius, confined the influence of Aristotelian method to narrow limits. In psychological thought, as in theology, the Platonising tendency prevailed; and the forms of the Aristotelian logic were employed in the expression of a system whose conceptions were essentially Platonic or Neo-Platonic. No better illustration of this could be taken than the scholastic conceptions of the soul; for even after the language of Aristotle about the soul had been recovered, it was understood in a Platonic sense. Like their Alexandrian predecessors, the schoolmen professed to be, and supposed themselves to be, Peripatetics; while they were only cutting into Aristotelian shapes a Platonic fabric of thought.

To this must be added the positive misrepresentations of Aristotle which prevailed before the thirteenth century. We need not perhaps attach much importance to the fact that the principal source of the earliest knowledge of Aristotle was a Neo-Platonist like Porphyry, since Porphyry’s Platonism was never suspected by those who received at his hands the problem of universals ; but we can hardly forget that Boethius had set before himself the object of reconciling Plato and Aristotle; and the fact is never to be lost sight of that the anonymous De Causis ascribed by Albert to a Jewish author—a compilation from late Greek and Arab sources, with a Neo-Platonic character so marked that St Thomas pronounced it to be extracted from Proclus—was long and generally ascribed to Aristotle. The identification with the name of Aristotle of the emanationist pantheism of Almaric and David of Dinant—which Rousselot, following Albert, traces to Arabian influences, and Jourdain in particular derives from the De Causis and the Fons Vitae of Avicebron—also illustrates the obscuring of the real Aristotle.

The confusion as to Aristotle’s true doctrines did not of course pass away even after his writings had been fully translated and circulated. Another illustration will shew the persistency of the misunderstanding which had attributed to Aristotle the De Causis and the doctrines of Master David. The apocryphal Theologia Aristotelis, although plainly a late Alexandrian composition and reflecting faithfully the doctrines of Plotinus, had been translated and circulated by the Arabian Peripatetics as a work of Aristotle. A reference to it by St Thomas shews that it had also gained acceptance in the West. As he remarks that it had not yet been translated into Latin (whether it were the original Greek, now lost, or an Arabic or Hebrew version that he had seen), it is not to be taken in evidence of the earlier Platonising interpretation of Aristotle in the European schools. But perhaps even more worthy of attention as illustrating a misapprehension of Aristotle’s real meaning, prolonged over centuries, is the fact that such a writing should have passed for Aristotle s, not only in the time of Aquinas but even till the sixteenth century, when it was translated and presented to Leo X as a genuine work of Aristotle.

In so far as the question of universals was really a question between Plato and Aristotle (although the schoolmen themselves were very far from recognising that such was the issue), it may be said to have been decided by Abelard for Aristotle. But amid all the discussions about Ideas, the question of the soul had never been raised in a manner resembling that of Aristotle; and the great Dominican schoolmen, who were the most sober “conceptualists,” and in many points understood Aristotle well, retained with reference to the soul the views which they had inherited from the Platonising fathers and which had had their birth in Alexandria. It cannot be denied, besides, that the long predominance, in the schools, of “realism” with regard to Ideas had created an intellectual atmosphere favourable to abstract spiritualism in psychology, and to the development of such an hypostasised abstraction as the “separable form,” the “separate spiritual substance.”

Accordingly the recovery in the thirteenth century of the true Aristotle did not alter rapidly the received ideas about the soul ; though a gradual infiltration can be traced of the Aristotelian idea of the soul into the thought of the thirteenth century scholastics. William of Auvergne draws the connection of soul and body closer than his predecessors, in so far as he makes the body a real part of man as a rational being; at the same time he refuses the Peripatetic doctrine of Avicebron with reference to form and matter, assigning to the soul, as immaterial, an independent and substantial existence. The localising of the soul (in the heart) is the stamp of this dualistic conception. Still, a transition is begun. Alfred had still earlier perhaps given a quasi vitalist account of the influence of soul, and described both soul and body as being what they are only in their conjunction; while still soul had a mode of being—indeterminate, however—previous to and apart from its embodiment; and, correlatively, had its special organ in the body—the heart, from which all bodily motion, set up by the immaterial soul, proceeded by the agency of the pneuma. Finally Alexander of Hales (ob. 1245) brings us in sight of the doctrine established in the schools by Albert and Thomas. Alexander calls soul the “form of body”; but on the one hand the body has its lower or natural form as well, so that it is not the soul that makes the body what it is; and on the other hand, while there are actions of the “whole man” there are also activities which belong to the intellectual soul as such, and are not in the body. If the soul has no longer a specific organ, this is indeed partly because it is in a sense the “form” of the whole body, but partly also because it is essentially separate from all that is corporeal. The dualism of the conception appears in Alexander’s occupying himself with intermediate degrees of fineness (moisture, breath, and so on) between matter and soul; this is not a tendency to materialise the soul, but the very contrary. Soul as such is abstractly conceived as incorporeal.

Albert and Thomas were in some respects more faithful to the letter of Aristotle; but in substance their famous doctrine is a development of these ideas, and presents the same combination of Aristotelian formulas with the traditional “spiritualistic” psychology. Meanwhile another influence had been at work—the influence of the Arabians.

Here we must go back to trace the history of that other perversion of Aristotelian doctrine, specified a few pages back, according to which intelligence in man is something meta physically distinct from soul. Men were confronted by the difficulty of accounting for reason in the physical being man, and of relating the natural and the spiritual aspects of the human being; and while some were led into the supposition of soul as a substantial entity separate from the body, others retained the word ‘soul’ to describe (in its higher aspect) the physical being, but denied to that soul and that being the possession of intelligence: intelligence they regarded as a separate entity, “assisting” the physical and psychical man or even in a sense inhabiting in him, yet separate from him in the ground of its existence. This mode of conceiving man’s composite being might justly claim to follow, more faithfully than the other, Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul; while, if not true to his real intention to ascribe reason as such to man as a natural being, it plainly was not without support from some of his language about νοϋς χωριστός.

It lies wholly beyond the design of this sketch in outline to trace the various and innumerable influences from both Greek and Oriental systems of thought which helped to inspire this particular form of dualism, or to describe the differences in detail of the countless shapes in which it embodied itself. We have already noticed that the earliest followers of Aristotle, who carried the empirical side of his thought almost to the point of materialism (defining the soul as a “movement” or as a “harmony” of physical elements) left a place still in their system for a transcendent and creative Reason; and that precisely in proportion as they diminished its part in the actual psychology of man they relegated it to a higher sphere. But the most instructive early example of this tendency to a dualistic theory of human reason within the Peripatetic school is presented by Alexander of Aphrodisias.

Alexander, who represents an intelligent and conscious reaction of Peripatetic principles against the grossness and confusion of Stoicism, handled firmly the physical and quasi-physical theories of the soul. He exposed the impossibility of one physical substance being really interpenetrated by another, as involving the inconceivable supposition of two bodies occupying the same space. A “mixture,” he argued, means one of two things; either that the elements mingled, preserving their own nature, exist side by side; or that the elements cease to exist as they were, and in their mixture become something different from either. Neither of these modes of co-existence is appropriate to body and soul; for the soul does not exist alongside and outside of the body, seeing it is the body that is animated, and the whole body; while on the other hand body and soul both evidently retain their characteristic qualities the co-existence of the two being the very problem before us. The Stoics had sought to escape this dilemma by imagining an inconceivable and impossible sort of “mixture,” according to which the two elements retained their distinctive qualities, yet interpenetrated or suffused one another in a physical manner. Alexander pressed home the contradictions of this whole mode of conception, and called for the entire abandonment of all physical notions of soul and all mechanical explanations of its union with body in favour of the true Aristotelian conception of form and matter. He states that conception accurately; the body, he says, would not be the body apart from the soul; the body is not mere matter; it is matter in this “form” of animation. It follows from this conception that the soul is not separable from the body except in thought, and Alexander believed that the soul came into existence and perished with the body.

When, however, he comes to the subject of Reason, Alexander shows signs of the influences that had been at work since Aristotle’s day. The soul in its highest form, the soul of man, exercises the function of rational thought. But instead of simply attributing this rational activity to man as man (as Aristotle had done, however dogmatically), Alexander ascribes it to influence from without and to the agency of a higher power. The νοϋς ποιητικός he attributes to the Divine Being; ό θείος νοϋς he calls it, and in its relation to us compares it to light. To the human soul he allows only the potentiality of rational thought—ό ύλικός νοϋς; but this ύλικός νοϋς is, strictly, but the capability of thought, a mere disposition or potentiality (έπιτηδειότης); actually it is nothing.

Simultaneously with this cardinal modification of Aristotle’s notion of reason in man we have to notice in Alexander a lowering of the doctrine of the soul. Those who had preceded him—Theophrastus, Dicaearchus, Strato—had more and more tended to regard the soul as a result, rather than as the informing principle, of the bodily organisation. Although rising nearer to Aristotle’s original conception, Alexander was infected by this tendency; it is illustrated by his calling the soul, in language unknown to Aristotle and foreign to his mind, a “power” (δύναμις) of the body.

These two features of Alexander’s interpretation of Aristotle are of the greatest interest in view of the developments that followed, especially in the Arabian schools. On the one hand, while following the essential Peripatetic doctrine of soul and body, he somewhat disturbs the balance of it, leaning to the materialistic side. On the other hand he adopts the dualistic and theological interpretation of Aristotle’s ambiguous language about the νοϋς. Two tendencies thus appear which were destined to react upon each other. In proportion as a lower view was taken of the soul of man as it actually is, and as it reveals itself to psychological analysis, it became the more necessary to introduce from without the principle which should explain the rational element in human nature; while conversely, as in course of time the supra-human and extra-psychical principle came to bulk more largely in men’s minds, and at the same time to ac quire, through various speculations about its nature, a seeming authenticity, the natural soul grew less, and an ever widening gulf was set between the “soul” as such and “intelligence” in the proper meaning of the name.

Meanwhile it is important to record the dualism of Alexander’s theory of human mental action. The human soul in itself possessed for him only a capacity or disposition for rational thought, while the Divine Reason brought the “assistance” necessary to its real exercise. But the “participation” of the human soul in superior reason was but a passing relation.

The analogy between the active reason of the Aristotelians and the Stoic World-Soul is superficially evident, although the difference between the two is as profound as the difference between the two philosophies. The doctrine of an “assisting” Reason presents itself also in one form or another in almost all the Alexandrian systems. We have observed that Philo, in his comprehensive syncretism, even while he was sublimating the soul as πνεϋμα into pure immateriality, had drawn the distinction which was implied in declaring that νοϋς (which also was πνεϋμα at the highest grade of refinement) was not a part of the soul. Later the Neo-Platonists regarded all the exercise of reason in human souls as the operation of the one Divine Reason, acting through the intermediary agency of the World-Soul.

This marked the introduction of an element which was not present to the minds of men of Alexander’s school. To Alexander the “assisting” Intelligence was the Divine Intelligence simpliciter (ό θείος νοϋς). Plotinus imagined the Divine Reason as an intermediate Being, from whom reason proceeded, first to the World-Soul, and secondly, through its mediation, to individual human souls. This prepares us for what we shall find among the Arabians.