Andrew Halliday Douglas

“ 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. ”

“ So soon as a fresh mind should take up the problem, Averroes separation of intelligence and the soul would drop out of sight, while his identification of human thought with universal reason would stand, and find acceptance. ”

“ The species, while representative, certainly conveyed the know ledge of reality. This unquestioning confidence of scholasticism in the human mind, and the absence of all suspicion of the relativity of knowledge, does more even than the errors of its logic to shake its title to the name of philosophy. Subjective in the highest degree in its theory of knowledge, it was yet perfectly innocent of scepticism; and we might take as a concise formula of mediaeval representative realism the words, " The cognition of the thing results from the form and the faculty." ”

“ We may hold that the distinction between the apprehension of an individual in its general character and the apprehension of an abstract general idea is not a distinction between thought and something else which is not thought, but between one act of thought and another; that thought is present in the whole process; and in particular that the apprehension which Pomponazzi thus assigns to cogitativa, as its peculiar and distinguishing function, is essentially an act of thought. ”

“ The sequences and conjunctions which seem magical and supernatural are after all on the same footing as other observed sequences and conjunctions in nature. We are not able to explain, says Pomponazzi, why one phenomenon in nature follows or accompanies another; we simply observe the fact that it is so. He thus compares the supposed sequence of an omen and its fulfilment with any other observed sequence in nature; in particular with a case in which one event is the recognised and authentic sign of another without being its cause, as the rainbow for example is a sign of the end of rain. ”

“ He compares man to a tree, whose leaves are always being shaken, but which is not at every blast plucked up by the roots. While always exposed to change and always in some degree of trouble, he would say, man has nevertheless his deep-rooted peace. If not a perfect happiness on earth, he has yet a real happiness. While always in fear of death, again he might have said, he does not every moment die. ”

“ While denying that the soul now has more than one mode of being, Pomponazzi saw no reason to suppose that it should or could ever have any other. St Thomas had said: "But if any one enquire further, if the intellect cannot act without an image, how then will it operate as an intelligence, after the soul has been separated from the body, the objector should understand that the solution of that question does not belong to the physicist [68] " ; and these words contain the germ of Pomponazzi's argument against the immortality of the soul. ”

“ Thus, developing the suggestion of the Aristotelian doctrine, Pomponazzi carries the synthetic function of sensus communis down to the simplest act of sensation.
The importance of the emphasis thus laid on sensus communis, and of the essential part assigned to it in the simplest sense- perception, appears when we consider all that was then included in sensus interior. Aristotle had explained the representative or reproductive powers, imagination and memory, as the sequel of sensation, and attributed them to the sensitive soul. ”

“ That man's nature possesses these two aspects he considers beyond question-: as in the body, or, if you will, using the body as an instrument, man is at least in one sense mortal; as exercising intelligence he partakes of that which is immaterial and imperishable. Now, it may be said either that there are here two separate beings or that one being combines two aspects.
If the physical and the intellectual elements in man be two different beings, then either (i) there are as many physical beings and as many spiritual beings as there are individual men (the Platonic doctrine of the soul) ”

“ But if it is asked whether God is true, I reply that truth in every sense is present in God, as Themistius says at this point with reference to the active intellect, that it is true, not with reference to other things, but simply by reference to itself, which is true intellect. How more completely then will God in this way be one and true in the highest degree, when He is true through Himself and not through something external to Him, as in the case of human truth! He is not only true, but true in every way, since in God there is both correspondence of object with mind and of mind with object. ”

“ Meanwhile Pomponazzi had broken fresh ground. He had gone back to Aristotle; and the master's profound and simple doctrine of man began once more to exercise its native force upon philosophy. Aristotle's conception of soul and body may be said to have been a perennial fountain of vivifying influence in human thought. Every time that men have caught sight of his meaning, even in partial glimpses, it has been the occasion of a new departure ”