Andrew Halliday Douglas

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 [11] . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I. 2, p. 155) that, in advance upon the Stoics, Philo regarded the πνεϋμα as essentially immaterial.↑ The following summary of his arguments is given by Siebeck: (1) Matter and body being essentially in flux require for any unity or intelligible form in them a unifying principle which cannot be material: (2) Every body has a definite way of working; “soul” can work equally in opposite effects: (3) The quality of soul is independent of quantity, e.g. ”