Andrew Halliday Douglas

“ Such an intelligence as man's is, depending for all its operation on sense and sensuous imagination, and thus united in the most inseparable way with those psychical powers which are admittedly bound up in the body, does not by its nature require a separate and peculiar mode of being. ”

“ Repeatedly he insists upon this point, that to allow the existence of the soul as a separate substantial being, whether now in temporary conjunction with the body, or in an imagined future self-subsistence, is to assign to man a nature other than his own, other than that which essentially distinguishes him and makes him what he is. ”

“ Now to assign thus to any object of knowledge two inconsistent and irreconcilable, yet, by the hypothesis, simultaneous modes of existence, appeared to Pomponazzi strictly unreasonable 1 . The nature of anything is only to be known as it shews itself to be. We must take the soul and the nature of human intelligence as they are given to us in actual experience; and so they are described in the definition. To ascribe any other nature to the soul on a speculative ground is dogmatic and arbitrary. If there fore we abandon Aristotle's definition we are plunged in hopeless confusion ”

“ Body as a self-subsisting substance, soul as a self-subsisting substance how are they related? We are reduced to the Platonic dualism: we have lost the only clue to the interpretation of human nature as a unity. Pomponazzi reproduces in his Commentary the dialectic in which Alexander of Aphrodisias had refuted the Stoical conception of the soul as a substance, and by which he had shewn the inconceivability of two substantial beings interpenetrating one another, and the impossibility of relating soul and body on any other terms than those of form and matter 2 . ”

“ Such is Pomponazzi's argument 2 .
Since already in answer to Averroes he had devoted more time to the "separability" of the intellectual soul than to its unity, he passes rapidly over the second dualistic theory of human nature, which he associates with the name of Plato, and which differs from the former only in assigning a separate intellectual soul to each individual man 3 . Such a conception, however, which he represents by the formula 4 " Man is soul that uses a body," he declares to be completely opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of forma corporis. ”

“ A concise summary of Pomponazzi's criticism of Averroes and St Thomas is found in the Commentary on the De Anima, ff. 250 to 254, where he states in clear terms the result he has arrived at. The soul is not "separate" from the body here, and there is "no reason" ("non est ratio") to suppose it will so exist hereafter. "Concerning the intellectual soul I hold in accordance with Aristotle that it essentially depends on body, both for its existence and for its intellection, and can neither exist without body nor operate without a corporeal organ. ”

“ It is true that a certain theoretical independence of the body even in the present life was entirely necessary for their theory, and was the ultimate foundation of the belief in a disembodied existence hereafter. But actually, in the present, they admitted, the soul is not separate from the body. ”

“ While allowing that the soul, as "naturally" considered, is one aspect of a composite being in the Aristotelian sense, characterised by " form and matter," St Thomas pronounced the soul as rational or possessed of intelligence (qua intellective?) to be a form in an altogether different sense. Forms which have no separate subsistence, and no operation except as conjoined with matter in a compositum, strictly speaking do not exist ”

“ In the chapter of the De Immortalitate devoted to Averroism he is content with a summary assertion that the notion of union with a superhuman intellectual principle as the end of man is an arbitrary invention ("figmentum in se") morally impracticable ("sic finis hominis irritus est") and contrary to Aristotle. He hazards the opinion, which perhaps was not far from the mark, that the belief in the unity of intellectual souls in Averroes's sense had never really been more than an academic theory 4 . ”

“ St Thomas had recalled Averroes to the real problem of intelligence as actually exercised by man the individual, and shewn the irrelevancy to that problem of his theory of intellectual action in a separate principle. ”

“ Further, on positive grounds, the intellectual soul of man was not to be removed from the scope of the definition, since intelligence as it is in man acts by no means in independence of the body, but, on the contrary, always and only in the body. Accordingly, when in the De Immortalitate Pomponazzi comes to deal with the Thomist notion of the "separable" intellectual principle, he repeats and applies the identical arguments which he had employed against the Averroist conception of it 2 . ”

“ This psychological necessity was the nerve of Pomponazzi's thinking and the basis of his argument about the soul 2 . He inferred from it that it was impossible for the intellectual principle in man to exist in any absolute separation from the body. ”

“ For to say, as those wish to do who affirm that the human soul is immortal in the full sense, that the intellect itself has two modes of cognition, one entirely without the use of images, the other accompanied by them, is to transmute human nature into divine Thus the human soul would be made divine, since it would assume the mode of activity that belongs to Divine beings, and thus we should commit ourselves to the legends of Ovid, namely to the view that one nature can be transmuted into another 1 . ”

“ It is, he says, a definition, in the sense that the quality which it attributes to the soul is that in virtue of which the soul is what it is. If the soul were supposed not to be in relation to body, it would not be known at all as we know it; it would not be what we find it to be. The soul is in relation to body. This belongs to the definition of "the soul." And a thing cannot be only potentially that which it is determined to be 2 .
(c) Again, Pomponazzi effectively criticises St Thomas's perversion of the Aristotelian notion of form, in his doctrine of "separate" or "substantial" forms. ”

“ In the Commentary on the De Anima Pomponazzi shews that he fully understands whither the Averroist conception tends and that the anima intellectiva, which is supposed to be one in all men, is that which makes each man what he is 2 , so that there is no escape from the monstrous consequences drawn by St Thomas. But he no longer feels it necessary to argue the point; and occupies himself by preference with an attempt to bring out the more reasonable side of Averroes's doctrine implied in his con cession of a vis cogitativa to the individual soul 3 . ”

“ Pomponazzi had already signalised Averroism as a dualistic theory 3; and now he treats as arbitrary and unfounded this supplementary hypothesis of a double mode of being for the intellectual principle.
He brings the theory at once to the bar of the Aristotelian definition 4: " Soul is the actuality of a natural organic body, etc. Therefore intellectual soul is the actuality of a natural organic body." ”

“ In the soul two forms of intellection are supposed to be united, one of which depends on the body, while the other is entirely unrelated to it, which seems at variance with reason, since of one and the same thing with reference to a single operation there seems to be only one mode of operation 1 . ”

“ So, by analogy, might the "common Intelligence" of men be considered "uno modo ut est infima intelligentiarum," and also "alio modo in ordine ad suam sphaeram." In the second aspect the human intelligence was the subject of scientia naturalis ”

“ The soul, it was suggested, during its existence in attachment to the body acquires a " habit " of existence in virtue of which it continues to exist after the bond that united it to the body is dissolved. ”

“ In replying that a mere unrealised possibility would not suffice for a definition for then a thing might really possess none of the qualities by which it was defined 1 Pomponazzi brings out clearly his point that the definition of soul by its relation to body must be taken seriously as the very description of its actual nature. ”

“ Doing so, he finds, as Aristotle did, that the soul of man yes, and his "intellectual" soul exists in body. It is known only there. We know nothing of it except in that relation. So far as known to us it has no other mode of existence. What is before us is corpus animatum.
Accordingly we find him arguing, whether against the superior Intelligence of Averroism, the single anima intellectiva operating in human intelligence or against the "separate" anima intellectiva of St Thomas, which is not (qua intellective?) ”

“ He firmly holds to it that the mode of human existence which we know is its essential mode. Other modes of existence there may be. The animals have a different being from man s: the higher Intelligences another being still: but man is man. One nature is not changed into another 4 . ”

“ Logically this possibility is exhausted in the alternatives already stated. As Pomponazzi says, in his scholastic way, " Nothing can be constituted equally of two contraries; one must always be the dominant factor 3 ." ”

“ Averroist doctrine of the common Intelligence) ; or (3) the intellectual beings are many and the physical body one. The third supposition is dismissed, as never having been put forward by any one and as absurd in itself 1 . The Platonic and Averroist theories are left.
The other alternative was that the human being is one nature with two aspects. Here Pomponazzi distinguishes his own view from that of St Thomas. ”

“ IX. p. 56: "Neque apud Aristotelem fingendum est quod iste modus intelligendi intellectus humani sit ei accidentalis, scilicet moveri ab objecto et non indigere subjecto, turn quia unius rei est tantum unus modus operandi essentialis."
2 "Nam hoc modo sublato nulla restat via probandi diversitatoin specificam inter aliqua." Op, cit. vm. p. 43.
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intellectual powers is conditioned by the body and bodily functions, just as the senses, the imagination, etc., were allowed to be. Accordingly in the argument for immortality a new element was introduced. ”

“ It comes into existence along with the body (although, as they held, by an act of special creation) : it continues to be attached to the body; and the exercise of even its highest or
1 " Tamque diversi modi operandi, scilicet per phantasma et sine phantasmate, videntur arguere diversitatem essentiae." ”