CHAPTER III

MIND

THOSE philosophers who deny the existence of matter yet find themselves obliged to give some explanation of the phenomenon which awakens the idea of matter in the human mind; even the most uncompromising Idealists have had to assume a principle of limitation and of passivity: thus the problem of matter forces itself upon every system of philosophy, including those which deny that there is any such thing as matter. And the case is the same with the problem of mind. An explanation must be found for the activity and relative order which seem to be the conditions of existence in the world, and for the will and

self-conscious intelligence found in man. In this wide sense, the problem of mind has had to be faced by every school and every system, for it enters as a necessary element into every philosophy of nature and of thought.

Progressive Distinction between the Corporeal and Spiritual, from Thales to Socrates.

The distinction between soul and body was, with primitive man, the result of the experience of death: a man was alive, he dies, and his body, which has still the same appearance, has lost all power of motion and feeling. The idea of the soul contained at first no elements except those which could be directly deduced from this experience (Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, Eng. tr. I, p. 124). The soul was like a breath of air, it was a subtle body, sometimes conceived in the likeness of the phantoms seen in dreams. For Homer, however, the

soul is a kind of image in the form of the body, and it escapes at the moment of death through the mouth or through an open wound. When separated from the physical organism it is only a shade (eidwλov) without strength, or consciousness, or recollection (Odyss. X, 490 sq.; XI, 34, 151, 215, etc.). The world is conceived on the analogy of man, and all nature is supposed to be full of souls like that which man believes he possesses himself.

We recognize the influence of these primitive conceptions in the first period of philosophy. The distinction between soul and body was not as yet a distinction between material and spiritual elements. The old Ionic philosophers sought the first principles of things in a living matter which was transformed in a progressive evolution (Doctrine of Hylozoism). Whether this matter be water, air, or fire, or an indeterminate Infinite (as with Anaximander), it is always identified with the force that moves and animates it. When, with the progress of reflection, a place was given amongst the principles of nature, not only to force, but to intelligence, reason was conceived as merely another attribute of the primary matter (e.g. the "thinking air" of Diogenes of Apollonia).

The fire of Heraclitus is a Reason which mingles with everything, and which out of the strife of contraries brings forth harmony. The human soul is made of warm and dry vapours. The purer the fire, the more perfect the soul. "The soul that is the most dry is the best and most pure" (Frag 54). "If the drunken man cannot contain himself, it is because his soul is soiled by moisture" (Frag. 53). The soul, like everything else, is subject to the law of change, and must therefore nourish itself with the external fire in order not to be exhausted. Reason, which is identical with fire, enters into our bodies through the organs of sensation, and through respiration. When the organs of sense close in sleep, the flame of reason darkens; when they open again on our awakening, it lights up once more. But it is extinguished for ever when man loses connection through respiration with the external world.

Parmenides, who taught the absolute unity of Being, and denied all becoming, did not need any principle to explain the apparent motion and order in things. For him the multiplicity of souls is only an illusion. His philosophy of nature is a concession to the demands of common sense; that

is to say, it rests upon what seems to him to be the most plausible theory. Far from setting up any antithesis between the spiritual and the corporeal, he explains all psychological phenomena by the mixture of substances in the body.

The Pythagoreans thought they had found an adequate explanation of the cosmic order when they made Number the substance of things. Harmony was placed above Number, as a kind of soul of the world governing the cosmos; if there was harmony in the universe, it was because the essential constituent of things, namely, Number, was itself harmony. How did the first Pythagoreans conceive the human soul? Aristotle, in his review of the opinions of his predecessors concerning the soul, merely says of the Pythagoreans that "some among them sought the soul in particles that are in motion: τὴν ψυχὴν εἶναι τὰ ἐν τῷ ἀέρι ξύσματα, οἱ δὲ τὸ ταῦτα κινοῦν ” (De Anima, I, 2, 404 a, 16). To the Pythagoreans the opinion is also attributed that the soul is a harmony. But as everything with them was number and harmony, this does not imply any distinction between human souls and other things. Did they

regard the soul as the harmony of the body, as we are told in the Phaedo? It is difficult to reconcile this opinion with the doctrine of the immortality and transmigration of souls taught by the Pythagoreans.

In Democritus we find a frankly materialistic theory of the soul. Motion being eternal, there is no need to distinguish matter from the force that moves it. The soul is corporeal, and its substance must correspond to its functions. Now, the soul is a vivifying and moving force. But all motion arises out of an impact; therefore the soul must be composed of the most mobile substance, of atoms that are subtile, smooth, and round ; in other words, of fire (Arist. De Anima, I, 2, 403 b, 29). The universe is full of fiery atoms. The soul is therefore not a force that organizes the world, but a part of matter, and it is formed out of the multitude of fiery atoms which engender motion and life. In man the soul pervades the whole body; between every two corporeal atoms a psychical atom is inserted (Lucr. III, 370). It might be supposed that the fiery atoms would be driven out of the body by the surrounding air, but this danger is averted by respiration which introduces new fiery elements, and above all forms an

opposite current, which prevents the psychical atoms in the body from escaping.

Heraclitus' theory of the soul, the substitution in the Eleatic and Pythagorean systems of an abstract principle for a material element, the general progress of Greek thought, all helped to prepare the way for the distinction between the material and the spiritual. Anaxagoras was the first of the Greek philosophers to formulate clearly this distinction, and, for this, Aristotle greatly honours him: "he was like a sober man amongst men who spoke at random ”: οἷον νήφων ἐφάνη Tap' eikĥ λéyovτas (Meta. I, 3, 984 b, 16). In the beginning, all the elementary substances are mixed up together. The distinction and combination of like particles are the work of an organizing and motor force, namely, Noûs, intelligence: πάντα ἦν ὁμῶς, ὁ Νοῦς ἐλθὼν πάντα διεκόσμησε.

Anaxagoras distinctly separates matter from the force by which it is moved and governed; but the attributes by which he characterizes intelligence, show that his notion of it was not yet very clear.

The Nous is simple, and not like all other things, composed of heterogeneous elements. Mixing with nothing it exists alone and of itself, “ μοῦνος αὐτὸς ἐφ ̓ ἑωυτοῦ ἐστιν” (Frag. 8). It is infinite (ἄπειρον), independent (avтокpaтés), never passive (ara@es), it has unlimited knowledge, "knows what is mixed, what is distinct, and what is separate" (Simpl. De Cael. 271 a, 20). Lastly, it has absolute power over matter, to which it alone can communicate motion: "yvóμŋv tepì παντὸς πᾶσαν ἴσχει καὶ ἰσχύει μέγιστον” (Frag. 8).

Such is the spiritual element in the conception which Anaxagoras formed of the Nous. But, on the other hand, his Nous is described as the most subtile of all things: λεπτότατον (Frag. 8); its quality does not change, but its quantity varies. The souls of other beings are parts of it; and these parts may be either greater or smaller. "In everything there are parts of everything except perhaps of intelligence, but in some beings there is also intelligence" (Frag. 7). The Nous was thus a kind of world-soul, an intermediate substance, which was akin to the spiritual in so far as it was simple, independent, and intelligent, and to what is corporeal, in so far as it possessed quantity, and perhaps also extension.

Socrates himself tells us (Phaedo, 97 b) that he was delighted with the theory of Anaxagoras; but he would seem to have merely enlarged the province of an intelligence that loved the good. His God is a kind of world-soul (ỷ èv tậ tavtì Ópóvnois), a wisdom which pervaded all things. The soul of man is only a small part of the universal intelligence, just as his body only contains a very small portion of the material elements (Mem. I, 4). This soul, although invisible, exists and is the sovereign ruler of the body (Baσiλevei év nμîv), and, as reason, it, more than anything else in man, participates in the divine.

Plato: the Soul of the World and Individual Souls.

It is not easy to disengage Plato's theory of the soul from the symbolic form in which he clothes it. The world is an animated, living whole, which has a body and a soul. The soul of the world, fashioned directly by the demïurgus, in proportions that are mathematical and musical (Timaeus, 35 b sq.), is a middle term between the intelligible and the sensible. God puts intelligence into the soul and the soul into the body (Tim. 30 b). To fulfil its role of medium, the soul must possess something of each of the two opposite natures which are reconciled in it. In the soul are blended the one and the many (Tim. 35-a). What moves itself must exist before that which is moved by something else. The soul possesses in itself the principle of its own movement. It moves the body according to numerical and harmonical relations: it makes the world into a wise mixture of the Limit and the Unlimited (πépas, TELρov). This soul, this principle of harmony, is a reality (ovoía), a substance extended throughout the world by the demiurgus and divided according to harmonical relations which correspond to the laws followed by the motion of the stars (Tim. 34 b sq.). The soul is not only the principle of the visible order in things, it is also the principle of all knowledge; and this is another reason why it combines in its nature the same (Tavrov) and the other (Tò ETEρov), the intelligible and the sensible; for in Plato's theory like can only be known by like (Tim. 37 a). This account of the soul is evidently partly symbolical, and not meant to be taken literally. According to Aristotle, it is rà manμaтikά, the