A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (short story to read txt) 📖

we cannot doubt what its plan would have been. Aristotle would have shown, as he did in the case of animals, that there are higher and lower grades of organism within the plant kingdom, and he would have attempted to trace the development in detail through all the then known species of plants.

Next above plants in the scale of being come animals. Since the higher always contains the lower, but exhibits a further realization of form peculiar to itself, animals share with plants the functions of nutrition and propagation. What is peculiar to them, the point in which they rise above plants, is the possession of sensation. Sense-perception is therefore the special function of animals, and they possess, therefore, the nutritive and the sensitive souls. With sensation come pleasure and pain, for pleasure is a pleasant sensation, and pain the opposite. Hence arises the impulse to seek the pleasant and avoid the painful. This can only be achieved by the power of movement. Most animals, accordingly, have the power of locomotion, which is not possessed by plants, because they do not require it, since they are not sensitive to pleasure and pain. In his books upon animals Aristotle attempts to carry out the principle of development in detail, showing what are the higher, and what the lower, animal organisms. This he connects with the {298} methods of propagation employed by different animals. Sex-generation is the mark of a higher organism than parthenogenesis.

The scale of being proceeds from animals to man. The human organism, of course, contains the principles of all lower organisms. Man nourishes himself, grows, propagates his kind, moves about, and is endowed with sense-perception. But he must have in addition his own special function, which constitutes his advance beyond the animals. This is reason. Reason is the essential, the proper end and activity of man. His soul is nutritive, sensitive, and rational. In man, therefore, the world-reason which could only appear in inorganic matter as gravitation and levitation, in plants as nutrition, in animals as sensation, appears at last in its own proper form, as what it essentially is, reason. The world-reason, so long struggling towards the light, has reached it, has become actual, has become existent, in man. The world-process has attained its proximate end.

Within human consciousness there are lower and higher grades, and Aristotle has taken great pains to trace these from the bottom to the top. These stages of consciousness are what are ordinarily called "faculties." But Aristotle notes that it is nonsense to talk, as Plato did, of the "parts" of the soul. The soul, being a single indivisible being, has no parts. They are different aspects of the activity of one and the same being; different stages of its development. They can no more be separated than the convex and concave aspects of a curve. The lowest faculty, if we must use that word, is sense-perception. Now what we perceive in a thing is its qualities. Perception tells us that a piece of gold is {299} heavy, yellow, etc. The underlying substratum which supports the qualities cannot be perceived. This means that the matter is unknowable, the form knowable, for the qualities are part of the form. Sense-perception, therefore, takes place when the object stamps its form upon the soul. This is important for what it implies rather than what it states. It shows the thoroughly idealistic trend of Aristotle's thought. For if the form is what is knowable in a thing, the more form there is, the more knowable it will be. Absolute form, God, will be the absolutely knowable. That the Absolute is what alone is completely knowable, intelligible, and comprehensible, and the finite and material comparatively unknowable, is a point of view essential to idealism, and stands in marked contrast to the popular idea of rationalism that the Absolute is unknowable, and matter knowable. For idealism, the Absolute is reason, thought. What can be more thoroughly intelligible than reason? What can thought understand, if not thought? This, of course, is not stated by Aristotle. But it is implied in his theory of sense-perception.

Next in the scale above the senses comes the common sense. This has nothing to do with what we understand by that phrase in every-day language. It means the central sensation-ganglion in which isolated sensations meet, are combined, and form a unity of experience. We saw, in considering Plato, that the simplest kind of knowledge, such as, "this paper is white," involves, not only isolated sensations, but their comparison and contrast. Bare sensations would not even make objects. For every object is a combined bundle of sensations. What thus combines the various sensations, and in {300} particular those received from different sense-organs, what compares and contrasts them, and turns them from a blind medley of phantasms into a definite experience, a single cosmos, is the common sense. Its organ is the heart.

Above the common sense is the faculty of imagination. By this Aristotle means, not the creative imagination of the artist, but the power, which everyone possesses, of forming mental images and pictures. This is due to the excitation in the sense-organ continuing after the object has ceased to affect it.

The next faculty is memory. This is the same as imagination, except that there is combined with the image a recognition of it as a copy of a past sense-impression.

Recollection, again, is higher than memory. Memory images drift purposelessly through the mind. Recollection is the deliberate evoking of memory-images.

From recollection we pass to the specifically human faculty of reason. But reason itself has two grades. The lower is called passive reason, the higher active reason. The mind has the power of thought before it actually thinks. This latent capacity is passive reason. The mind is here like a smooth piece of wax which has the power to receive writing, but has not received it. The positive activity of thought itself is active reason. The comparison with wax must not mislead us into supposing that the soul only receives its impressions from sensation. It is pure thought which writes upon the wax.

Now the sum of the faculties in general we call the soul. And the soul, we saw, is simply the organization {301} or form, of the body. As form is inseparable from matter, the soul cannot exist without the body. It is the function of the body. It is to the body what sight is to the eye. And in the same sense Aristotle denies the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato that the soul reincarnates itself in new bodies, particularly in the bodies of animals. What is the function of one thing cannot become the function of another. Exactly what the soul is to the body the music of the flute is to the flute itself. It is the form of which the flute is the matter. It is, to speak metaphorically, the soul of the flute. And you might as well talk, says Aristotle, of the art of flute-playing becoming reincarnate in the blacksmith's anvil, as of the soul passing into another body. This would seem also to preclude any doctrine of immortality. For the function perishes with the thing. We shall return to that point in a moment. But we may note, meanwhile, that Aristotle's theory of the soul is not only a great advance upon Plato's, but is a great advance upon popular thinking of the present day. The ordinary view of the soul, which was Plato's view, is that the soul is a sort of thing. No doubt it is non-material and supersensuous. But still it is a thing; it can be put into a body and taken out of it, as wine can be put into or taken out of a bottle. The connection between body and soul is thus purely mechanical. They are attached to each other by no necessary bond, but rather by force. They have, in their own natures, no connexion with each other, and it is difficult to see why the soul ever entered a body, if it is in its nature something quite separate. But Aristotle's view is that the soul, as form of the body, is not separable from it. You cannot have {302} a soul without a body. The connection between them is not mechanical, but organic. The soul is not a thing which comes into the body and goes out of it. It is not a thing at all. It is a function.

But to this doctrine Aristotle makes an exception in favour of the active reason. All the lower faculties perish with the body, including the passive reason. Active reason is imperishable and eternal. It has neither beginning nor end. It comes into the body from without, and departs from it at death. God being absolute reason, man's reason comes from God, and returns to him, after the body ceases to function. But before we hail this as a doctrine of personal immortality, we had best reflect. All the lower faculties perish at death, and this includes memory. Now memory is an essential of personality. Without memory our experiences would be a succession of isolated sensations, with no connecting link. What connects my last with my present experience is that my last experience was "mine." To be mine it must be remembered. Memory is the string upon which isolated experiences are strung together, and which makes them into that unity I call myself, my personality. If memory perishes, there can be no personal life. And it must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely that, in that future life--if we persist in calling it such--the memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in the future life itself reason has no memory of itself from moment to moment. We cannot be dogmatic about what Aristotle himself thought. He seems to avoid the question. He probably shrank from disturbing popular beliefs on the subject. We have, at any rate, no definite pronouncement from {303} him. All we can say is that his doctrine does not provide the material for belief in personal immortality. It expressly removes the material in that it denies the persistence of memory. Moreover, if Aristotle really thought that reason is a thing, which goes in and out of the body, an exception, in the literal sense, to his general doctrine of soul, all we can say is that he undergoes a sudden drop in the philosophic scale. Having propounded so advanced a theory, he sinks back to the crude view of Plato. And as this is not likely, the most probable explanation is that he is here speaking figuratively, perhaps with the intention of propitiating the religious and avoiding any rude disturbance of popular belief. If so, the statements that active reason is immortal, comes from God, and returns to God, mean simply that the world-reason is eternal, and that man's reason is the actualization of this eternal reason, and in that sense "comes from God" and returns to Him. We may add, too, that since God, though real, is not to be regarded as an existent individual, our return to Him cannot be thought as a continuation of individual existence. Personal immortality is inconsistent with the fundamentals of Aristotle's system. We ought not to suppose that he contradicted himself in this way. Yet if Aristotle used language which seems to imply personal immortality, this is neither meaningless nor dishonest. It is as true for him as for others that the soul is eternal. But eternal does not mean everlasting in time. It means timeless. And reason, even our reason, is timeless. The soul has eternity in it. It is "eternity in an hour." And it is this which puts the difference between man and the brutes.

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We have traced the scale of being from inorganic matter, through plants and animals, to man. What then? What is the next step? Or does the scale stop there? Now there is a sort of break in