§ 2
What the Ionic philosophers in connexion with the rest of their cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote totally different things; it could surprise no one if different things were said about quite different objects.
According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the Orphics and other theologi also agreed—according to this view the “psyche” was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and material nature that, wherever it may have come from, now dwells within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate existence, making itself felt when the visible self loses consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy (see above, [pp. 6] f.). In the same way, the moon and the stars become visible when no longer obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own; it was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and able to live by and for itself.
This spiritual being and the obscure manifestations of its existence in the living man, did not attract the observation of the Ionian philosophers. Their thoughts were all for the universe as a whole; they looked for the “origins” (ἀρχαί) of all that is and becomes; for the simple elements of multifarious appearance and for the force which turns the simple into the multifarious while controlling, moving, and giving life to primeval matter. The power of life, the force which can set in motion both itself and all else that without it would be fixed and motionless—this force penetrates all being; where it manifests itself most strikingly in separate individual beings, there it is what these philosophers call the “psyche”.
Thought of in this way, the psyche is something quite different from the old psyche of popular belief, idly observing the life and activities of its body, as of some stranger, concentrated in itself, and pursuing its own secret, hidden life. And yet the name given to these very different concepts remained the same. The application of the word “psyche” [365] to the power which gives life and movement to the visible body—man’s power of life—might have been suggested to the philosophers by a manner of expression which, though in the strict sense of the words conflicting with Homeric conceptions, is occasionally observable in the Homeric poems, and seems to have become more and more frequent in late times.[1] In more exact language, the “psyche” of these philosophers is a collective expression for all the powers of thought, desire, and will (νόος, μένος, μῆτις, βουλή), and especially for the functions denoted by the untranslatable word θυμός—powers which according to the Homeric and popular partition all belong entirely to the side of the visible man and his body.[2] According to that view, they are all expressions of the body’s natural powers of life—though they cannot indeed be awakened to real life before the arrival of the “psyche”—and in Homeric usage are almost the exact opposite of the “psyche”, for they perish at death, while the psyche leaves them behind to wander about in its separate shadow-life.
But the soul, according to the view of the physiologists, has quite a different relation to the totality of life and living, and differs in this respect both from the Homeric psyche and the Homeric θυμός. The same force which manifests itself so strongly, as though specially concentrated there, in the psyche of man, works and rules in all matter as the general source of life that creates and preserves the world. Thus, the psyche loses the special singularity that distinguished it from all the other things and substances in the world, and made it incomparable and unique. Later reporters are wrong in attributing to these Ionic thinkers (for whom vital power and material substance seemed immediately and indissolubly united) the conception of a separate, independent “World-Soul”. Not as emanations from a single Soul of the World did they conceive the separate souls of men; but neither did they conceive them as simply independent, unique, and entirely incomparable essences. They are expressions of that force which everywhere in all the phenomena of the world produces life and is itself life. Attributing spiritual qualities to the primeval source of things, the physiology of the “Hylozoists” naturally could not assume any profound distinction between that source and the “soul”. Deprived in this way of its separateness, the soul acquired a new importance in exchange; in another sense from that of the mystics and theologians it could still be thought of as something divine, for it was a participator in the one Force which builds and rules the world. It is not the abode of a single daimonic [366] nature, but instead, the very nature of god is alive within it.
The closer its inward connexion with the universal Whole the less, of course, will the soul be able to preserve its individual existence, which was only lent to it while it gave life and movement to the body, when that body, the sign and support of its separateness, is overtaken by death. These earliest philosophers whose view was almost entirely concentrated on the broad outlines of the life of nature as a whole, would hardly have regarded it as part of their task to formulate a deliberate opinion about the fate of the puny individual soul after the death of its body. In no case could they have spoken of an immortality of the soul in the same sense as did the mystics who regarded the soul of which they spoke as something which has entered from without into material existence, and as a spiritual essence quite distinct from everything material. The latter were thus able to attribute to the psyche a capacity for separate and continued existence which was inadmissible in the case of a force of movement and sensation completely inhering in matter and in the shaping of matter. And it was such a force which the physiologists called the soul.
Ancient tradition, nevertheless, asserts that Thales of Miletos, whose genius first began the philosophic study of nature, was the first “to call the soul (of man) immortal”.[3] But Thales, who recognized a “soul” also in magnets and plants,[4] and thought of the material stuff and the motive force of the “soul” as inseparable, can only have spoken of the “immortality” of the human soul in the same sense as he might have spoken of the immortality of all “soul-forces” in nature. Like the primal Matter which works and creates by reason of its own natural powers of life, so, too, the universal Force which permeates it[5] is imperishable and indestructible, as it is uncreated. It is entirely and essentially alive and can never be “dead”.
Anaximander said of the “Unlimited” from which all things have been developed by separation, and by which all things are enveloped and directed, that it never grows old, but is immortal and imperishable.[6] This cannot be intended to apply to the human soul as a separate existence; for like all separate creations out of the “Unlimited” it must “in the order of the time” pay the penalty for the “offence” of its separate existence,[7] and lose itself again in the one primordial matter.
Nor could the third in this series—Anaximenes of Miletos—have differed seriously from Thales in the sense in which [367] he spoke of the soul as “immortal”; for him it was of the same nature[8] as the one divine[9] primal element of Air that is eternally in movement and produces all things out of itself.