[139] Aristot. De Memor. et Rem. ii. p. 453, a. 22: ὁ ἀναμιμνησκόμενος καὶ θηρεύων σωματικόν τι κινεῖ, ἐν ᾧ τὸ πάθος.
[140] Ibid. p. 453, a. 28: ἔοικε τὸ πάθος τοῖς ὀνόμασι καὶ μέλεσι καὶ λόγοις, ὅταν διὰ στόματος γένηταί τι αὐτῶν σφόδρα· παυσαμένοις γὰρ καὶ οὐ βουλομένοις ἐπέρχεται πάλιν ᾄδειν ἢ λέγειν.
[141] Ibid. i. p. 449, b. 7.
In this account of Memory and Reminiscence, Aristotle displays an acute and penetrating intelligence of the great principles of the Association of Ideas. But these principles are operative not less in memory than in reminiscence: and the exaggerated prominence that he has given to the distinction between the two (determined apparently by a wish to keep the procedure of man apart from that of animals) tends to perplex his description of the associative process. At the same time, his manner of characterizing phantasy, memory, and reminiscence, as being all of them at once corporeal and psychical — involving, like sensation, internal movements of the body as well as phases of the consciousness, sometimes even passing into external movements of the bodily organs without our volition — all this is a striking example of psychological observation, as well as of consistency in following out the doctrine laid down at the commencement of his chief treatise: Soul as the Form implicated with Body as the Matter, — the two being an integral concrete separable only by abstraction.
We come now to the highest and (in Aristotle’s opinion) most honourable portion of the soul — the Noûs or noëtic faculty, whereby we cogitate, understand, reason, and believe or opine under the influence of reason.[142] According to the uniform scheme of Aristotle, this highest portion of the soul, though distinct from all the lower, presupposes them all. As the sentient soul presupposes the nutrient, so also the cogitant soul presupposes the nutrient, the sentient, the phantastic, the memorial, and the reminiscent. Aristotle carefully distinguishes the sentient department of the soul from the cogitant, and refutes more than once the doctrine of those philosophers that identified the two. But he is equally careful to maintain the correlation between them, and to exhibit the sentient faculty not only as involving in itself a certain measure of intellectual discrimination, but also as an essential and fundamental condition to the agency of the cogitant, as a portion of the human soul. We have already gone through the three successive stages — phantastic, memorial, reminiscent — whereby the interval between sensation and cogitation is bridged over. Each of the three is directly dependent on past sensation, either as reproduction or as corollary; each of them is an indispensable condition of man’s cogitation; moreover, in the highest of the three, we have actually slid unperceived into the cogitant phase of the human soul; for Aristotle declares the reminiscent process to be of the nature of a syllogism.[143] That the soul cannot cogitate or reason without phantasms — that phantasms are required for the actual working of the human Noûs — he affirms in the most explicit manner.[144]
[142] Aristot. De Animâ, III. iv. p. 429, a. 10: περὶ δὲ τοῦ μορίου τοῦ τῆς ψυχῆς ᾧ γινώσκει τε ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ φρονεῖ. He himself defines what he means by νοῦς a few lines lower; and he is careful to specify it as ὁ τῆς ψυχῆς νοῦς — ὁ ἄρα καλούμενος τῆς ψυχῆς νοῦς (λέγω δὲ νοῦν, ᾧ διανοεῖται καὶ ὑπολαμβάνει ἡ ψυχή) — a. 22.
In the preceding chapter he expressly discriminates νόησις from ὑπόληψις. This last word ὑπόληψις is the most general term for believing or opining upon reasons good or bad; the varieties under it are ἐπιστήμη, δόξα, φρόνησις καὶ τἀναντία τούτων (p. 427, b. 16-27).
[143] Aristot. De Memor. et Rem. ii. p. 453 a. 10.
[144] Ibid. p. 449, b. 31-p. 450, a. 12: νοεῖν οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνευ φαντάσματος — ἡ δὲ μνήμη καὶ ἡ τῶν νοητῶν οὐκ ἄνευ φαντάσματός ἐστιν. — De Animâ, III. vii. p. 431, a. 16.
The doctrine of Aristotle respecting Noûs has been a puzzle, even from the time of his first commentators. Partly from the obscurity inherent in the subject, partly from the defective condition of his text as it now stands, his meaning cannot be always clearly comprehended, nor does it seem that the different passages can be completely reconciled.