[177] Ibid. p. 430, a. 2-9.
[178] Aristot. De Animâ, II. v. p. 417, b. 23. Ibid. III. iv. p. 429, b. 7: ὅταν δύνηται ἐνεργεῖν δι’ αὑτοῦ.
The distinction, yet at the same time correlation, between Form and Matter, pervades all nature (Aristotle affirms), and will be found in the Noûs as elsewhere. We must recognize an Intellectus Agens or constructive, and an Intellectus Patiens or receptive.[179] The Agens is the great intellectual energy pervading the celestial body, and acting upon all the animals susceptible of its operation; analogous to light, which illuminates the diaphanous medium, and elevates what was mere potential colour into colour actual and visible.[180] The Patiens is the intellectual receptivity acted upon in each individual, and capable of being made to cogitate every thing; anterior to the Agens, in time, so far as regards the individual, yet as a general fact (when we are talking of man as a species) not anterior even in time, but correlative. Of the two, the Intellectus Agens is the more venerable; it is pure intellectual energy, unmixed, unimpressible from without, and separable from all animal body. It is this, and nothing more, when considered apart from animal body; but it is then eternal and immortal, while the Intellectus Patiens perishes with the remaining soul and with the body. Yet though the Intellectus Agens is thus eternal, and though we have part in it, we cannot remember any of its operations anterior to our own maturity; for the concurrence of the Intellectus Patiens, which begins and ends with us, is indispensable both to remembrance and to thought.[181]
[179] Ibid. III. v. p. 430, a. 10.
[180] Ibid. a. 14: καὶ ἔστιν ὁ μὲν τοιοῦτος νοῦς τῷ πάντα γίνεσθαι, ὁ δὲ τῷ πάντα ποιεῖν, ὡς ἕξις τις, οἷον τὸ φῶς· τρόπον γάρ τινα καὶ τὸ φῶς ποιεῖ τὰ δυνάμει ὄντα χρώματα ἐνεργείᾳ χρώματα. Aristotle here illustrates νοῦς ποιητικός by φῶς and ἕξις; and we know what view he takes of φῶς (De Animâ, II. vii. p. 418, b. 9) as the ἐνέργεια or ἕξις τοῦ διαφανοῦς — which diaphanous he explains to be a φύσις τις ἐνυπάρχουσα ἐν ἀέρι καὶ ὕδατι καὶ ἐν τῷ ἀϊδίῳ τῷ ἄνω σώματι. Judging by this illustration, it seems proper to couple the νοῦς ποιητικός here with his declaration in De Generat. Animal. II. p. 736, b. 28: τὸν νοῦν μόνον θύραθεν ἐπεισέναι καὶ θεῖον εἶναι μόνον: he cannot consider the νοῦς ποιητικός, which is of the nature of Form, as belonging to each individual man like the νοῦς παθητικός.
[181] Aristot. De Animâ, III. v. p. 430, a. 17: καὶ οὗτος ὁ νοῦς (i. e. ποιητικός χωριστὸς καὶ ἀπαθὴς καὶ ἀμιγής, τῇ οὐσίᾳ ὢν ἐνέργεια· ἀεὶ γὰρ τιμιώτερον τὸ ποιοῦν τοῦ πάσχοντος, καὶ ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς ὕλης. — Ibid. a. 22: χωρισθεὶς δ’ ἐστὶ μόνον τοῦθ’ ὅπερ ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον· οὐ μνημονεύομεν δέ, ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές, ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς φθαρτός, καὶ ἄνευ τούτου οὐθὲν νοεῖ. In this obscure and difficult chapter (difficult even to Theophrastus the friend and pupil of the author), we have given the best meaning that the words seem to admit.
We see here the full extent of Aristotle’s difference from the Platonic doctrine, in respect to the immortality of the soul. He had defined soul as the first actualization of a body having potentiality of life with a determinate organism. This of course implied, and he expressly declares it, that soul and body in each individual case were one and indivisible, so that the soul of Sokrates perished of necessity with the body of Sokrates.[182] But he accompanied that declaration with a reserve in favour of Noûs, and especially of the theorizing Noûs; which he recognized as a different sort of soul, not dependent on a determinate bodily organism, but capable of being separated from it, as the eternal is from the perishable.[183] The present chapter informs us how far such reserve is intended to go. That the theorizing Noûs is not limited, like the sentient soul, to a determinate bodily organism, but exists apart from that organism and eternally — is maintained as incontestable: it is the characteristic intellectual activity of the eternal celestial body and the divine inmates thereof. But the distinction of Form and Matter is here pointed out, as prevailing in Noûs and in Soul generally, not less than throughout all other Nature. The theorizing Noûs, as it exists in Sokrates, Plato, Demokritus, Anaxagoras, Empedokles, Xenokrates, &c., is individualized in each, and individualized differently in each. It represents the result of the Intellectus Agens or Formal Noûs, universal and permanent, upon the Intellectus Patiens or noëtic receptivity peculiar to each individual; the co-operation of the two is indispensable to sustain the theorizing intellect of any individual man. But the Intellectus Patiens, or Receptivus, perishes along with the individual. Accordingly, the intellectual life of Sokrates cannot be continued farther. It cannot be prolonged after his sensitive and nutritive life has ceased; the noëtic function, as it exists in him, is subject to the same limits of duration as the other functions of the soul. The intellectual man is no more immortal than the sentient man.
[182] Ibid. II. i. p. 413, a. 3.
[183] Ibid. ii. p. 413, b. 24: περὶ δὲ τοῦ νοῦ καὶ τῆς θεωρητικῆς δυνάμεως οὐδέν πω φανερόν, ἀλλ’ ἔοικε ψυχῆς γένος ἕτερον εἶναι, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον ἐνδέχεται χωρίζεσθαι, καθάπερ τὸ ἀΐδιον τοῦ φθαρτοῦ.
Such is the opinion here delivered by Aristotle. And it follows indeed as a distinct corollary from his doctrine respecting animal and vegetable procreation in general. Individuality (the being unum numero in a species) and immortality are in his view incompatible facts; the one excludes the other. In assigning (as he so often does) a final cause or purpose to the wide-spread fact of procreation of species by animals and vegetables, he tells us that every individual living organism, having once attained the advantage of existence, yearns and aspires to prolong this for ever, and to become immortal. But this aspiration cannot be realized; Nature has forbidden it, or is inadequate to it; no individual can be immortal. Being precluded from separate immortality, the individual approaches as near to it as is possible, by generating a new individual like itself, and thus perpetuating the species. Such is the explanation given by Aristotle of the great fact pervading the sublunary, organized world[184] — immortal species of plants, animals, and men, through a succession of individuals each essentially perishable. The general doctrine applies to Noûs as well as to the other functions of the soul. Noûs is immortal; but the individual Sokrates, considered as noëtic or intellectual, can no more be immortal than the same individual considered as sentient or reminiscent.