A critical history of Greek philosophy

by W. T. Stace

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.

[{304}]

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 Aristotle's system at this point, which has led many to say that man is the top of the scale. The rest of Aristotle's physics deal with what is outside our earth, such as the stars and planets. And they deal with them quite as if they were a different subject, having little or nothing to do with the terrestrial scale of being which we have been considering. But here we must not forget two facts. The first is that Aristotle's writings have come down to us mutilated, and in many cases unfinished. The second is that Aristotle had a curious habit of writing separate monographs on different parts of his system, and omitting to point out any connexion between them, although such a connexion undoubtedly exists.

Now although Aristotle himself does not say it, there are several good reasons for thinking that the true interpretation of his meaning is that the scale of being does not stop at man, that there is no gap in the chain here, but that it proceeds from man through planets and stars--which Aristotle, like Plato, regarded as divine beings--right up to God himself. In the first place, this is required by the logic of his system. The scale has formless matter at the bottom and matterless form at the top. It should proceed direct from one to the other. It is essential to his philosophy that the universe is a single continuous chain. There is no place for such a hiatus between man and the higher beings. Secondly, it is not as if terrestrial life formed a scale, and celestial beings were all on a par, having among themselves no [{305}] scale of higher and lower. This is not the case. The heavenly bodies have grades among themselves. The higher are related to the lower as form to matter. Thus stars are higher than planets. So that if we suppose that evolution stops at man, what we have is a gap in the middle, a scale below it, and a scale above it. It is like a bridge over a sheet of water, the two ends of which are intact, but which is broken down in the middle. The natural completion of this scheme involves the filling up of the gap. Thirdly, we have another very important piece of evidence. With his valuable idea of evolution Aristotle combined another very curious, and no doubt, absurd, theory. This was that in the scale of the universe the lowest existence is to be found in the middle, the highest at the periphery, and that in general the higher is always outside the lower, so that the spatial universe is a system of concentric spheres, the outer sphere being related to the inner sphere as higher to lower, as form to matter. At the centre of the spherical universe is our earth. Earth, as the lowest element, is in the middle. Then comes a layer of water, then of air, then of fire. Among the heavenly bodies there are fifty-six spheres. The stars are outside the planets and are therefore higher beings. And in conformity with this scheme, the supreme being, God, is outside the outermost sphere. Now it is obvious that, in this scheme, the passage from the centre of the earth to the stars forms a spatial continuity, and it is impossible to resist the conclusion that it also forms a logical continuity, that is, that there is no break in the chain of evolution.

Noting that this is not what Aristotle in so many words says, but that it is our interpretation of his [{306}] intention, which is almost certainly correct, we conclude that man is not the top of the scale. Next to him come the heavenly bodies. The planets include the sun and the moon, which, revolve round the earth in a direction opposite to that of the stars. Next in the scale come the stars. We need not go into details of the fifty-six spheres. The stars and planets are divine beings. But this is only a comparative term. Man, as the possessor of reason, is also divine, but the heavenly bodies infinitely more so. And this means that they are more rational than man, and so higher in the scale. They live an absolutely blessed and perfect life. They are immortal and eternal, because they are the supreme self-realization of the eternal reason. It is only upon this earth that death and corruption occur, a circumstance which has no doubt emphasized that view of Aristotle's philosophy which holds the gap between man and the stars to be a real one. The heavenly bodies are not composed of the four elements, but of a fifth, a quintessence, which is called ether. Like all elements it must have its natural motion. And as it is the finest and most perfect, its motion must be perfect. And it must be an eternal motion, because the stars are eternal beings. It cannot be motion in a straight line, because that never comes to an end, and so is never perfect. Circular motion alone is perfect. And it is eternal because its end and its beginning are one. Hence the natural motion of ether is circular, and the stars move in perfect circles.

Leaving the stars behind, we reach the summit of the long ladder from matter to form. This is the absolute form, God. As formless matter is not an existent thing, nor is matterless form. God, therefore, is not in the [{307}] world of space and time at all. But it is one of the curiosities of thought that Aristotle nevertheless gives him a place outside the outermost sphere. What is outside the sphere is, therefore, not space. All space and time are inside this globular universe. Space is therefore finite. And God must be outside the outermost sphere because he is the highest being, and the higher always comes outside the lower.