Translation:Treaty of the Three Fraudsters/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
Of the Soul
§. 1.
The soul is better to deal with than Heaven and Hell. For the Reader's curiosity, it'd be therefore appropriate to talk about it in detail. Before defining it, we must explain what the most famous Philosophers thought about it. I will not use more words, so that it can be remembered more easily.
§. 2.
Some have claimed that the soul is a Spirit, or an immaterial substance; others have maintained that it is a slice of divinity; some make it look very subtle; others say it is a harmony of all the body; for some, the soul is the most subtle part of the blood, which leaves it in the brain and is distributed by the nerves. That said, the source of the soul is the heart where it is generated and the place where it exercises its noblest functions is the brain, leaving the blood. These various opinions have been formed about the soul. Natheless, to study the soul better, let's divide it into two. In one, the Philosophers believed it to be corporeal; in the other, they conceived it incorporeal.
§. 3.
Pythagoras and Plato argued that the soul was incorporeal, that is to say, a being capable of subsisting without the aid of the body and which could move on its own. They claim that all animal souls are portions of the universal soul of the world, that these portions are incorporeal and immortal, or of the same nature.
§. 4.
These Philosophers believed that the universe was animated by an immaterial, immortal and invisible substance, which does everything, which always acts, and which is the cause of all movement, and the source of all souls that emerge from it. Now, as these souls are very unmixed and transcend the body, they do not unite immediately, but through a subtle corpora like flame or air, which the vulgar mistakes for Heaven. Then a subtler body, then another a little less gross, and always like this by degrees, until they can unite with the sensitive bodies where they descend. For them, death of the body is the life of the soul, which was there as if buried, and where it only weakly exercised its noblest functions. Hence, through the death of the body, the soul leaves its prison, gets rid of matter, and reunites with the soul of the world from which it emanated.
According to this opinion, all animal souls are of the same nature, and the diversity of their functions or faculties comes only from the difference in the bodies into which they enter. Aristotle admits a universal intelligence common to all beings, which regards to particular intelligences what light regards to the eyes. As light makes objects visible, universal understanding makes these objects intelligible.[1] This Philosopher describes the soul as what makes us live, feel, conceive and move, but he does not say what this being is, which is the source and principle of these noble functions, and hence, our doubts about the nature of the soul are left unresolved.
§. 5.
Dicearchus, Asclepiades, and Galen in some respects, also believed that the soul was incorporeal, but in another way. They said that the soul is nothing other than the harmony of all the parts of the body, that is to say, what evolves from an exact mixture of the elements and the arrangement of the parts, of moods and minds. Therefore, they say, health is not a part of one who is well, although one may be healthy. In the same way, although the soul is in the animal, it is not one of its parts, but the treat of all those of which it is composed.
Whereupon, these authors believe the soul to be incorporeal, on a principle quite opposed to their intention. To say that it is not a body, but only something inseparably attached to the body, is to say that it is corporeal. Because we call corporeal not only that which is body, but everything that is form or accident, or that which cannot be separated from matter. These Philosophers maintain that the soul is incorporeal or immaterial. We see that they do not agree with themselves, and therefore do not deserve to be believed. We ought to move on to those who have admitted that the soul is corporeal or material.
§. 6.
Diogenes believed that the soul is composed of air, from which he ended up with the need to breathe. The air passes through the lungs into the heart, where it heats up, and where it is then distributed throughout the body. Leucippus and Democritus said that the soul was made of fire and that, like fire, it was composed of particles. The soul easily settles on all parts of the body and makes it move.
Hippocrates said it was composed of water and fire; Empedocles of four elements. Epicurus believed, like Democritus, that the soul is composed of fire, but he added that in this composition there enters air, vapor, and another substance which has no name, and which is the principle of affect. From these four different substances, a very subtle spirit is made, which spreads throughout the body and which must be called the soul.
Descartes also maintains, but miserably, that the soul is not material. I say miserably because never a Philosopher reasoned so badly on this subject as this grandeur; and this is how he does it. First, he says that one must doubt the existence of one's body; to believe that there is none; then reason in this way: There is no body; yet I am, therefore I am not a body; therefore, I can only be a substance that thinks. Although this beautiful reasoning is quite self-defeating, I will natheless say my thoughts.
- Mr. Descartes' doubt is totally impossible. Although we sometimes think that there are no bodies, it is natheless true that there are bodies when we think about them.
- Whoever believes that there is no body must be assured that there is not one. No one is able to doubt oneself, and hence, if one is assured of this, one's doubt is useless.
- When he says that the soul is a substance that thinks, he does not teach us anything new. Everyone is fit for this, but the difficulty is to decide about what this substance is.
§. 7.
Not to be biased and to have the healthiest idea to be formed of the animal soul, without excluding the human being who is of the same nature and who does not exercise different functions by the diversity of organs and moods, we must pay attention to the following.
Obviously, there is in the universe a very subtle fluid, a very loose and always moving matter. The source of this matter is in the sun; the rest is spread in other corpora, more or less, depending on their coherence and nature. The soul of the world is what governs and vivifies it, some portion of which is distributed to all the parts that compose it.
The soul is the fire in the universe. It does not burn by itself, but by different movements that it gives to the particles of other corpora into which it enters, it burns and makes its heat felt. Visible fire contains more of this matter than air, the latter than water, and the earth has much less. Plants have more than minerals, and animals even more. In the end, this fire contained in the corpora makes it feel, which is the soul or what we call the animal spirit spread throughout the corpora. Now, it is certain that this soul, being of the same nature in all animals, dissipates at death, as well as at that of beasts. From there it fits into what Poets and Theologians tell us about the other world is an illusion that they have depicted for reasons that are easy to guess.
- ↑ Le Dictionnaire of Bayle. Art. Averoës.