The Complete Essays (96 page)

[C]
medium non deserit unquam
Coeli Phoebus iter; radiis tamen omnia lustrat
.

[Phoebus never deserts his path through the sky, yet bathes all things with light from his rays] –

just as the Sun in the sky pours out its light and its powers and fills the whole universe:

Caetera pars animae per totum dissita corpus
Paret, et ad numen mentis nomenque movetur
.

[The remainder of the soul, scattered throughout the body, obeys, and is activated by the majesty and authority of the mind.]
²⁹⁵

Some said that there is a general Soul, like some huge body, from which individual souls were extracted, later returning there to be re-absorbed in that universal matter:

Deum namque ire per omnes
Terrasque tractusque maris coelumque profundum:
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;
Scilicet huc reddi deinde, ac resoluta referri
Omnia: nec morti esse locum;

[For God is said to spread through all lands, all tracts of sea and highest heaven; from him all flocks and herds and men and every race of beast all take, at birth, their tenuous lives, and to him all things eventually return, when they are loosened asunder: and so there is no place at all for death;]
²⁹⁶

others said that the individual souls merely rejoined this general Soul – attached to it, but as individuals; others said that souls were produced from the divine substance itself; others, from fire and water, by angels; some said they existed from the earliest times; others, that they were created only when actually required. Some said they came down from the circle of the Moon and later returned there. Most of the Ancients held that, exactly like all other natural things, they were engendered from father to son, adducing as an argument the resemblance of sons to their fathers:
²⁹⁷

Instillata patris virtus tibi:
Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis
.

[Your father’s virtue is transmitted to you; strong men are born from strong men and good.]
²⁹⁸

Not only physical characteristics were held to flow like this from father to son but similar humours, complexions and inclinations of the soul:

Denique cur acris violentia triste leonum
Seminium sequitur; dolus vulpibus, et fuga cervis
A patribus datur, et patrius pavor incitat artus;
Si non certa suo quia semine seminioque
Vis animi pariter crescit cum corpore toto?

[Finally, why is impetuous ferocity the hereditary mark of the dire lion family, trickery of the fox and swiftness of the deer (which inherits the paternal instinct towards timorous flight) if not because the soul is born from semen and grows with the rest of the body?]

This was held to be the basis of divine Justice which readily visits upon the children the sins of the fathers, because the pollution of the fathers’ vices is to some extent imprinted upon the souls of their children, who are influenced by their fathers’ unruly desires.
²⁹⁹

Moreover if souls do not come from natural succession but by some other way – if, say, they existed beforehand as entities independent of their bodies – they would have had some memory of their former state, given that reflection, reason and memory are the natural properties of the soul:

[B]
si in corpus nascentibus insinuatur,
Cur superante actam aetatem meminisse nequimus,
Nec vestigia gestarum rerum ulla tenemus?

[If souls are only introduced into the bodies at birth, why cannot we fully remember what happened before nor retain any trace of the things which we did?]
³⁰⁰

[A] If we are to give the value we wish to the attributes of our souls, we are obliged to assume that, even in their natural simplicity and purity, they
are full of knowledge; free from the prison of the body, our souls, therefore, must be such, before they entered their bodies, as we hope they will be once they have gone forth from them; so, while they are in the body, they must continue to remember that knowledge: hence Plato’s assertion that whatever we learn is really the recollection of what we once knew. But we all know that to be false from our own experience. First: we remember nothing save what we have been taught; if memory did its duty ‘purely’, it would at least hint at something beyond our apprenticed knowledge. Second: what the soul knew in her pure state was true knowledge: since her intelligence was divine, she knew things as they really are; here below you can make the soul accept lies and errors, if you teach them to her. She cannot be using her powers of recollection in that case, since she had never accommodated such Forms and concepts!

But to say that her imprisonment in the body smothers her native faculties so completely as to snuff them right out, runs, first of all, contrary to that other belief: that we can recognize her powers to be so great, and those of her workings which we are conscious of in this life to be so wonderful, that they allow us to conclude that she is divine, has existed from all eternity and will enjoy immortality.

[B]
Nam, si tantopere est animi mutata potestas
Omnis ut actarum exciderit retinentia rerum,
Non, ut opinor, ea ab leto jam longior errat
.

[For if all the faculties of the soul are so completely changed that no memory of the past remains, that seems to me to be no different from extinction.]
³⁰¹

[A] Moreover, the powers and actions of our souls must be examined not elsewhere but here, at home in our bodies. Any other perfections they may have are useless and irrelevant; it is for their present state that their whole immortality will receive its acknowledged rewards: each is entirely accountable for the life of a human being. But it would be an act of gross injustice to lop off the soul’s powers and resources, to strip her of all her weapons and then to take the very time when she lies weak and ill in prison – a time of repression and constraint – and to make that the basis for a judgement leading to endless, everlasting punishment; it would be unjust to limit consideration to so short a span, to a life that may have lasted a mere two hours or, at the very worst a hundred years – an instant in proportion to infinity – and then, from that momentary interlude, to order and establish, once and for all, the whole state of her future existence. To reward or
punish on the basis of so short a life would be disproportionate and iniquitous.

[C] To get out of this difficulty, Plato wants future rewards and punishments never to exceed a hundred years and always to be proportionate to the actual length of a man’s life. Quite a few Christians too have imposed temporal limits on to them.
³⁰²

[A] As a result of all this men followed Epicurus and Democritus (whose opinions were most widely received); they concluded that the generation and life of the soul shared all the usual characteristics of things human. Many striking features make this seem probable: they could see that the soul was born precisely when the body was capable of receiving her; that her strength increased as the body’s did: it was observed that the soul was weak in infancy and then, eventually, experienced a vigorous maturity, a decline into old age and, finally, decrepitude:

gigni pariter cum corpore, et una
Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem
.

[We can feel that the soul is born with the body, grows up with it and then grows old.]
³⁰³

Man perceived that the soul can experience various passions and be disturbed by several emotions which subject her to pain and lassitude; she is capable of change, including change for the worse; she is capable of joy, tranquillity, languor; like the stomach or the foot, she is subject to wounds and illness:

[B]
mentem sanari, corpus ut aegrum
Cemimus, et flecti medicina posse videmus
.

[We see that the mind can be cured like the body and be modified by drugs.]

[A] She can be confused and dazed by the powers of wine, be upset by the vapours of a burning fever; be lulled to sleep by certain drugs and aroused by others:

[B]
corpoream naturam animi esse necesse est,
Corporeis quoniam telis ictuque laborat
.

[The nature of the mind is necessarily corporeal, for it can be hurt by physical cuts and blows.]

[A] Men saw that all the soul’s faculties can be stunned and overthrown by the mere bite of a sick dog; that the soul has no way of avoiding any of these accidents, even by showing the utmost firmness of mind or any moral quality or virtue, by philosophical determination or by any straining of her forces. Let the saliva of some wretched dog slaver over the hand of Socrates and they knew that it would put a sudden end to all his wisdom and to all his mighty, disciplined thought, reducing them to nothing, so that no trace whatever would remain of his original awareness:

[B]
vis animai

Conturbatur,… et divisa seorsum
Disjectatur, eodem illo distracta veneno
.

[The power of the soul is disturbed and its parts are broken up and dispersed by that same poison.]

[A] They knew that the poison would find no greater powers of resistance in his soul than in a four-year-old’s: if Philosophy herself became incarnate, such a poison would make her lose her senses and drive her insane. Cato could wring the neck of Death and Destiny, but if ever he had been bitten by a mad dog and contracted that illness which doctors call
hydroforbia
,
³⁰⁴
even he would have been overcome with fear and terror, quite unable to bear the sight of water or a looking-glass.

[B]
vis morbi distracta per artus
Turbat agens animam, spumantes aequore salso
Ventorum ut validis fervescunt viribus undae
.

[The power of the disease spreading through one’s limbs drives the soul to distraction, like stormy winds lashing the waves of the troubled sea.]

[A] While we are on this subject, Philosophy has armed Man well against all the other ills which may befall him, teaching him either to bear them or else, if the cost of that is too high, to inflict certain defeat on them by escaping from all sensation. But such methods can only be of service to a vigorous soul in control of herself, a soul capable of reason and decision: they are no use in a disaster such as this, where the soul of a philosopher becomes the soul of a madman, confused, lost and deranged. This can happen from several causes: by some excessive emotion which snatches the
mind away; by some strong passion engendered by the soul herself; by a wound in certain parts of the body; by a gastric vapour subjecting the soul to giddiness and confusion:

[B]
morbis in corporis, avius errat
Saepe animus: dementit enim, deliraque fatur;
Interdumque gravi lethargo fertur in altum
Aeternumque soporem, oculis nutuque cadenti
.

[During physical illness, the soul often goes astray, becoming mad and talking deliriously; sometimes it plunges into a deep lethargy, into a perpetual sleep, as the eyes close and the head droops down.]

[A] Philosophers, it seems to me, have hardly begun to pluck that particular chord; [C] no more than another one of similar importance. To console us in our mortal state they constantly present us with the following dilemma: the soul is either mortal or immortal; if mortal, she will be without pain; if immortal she will go on improving. But they never touch on the other alternative. What if she goes on getting worse! They simply hand threats of further punishment over to the poets. But that game is far too easy.

I am often struck by these two omissions in their argument: I now go back to the first. [A] The deranged soul loses all taste for the Sovereign Good of the Stoics, so constant and so resolute. On this point our wisdom, fair though she is, really must surrender and lay down her arms.

Meanwhile the vanity of human reason led philosophers to conclude that a composite being, linking in fellowship two elements as diverse as mortal body and immortal soul, is quite inconceivable.

Quippe etenim mortale aeterno jungere, et una
Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse,
Desipere est. Quid enim diversius esse putandum est,
Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque,
Quam mortale quod est, immortali atque perenni
Junctum, in concilio saevas tolerare procellas?