If there are still readers who fear that in thus emphasizing the relation of soul to body we are detracting from the spirituality of life, we may be permitted to suspect that they have failed to grasp the distinction, so vital to all clear thinking, between the value and the origin of a thing-what a thing is in itself, and the materials or the natural processes which are its conditions. A flower is not less a flower because of the earth out of which it springs, or a statue a statue because it is resolvable into carbonate of lime. The glory of the flower and of the statue is that their materials have been transfigured in the making of them, as it is the glory of these materials to be so transfigured. Similarly, it is the glory of the soul to have moulded and transfigured the body, just as it is the glory of the body to have been moulded and transfigured by the soul.* § 2. The "Parts" of the Soul. [I. c. xiii. §§ 10 foll.] The philosophical principle of form and matter, which is applied to explain the relation of soul and body, shows us also in what sense the Aristotelian division between the "parts" of the soul as we have it in these sections must be taken. We have already seen that Aristotle conceives of nature as revealing herself in a progressive series of forms, beginning with the lower and inorganic, and rising finally to the life of conscious reason. While nature thus presents us * Cf. Bosanquet's Psychology of the Moral Self, pp. 124, 125. with a continuous series of graduated forms, each of which stands to that above it as matter to form, means to end, yet at certain points we meet with clearly marked divisions corresponding to popular distinctions. Confining ourselves to organic life, we have first the merely vegetative life of plants, with their two main properties of growth and propagation. Above this we have the animal forms, endowed in addition to these with the properties of sensation, pain and pleasure, appetite, to which we must add in the case of some of the higher animals a large gift of intelligence, and the rudiments of moral character. Finally, in the rational soul of man, which is the crown of all that goes before, we have the attribute of reason displaying itself not only in a higher degree of intelligence, but in the faculty of apprehending the supersensible and entering into the meaning of the whole.* As separate stages of organic development, and again, as separate elements in human nature, it is clear enough what we are to understand by these different 'souls." But it is not so plain how we are to conceive of their union in individual organisms. A reference, however, to what Aristotle elsewhere says, leaves us in no doubt as to his own view on this subject. Thus, in criticizing Plato's threefold division of the soul into reason, passion, and desire, Aristotle points out that it commits the mistake of splitting up the soul into parts, and forces us to assume, contrary to fact, that each has a specific organ in the body. The * Zeller, op. cit. ii. p. 21 foll. connexion is much more intimate than Plato held, and is compared by Aristotle to the relation of a more complex geometrical figure to a simpler. Just as a quadrangle contains in itself two triangles, but cannot be said to be compacted of them, so the individual animal consists of the union of the vegetative and the appetitive soul. And just as there is no figure which is not some power of the triangle, so there is no soul, however exalted in the scale, which does not contain the lower. But Aristotle would have been the first to admit that no geometrical metaphor is adequate to express the real depth of the connexion. The higher not only contains the lower, but transforms it, so that it is only in the new setting which it receives as an element in the higher that the potentialities of the lower become apparent.* Thus in the life of sensation and desire we have the life of nutrition raised to a higher power, and showing us what it had in it to become. Similarly, in the life of thought and volition we see for the first time the true end and purpose of sense, feeling, and appetite. Applying this to the division before us: when Aristotle tells us that the soul of man consists of three parts-a vegetative or purely irrational, a sensitive or appetitive, which is partly rational and partly irrational, and a purely rational—we are prepared to understand in what sense these expressions must be taken. The most suggestive of Aristotle's formulæ for expressing the relation of form to matter is that by which he describes the form as "that which the matter was all along " (tò tí ñv elvai). F 1. In the first place there can here be nothing purely irrational in the sense that it is not adapted to the end of the whole. The physical and merely vegetative part of man already bears the stamp of his reason. There is even, as Professor Stewart points out, a sense in which it is the conscious product of reason. It is true that as conscious individuals we have little to do with the form and physical growth of our bodies. But it is not true that the body has reached its present stage of development independently of the action of conscious purpose. Apart altogether from sexual selection, where the purpose may be said to be unconscious, we have the conscious reason of the community, acting inter alia through prescribed forms of physical education, and sensibly modifying the inherited structure of the physical organism. 2. It is all the more important to try to define accurately what is implied in the general philosophy sketched above as to the relation between reason and desire, that Aristotle's own expressions in the passage before us are not carefully selected. Thus in §§ 15 and 18, he does not hesitate to class desire as "irrational," while his metaphor in §§ 15 and 16 of the paralytic limb does not mend matters, but, as Grant remarks, is apt to suggest the parallel passage in the Epistle to the Romans, where St. Paul describes the opposition between the "law of my mind," and "the law in my members." The reader who has followed the above account of Aristotle's guiding conception will have no difficulty in seeing how wholly contrary to the spirit of his doctrine any such interpretation would be. On the one hand, the "law in the members" is not something essentially different from "the law of the mind "-desire from reason. According to Aristotle there is a natural tendency in the desires and impulses to fall into an order or system which more or less reflects the order required by the social environment.* On the other hand, the life of reason does not mean the uprooting of the animal desires, but the subordination of them to the human purposes which they themselves already foreshadow It is true, indeed, that in the man of imperfect selfcontrol there does appear to be such a division as is here suggested. But this is because he represents the stage of transition from the lower stage at which, as in the intelligent animal or docile child, the harmony between reason and passion is merely implicit, to the higher in which, as in the man of perfected self-control, it has become the conscious principle of life. When the transition has been made we find that the higher harmony has been obtained, not at the expense of the lower or animal nature by suppressing or maiming it, but by developing the rational principle it foreshadows and reproducing on the higher plane of conscious life the completeness which the unconscious possesses on a lower. $ 3. Moral and Intellectual Virtue. If we apply the same principle to the different forms of virtue or capacity with which these sections *See p. 70. |