[Discussion] On the Gods and the World, Ch. VIII

Happy Wednesday! and to those who celebrate them, a happy belated solstice and early merry Christmas. Let's pick the puzzle-box back up and continue this second third of Sallustius, shall we?

VIII. On Mind and Soul, and that the latter is immortal.

There is a certain force,* less primary than Being but more primary than the Soul, which draws its existence from Being and completes the Soul as the Sun completes the eyes. Of Souls some are rational and immortal, some irrational and mortal. The former are derived from the first Gods, the latter from the secondary.

First, we must consider what soul is. It is, then, that by which the animate differs from the inanimate. The difference lies in motion, sensation, imagination, intelligence.† Soul, therefore, when irrational, is the life of sense and imagination; when rational, it is the life which controls sense and imagination and uses reason.

The irrational soul depends on the affections of the body; it feels desire and anger irrationally. The rational soul both, with the help of reason, despises the body, and, fighting against the irrational soul, produces either virtue or vice, according as it is victorious or defeated.

It must be immortal, both because it knows the gods (and nothing mortal knows‡ what is immortal), it looks down upon human affairs as though it stood outside them, and, like an unbodied thing, it is affected in the opposite way to the body. For while the body is young and fine, the soul blunders, but as the body grows old it attains its highest power. Again, every good soul uses mind; but no body can produce mind: for how should that which is without mind produce mind? Again, while Soul uses the body as an instrument, it is not in it; just as the engineer is not in his engines (although many engines move without being touched by any one). And if the Soul is often made to err by the body, that is not surprising. For the arts cannot perform their work when their instruments are spoilt.

* Gilbert Murray notes, "Proclus, Elem. Theol. xx, calls it ἡ νοερὰ φύσις ['he noera physis'], Natura Intellectualis. There are four degrees of existence: lowest of all, Bodies; above that, Soul; above all Souls, this 'Intellectual Nature'; above that, The One."

† Thomas Taylor notes, "In order to understand this distinction properly, it is necessary to observe, that the gnostic powers of the soul are five in number, viz. intellect, cogitation, (διανοια ['dianoia']) opinion, phantasy, sense. Intellect is that power by which we understand simple self-evident truths, called axioms, and are able to pass into contact with ideas themselves. But cogitation is that power which forms and perfects arguments and reasons. Opinion is that which knows the universal in sensible particulars, as that every man is a biped; and the conclusion of cogitation, as that every rational soul is immortal; but it only knows the οτι ['oti'], or that a thing is, but is perfectly ignorant of the διοτι ['dioti'], or why it is. And the phantasy is that power which apprehends things cloathed with figure, and may be called μοζφωτιχη νοησις ['mozphotiche noesis'], a figured intelligence. And, lastly, sense is that power which is distributed about the organs of sensation; which is mingled with passion in its judgement of things, and apprehends that only which falls upon, and agitates it externally. Again, the basis of the rational life is opinion; for the true man, or the rational soul, consists of intellect, cogitation, and opinion; but the summit of the irrational life is the phantasy. And opinion and phantasy are connected with each other; and the irrational is filled with powers from the rational life: so that the fictitious man commences from the phantasy; under which desire, like a many-headed savage beast, and anger, like a raging lion, subsist.

"But of these powers, intellect and sense do not employ a reasoning energy, on account of the acuteness and suddenness of their perceptions. And with respect to cogitation, it either assumes the principles of reasoning from intellect, which principles we call axioms; and in this case it produces demonstrative reasoning, the conclusions of which are always true, on account of the certainty of the axioms from which reason receives its increase: or the same cogitation converts itself to opinion, and deriving its principles from thence, forms dialectic reason, so called from its being employed by men in common discourse with each other; and hence its conclusions are not always true, because opinion is sometimes false: or, in the third place, cogitation conjoins itself with the phantasy, and in consequence of this produces vicious reasoning, which always embraces that which is false."

‡ Murray notes, "i. e. in the full sense of Gnôsis."