On the Soul
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- Charles Collier
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~91,200 words · 433 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). De Anima (On the Soul) [On the Soul] (Charles Collier, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/de-anima-on-the-soul
- MLAAristotle. De Anima (On the Soul) [On the Soul]. Translated by Charles Collier. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/de-anima-on-the-soul.
- ChicagoAristotle. De Anima (On the Soul) [On the Soul]. Translated by Charles Collier. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/de-anima-on-the-soul.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Aristotle's treatise on the soul, which is not a spirit shut inside a body but that which makes a living body alive.
Context and history
The definition in book two — the soul is the first actuality of a natural body having life in potentiality — dissolves at a stroke the Platonic problem of how two different substances are joined: they are not joined, because they are not two, just as the shape of an axe is not something separate from the iron. Out of this comes a scale: plants feed and reproduce, animals also perceive and move, man also thinks. Book three contains the passage on the active intellect that occupied fifteen hundred years of commentary, because Aristotle says there that this part is 'separable, impassible and unmixed' and does not make clear whether it is personal or common: Averroes read it one way and Aquinas another, and the quarrel ran on to the Renaissance. It is also the earliest treatise on psychology and on the theory of perception that we possess.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
of this essay is that something which gives to matter those attributes. The processes, then, of reproduction, growth, and decay, that is, generation, life, and death, are the essential characteristics of living beings, and conferred upon them, as has been said, by that something which is designated Vital Principle. Now, to homogeneous forms and solitary functions others of more complex nature are superadded, and these give rise to that long chain of being of which man may be regarded as the head; but yet, amid all the simplicity of organs, of action, and of reaction, those two functions still prevail, and constitute life, whatever the type of being, in its strictest signification. This is the teaching of Aristotle, as it is the doctrine of modern physiologists; and those functions are always here referred to as the essential conditions of whatever is animated, although, for higher forms of being, other organs and functions are required. The nature, however, of the essence or principle which originates and orders those living functions is hitherto for us, as it was for Aristotle, inscrutable; and it may be that the wide survey which he took of life, by complicating simple functions with sentient and even intellectual faculties, tended only to disturb and pervert the course of his inquiry. But whether Aristotle's mode of inquiry was or not faulty, and whether the principle which animates the world (it may be the universe) is or not among those causes which are inscrutable, it will be ever a topic of deep interest to the learned and the thoughtful of every age.