oul, are common opinions: the others are only
entertained by individuals; and, indeed, there were many among the
ancients who held singular opinions on this subject, of whom the latest
was Aristoxenus, a man who was both a musician and a philosopher. He
maintained a certain straining of the body, like what is called harmony
in music, to be the soul, and believed that, from the figure and nature
of the whole body, various motions are excited, as sounds are from an
instrument. He adhered steadily to his system, and yet he said
something, the nature of which, whatever it was, had been detailed and
explained a great while before by Plato. Xenocrates denied that the
soul had any figure, or anything like a body; but said it was a number,
the power of which, as Pythagoras had fancied, some ages before, was
the greatest in nature: his master, Plato, imagined a threefold soul, a
dominant portion of which--that is to say, reason--he had lodged in the
head, as in a tower; and the other two parts--namely, anger and
desire--he made subservient to this one, and allotted them distinct
abodes, placing anger in the breast, and desire under the praecordia.
But Dicaearchus, in that discourse of some learned disputants, held at
Corinth, which he details to us in three books--in the first book
introduces many speakers; and in the other two he introduces a certain
Pherecrates, an old man of Phthia, who, as he said, was descended from
Deucalion; asserting, that there is in fact no such thing at all as a
soul, but that it is a name without a meaning; and that it is idle to
use the expression "animals," or "animated beings;" that neither men
nor beasts have minds or souls, but that all that power by which we act
or perceive is equally infused into every living creature, and is
inseparable from the body, for if it were not, it would be nothing; nor
is there anything whatever really existing except body, which is a
single and simple thing, so fashioned as to live and have its
sensations in consequence of the regulations of nature. Aristotle, a
man superior to all others, both in genius and industry (I always
except Plato), after having embraced these four known sorts of
principles, from which all things deduce their origin, imagines that
there is a certain fifth nature, from whence comes the soul; for to
think, to foresee, to learn, to teach, to invent anything, and many
other attributes of the same kind, such as to remember, to love, to
hate, to