The Complete Essays (95 page)

Now let us see what human reason can tell us about itself and about the soul! [C] I am not talking now of that generic soul, in which virtually all philosophy makes the heavenly bodies and the elements to share; nor of that soul which Thales, prompted by his study of the magnet, attributes to objects normally considered inanimate; I am concerned with the soul which belongs to us, the one we should know best:

[B]
Ignoratur enim quae sit natura animai,
Nata sit, an contra nascentibus insinuetur,
Et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta,
An tenebras orci visat vastasque lacunas,
An pecudes alias divinitus insinuet se
.

[The nature of the soul is not known; whether it is innate or, on the contrary, slipped into creatures at the moment of their birth; does it die when we die, does it visit the darkness and the vast depths of Orcus, or else does it, under divine guidance, slip into animals different from ouselves?]
²⁷⁹

[A] Reason taught Crates and Dicaearchus that there is no soul (bodies being endowed with natural power of movement); it taught Plato that the soul is a self-moving substance; Thales, that soul is a natural substance, never in repose; Asclepiades, an exercising of the senses; Hesiod and Anaximander, a substance composed of fire and water; Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of blood:

–
Sanguineam vomit ille animam

[He vomits up his soul of blood]–

Possidonius, Cleanthes and Galen, that the soul is heat or a hot complexion –

Igneus est ollis vigor, et coelestis origo
[Souls have a fiery vigour and a heavenly origin] –

Hippocrates, a spirit spread throughout the body; Varro, air, infused through the mouth, warmed in the lungs, refreshed in the heart and spread throughout the body; Zeno, the quintessence of four elements; Heraclides of Pontus, light; Xenocrates and the Egyptians, number in motion; the Chaldeans, a power of indeterminate form:

[B]
habitum quemdam vitalem corporis esse,
Harmoniam Graeci quam dicunt
.

[There is a certain life-giving quality in the body which the Greeks call Harmony.]
²⁸⁰

[A] And let us not overlook Aristotle, who said the soul was that power which naturally moved the body and which he called
entelechia
(as dull an
idea as anyone else’s, for he does not mention the essence, origin or nature of the soul but merely notes what it does). Lactantius, Seneca and the better part of the Dogmatists all confessed that they did not know what it was. [C] And after running through all these opinions, Cicero comments:
‘Harum sententiarum quae vera sit, deus aliquis viderit’
[It is up to some god or other to say which of these is true]. [A] ‘I know from myself’, said St Bernard, ‘how incomprehensible God is: I cannot even comprehend the constituents of my own being.’ [C] Heraclitus held that everything is full of souls and daemons; he nevertheless maintained that whatever advances we may make in our knowledge of the soul, we would never get to the end, since its essence is too profound.
²⁸¹

[A] There is just as much disagreement and argument about the seat of the soul: Hippocrates and Hierophilus lodge it in the ventricle of the brain; Democritus and Aristotle, throughout the body –

[B]
Ut bona saepe valetudo cum dicitur esse
Corporis, et non est tarnen haec pars ulla valentis
.

[As we often say that a man has a healthy body, without implying that health is part of a healthy man.] –

[A] Epicurus lodges it in the stomach –

[B]
Hic exultat enim pavor ac metus, haec loca circum
Laetitiae mulcent;

[For terror and fear make the stomach tremble, while joys soothe its pains;]
²⁸²

[A] the Stoics lodge it within and around the heart; Erasistratus, adjoining the membrane of the epicranium; Empedocles, in the blood – like Moses, who for this reason forbade men to ‘eat the blood’ of beasts (whose soul is within the blood);
²⁸³
Galen thought that each part of the body had its own soul; Strato lodged it between the eyebrows: [C]
‘Qua facie quidem sit animus, aut ubi habitet, ne quaerendum quidem est’
[As for the aspect of the
soul and the place wherein it dwells, we should not even try to inquire]. – I gladly let that fellow Cicero use his own words (should I dare to contaminate the utterances of Eloquence!) and there is little to gain from stealing the substance of his own ideas, which are neither frequent, sound nor unknown.
²⁸⁴

[A] But the reason which led Chrysippus and others of his sect to make a case out for the heart is not to be forgotten: it is (he says) because, when we want to swear an oath, we place our hand upon our bosom, and when we want to pronounce the word έγω (which means ‘I’) we lower our jaw towards our chest. This passage should not be allowed to slip by without a remark about such silliness in so great a person. Even if you leave aside the total lack of weight in the argument as such, his last proof could only convince Greeks that their soul is where he said it is. No man’s judgement is so alert as never to nod off to sleep!
²⁸⁵
[C] Why are we afraid to say so? Here are the Stoics, the fathers of human wisdom, finding that, when a man is buried under the weight of a fallen building, his soul cannot extricate itself but makes lengthy struggles to get free – like a mouse in a trap!

Some
²⁸⁶
maintain that the world was made specifically to give bodies to souls, as a punishment for having wilfully fallen from their original purity; at first they were simply incorporeal; they are given light or heavy bodies, depending upon how far they have withdrawn from their original spiritual state (which explains the great variety of created matter). The spirit who, as a punishment, was invested with the body of the Sun must have fallen off in some very rare and special way!

The frontiers of our research are lost in dazzling light. Plutarch, writing of the fountain-heads of history, says that when we push our investigations to extremes, they all fall into vagueness, rather like maps where the margins of known lands are filled in with marshes, deep forests, deserts and uninhabitable places.
²⁸⁷
That explains why the most gross and puerile of rhapsodies are to be found among thinkers who penetrate most deeply into the highest matters: they are engulfed by their curiosity and their arrogance.

The beginnings and the ends of our knowledge are equally marked by an animal-like stupor: witness Plato’s soarings aloft in clouds of poetry and the babble of the gods to be found in his works. Whatever was he thinking about when he [A] defined Man as an animate creature with two legs and no feathers? He furnished those who wanted to laugh at him with an amusing opportunity for doing so. For, having plucked a live capon, they went about calling it ‘Plato’s Man’.
²⁸⁸

And the Epicureans too. With what simple-mindedness they first imagined that the universe had been formed by their atoms (which, they said, were bodies having some weight and a natural downward movement) until their opponents reminded them that, by their own description, it was impossible for these atoms to link up together: their fall, being straight and perpendicular, could only be effected along parallel lines. This obliged them to add a quite fortuitous sideways motion, and to furnish their atoms with curved hooks on their tails by which they could link themselves firmly to each other. [C] Even then, they were in trouble from others, who hounded them with another consideration: if atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the
Iliad?

That which is capable of reasoning, argued Zeno, is superior to that which is not: nothing is superior to the Universe, therefore the Universe is capable of reasoning. Cotta used the same argument to make the Universe into a mathematician and another argument of Zeno’s to make it into a musician – an organist. The whole is greater than the part: we, who are parts of the Universe, are capable of wisdom: therefore the Universe is wise.
²⁸⁹

[A] One can find innumerable examples
²⁹⁰
of similar arguments which are not only false but inept and unable to hold together, emphasizing that their inventors were not so much ignorant as silly; you can find them in the criticisms which philosophers make of each other in their clashes of opinion and in the disagreements between Schools.

[C] Anyone who made an intelligent collection of the asinine stupidities of human Wisdom would have a wondrous tale to tell. I like collecting such things as evidence which, from some angles, can be studied as usefully as sane and moderate opinions. [A] We can judge what we should think of Man, of his sense and of his reason, when we find such obvious and gross errors even in these important characters who have raised human intelligence to great heights. Personally I prefer to believe that they treated knowledge haphazardly, sporting with it, in any fashion, like a toy and that they played with reason as if it were some vain and frivolous instrument, putting forward all kinds of thoughts and fantasies, some forceful, others, weak. The selfsame Plato who defined Man as a capon, elsewhere follows Socrates and says that, in truth, he does not know what Man is, and that Man is one of the hardest things in the world to understand.
²⁹¹
With such varied and unstable opinions they lead us tacitly by the hand to inconclusive conclusions. They profess that they do not present the face of their thought openly and unveiled; they hide it beneath obscurities of poetic fable or behind some other mask. Our imperfection is such that raw meat is not always proper food for our stomachs: it first has to be dried, treated or hung. They do the same: they sometimes take their straightforward opinions and judgements and hide them behind obscurity [C] and season them with falsehood, [A] so as to prepare them for public consumption. They do not want to make an express avowal of the ignorance and weakness of human reason – [C] they want to avoid frightening the children – [A] but they give us a good glimpse of it beneath the appearance of confused and unstable erudition.

[B] when I was in Italy, I advised a man who was at pains to learn Italian that if it were merely to be understood, without excelling in any other way, he should simply use the first words which came to his lips, Latin, French, Spanish or Gascon, and stick an Italian ending on them; he would never fail to hit on some local dialect, Tuscan, Roman, Venetian, Piedmontese or Neapolitan: there are so many forms that he was bound to coincide with one of them. I say the same about Philosophy. She has so many faces, so much variety and has been so garrulous, that all our ravings and our dreams may be found within her. Human fancy can conceive nothing, good or evil, which is not there already. [C]
‘Nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum’
[Nothing can be so absurd that it has not already been said by one of the philosophers].
²⁹²
[B] So I
am all the more ready to give a free run to my own whims in public: I know they were born to me, not modelled on others, but you can always find some Ancient or other whose fantasies are akin to them. There will always be somebody to say, ‘Look, he got it from there.’

[C] My ways of life are natural to me: in forming them I have never never called in the help of any erudite discipline; but when I was seized with the desire to give a public account of them, weak as they are, I made it my duty to help them along with precepts and examples, so that I could publish them more decorously. I was then astonished myself to find that, by sheer chance, they were in conformity with so many philosophical examples and precepts. Only after my life was settled in its activity did I learn which philosophy was governing it! A new character: a chance philosopher, not a premeditated one!

[A] To get back to our souls,
²⁹³
Plato placed reason in the brain, anger in the heart, desire in the liver; but that probably resulted from an interpretation of the emotions of the soul rather than from any desire to divide the soul up into separate parts; it was more like one body with several members. The most likely of all these opinions states that the human soul is one single entity with the faculties for ratiocinating, remembering, comprehending, judging and desiring; it exercises its other functions through the instrumentality of the various parts of the body (just as the seaman sails his vessel according to his experience of it, at times tightening or slackening a sheet, at others hoisting the yard or pulling the oar, one single power organizing all these actions); the seat of this power is the brain, as is clearly shown by the fact that wounds and accidents affecting the head immediately harm the faculties of the soul; it is not inappropriate, therefore, that this power should extend from the brain to the rest of the body
²⁹⁴
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