On the Immortality of the Soul 1–10

If knowledge exists somewhere, and can exist only in what lives, and always exists, and nothing in which something always exists can itself not always exist, then that in which knowledge exists always lives. If we are the ones who reason, that is, our mind, and our mind cannot reason rightly without knowledge, and a mind cannot be without knowledge except one in which knowledge does not exist, then knowledge exists in the mind of man. Now knowledge exists somewhere: for it exists, and whatever exists cannot exist nowhere. Again, knowledge cannot exist except in what lives. For nothing that does not live learns anything; and knowledge cannot exist in what learns nothing. Again, knowledge always exists. For what exists and is unchangeable must always exist. And no one denies that knowledge exists. And whoever admits that it cannot be that a line drawn through the center of a circle is not the longest of all lines that are not drawn through the center, and that this belongs to some branch of knowledge, does not deny that knowledge is unchangeable. Again, nothing in which something always exists can itself not always exist. For nothing that always exists allows that in which it always exists to be taken from it at any time. Now when we reason, it is the mind that does it. For only that which understands does it; and the body does not understand, nor does the mind understand with the body's help, since when it wants to understand, it turns away from the body. For what is understood is always of the same kind, and nothing of the body is always of the same kind; so the body cannot help the mind as it strives to understand; it is enough if it does not hinder it. Again, no one reasons rightly without knowledge. For right reasoning is thought striving from certain things to the investigation of uncertain ones; and nothing is certain in a mind that does not know it. Now all that the mind knows it has within itself; and knowledge embraces nothing except what belongs to some branch of knowledge. For knowledge is the knowing of any things whatever. Therefore the human mind always lives.

Reason certainly either is the mind or is in the mind. Now our reason is better than our body; and our body is some substance, and it is better to be a substance than nothing; so reason is not nothing. Again, whatever harmony of the body there is must exist inseparably in the body as its subject, and nothing should be believed to be in that harmony which is not equally of necessity in that subject body, in which the harmony itself is no less inseparably. But the human body is changeable, and reason is unchangeable. For everything that does not always exist in the same way is changeable. And it is always the same that two and four are six. Again, it is always the same that four contains two and two, while two does not contain this; so two is not four. And this reasoning is unchangeable; so reason exists. But in no way can what is inseparably in a subject not be changed when the subject is changed. So the mind is not the harmony of the body. Nor can death befall unchangeable things. So the mind always lives, whether it is itself reason or reason is inseparably in it.

There is a certain virtue of constancy, and all constancy is unchangeable; and every virtue can do something, and it is not the case that when it does something it is not a virtue. Further, every action either is moved or moves. So either not everything that is moved, or certainly not everything that moves, is changeable. But everything that is moved by another and does not move itself is something mortal. And nothing mortal is unchangeable. Therefore it is now concluded with certainty and without any alternative that not everything that moves is changed. But there is no motion without substance; and every substance either lives or does not live; and everything that does not live is lifeless; and there is no action of a lifeless thing. So that which moves without being changed can only be a living substance. And every such substance, through whatever degrees, moves the body. So not everything that moves a body is changeable. But a body is moved only in time; for to this belongs being moved more slowly and more quickly. It follows that there is something that moves in time and yet is not changed. Now everything that moves a body in time, though it tends to one end, can neither do everything at once nor avoid doing many things. For it is not possible, by whatever power it is done, either that what can be divided into parts should be perfectly one, or that there should be any body without parts, or time without intervals of duration, or that even the shortest syllable should be pronounced of which you do not hear the end when you no longer hear the beginning. Further, what is done in this way needs expectation in order to be completed, and memory in order to be grasped as far as possible. And expectation is of things future, memory of things past. But the intention to act belongs to the present time, through which the future passes into the past; nor can the end of a bodily motion once begun be expected without some memory. For how is the end of something expected, when it has slipped from the mind that it began, or that it was moved at all? Again, the present intention to complete cannot exist without expectation of the end, which is future; nor is there anything that either does not yet exist or no longer exists. So there can be in the one who acts something that pertains to the things that do not yet exist. Many things can be in the agent at once, though the many things that are done cannot exist at once. So they can be in the mover, though they cannot be in what is moved. But whatever things cannot exist at once in time, and yet pass from future into past, must be changeable. From this we now gather that there can be something which, while it moves changeable things, is not changed. For when the intention of the mover to bring the body he moves to the end he wills is not changed, while the body on which something is made is changed moment by moment by that same motion, and that intention to complete, which clearly remains unchanged, moves both the very limbs of the craftsman and the wood or stone subject to the craftsman, who would doubt that what has been said follows? So if some change of bodies takes place when the mind moves them, even though the mind is intent on that change, it is not to be thought that the mind is therefore necessarily changed, and for that reason also dies. For in this intention it can have at once both memory of things past and expectation of things future, none of which can exist without life. And though there is no perishing without change, and no change without motion, still not every change brings about perishing, nor every motion change. For we may say that our body itself is often moved by some action, and certainly changed at least by age, and yet has not yet perished, that is, is not without life. Let us be permitted, then, to think that the mind too is not straightway deprived of life, even though some change may perhaps happen to it through motion.

For if something unchangeable remains in the mind which cannot exist without life, eternal life too must remain in the mind. For the matter stands exactly thus: if the first is so, the second is so. And the first is so. For who would dare to say, to pass over other things, either that the principle of numbers is changeable, or that every art does not rest on such a principle; or that an art is not in the craftsman even when he is not exercising it; or that it belongs to anything but the mind; or that it can exist where there is no life; or that what is unchangeable can at some time not exist; or that art is one thing and a principle (ratio) another? For although one art is said to be, as it were, a gathering of many principles, still an art can most truly be called and understood as one principle. But whether it is this or that, it follows no less that art is unchangeable; and it is clear that art not only is in the mind of the craftsman but also is nowhere except in the mind, and that inseparably. For if art is separated from the mind, it will either exist elsewhere than in the mind, or exist nowhere, or pass continually from mind to mind. But as there is no seat for art without life, so there is no life with reason except in a soul. Further, what exists cannot exist nowhere, and what is unchangeable cannot at some time not exist. And if art passes from mind to mind, leaving this one to remain in that, no one teaches an art except by losing it, or else no one becomes skilled except by the forgetting, or the death, of his teacher. If these things are most absurd and most false, as they are, the human mind is immortal. But if art is sometimes in the mind and sometimes not, which is well enough known from forgetting and lack of skill, the connection in this argument brings nothing toward its immortality, unless the antecedent is denied in this way. Either there is something in the mind which is not in present thought, or the art of music is not in a learned mind when it is thinking only of geometry. But the latter is false; so the former is true. Now the mind is aware of having nothing except what has come into thought. So there can be something in the mind which the mind itself is not aware is in it. How long this lasts makes no difference. For if the mind has been occupied with other things too long to be able easily to turn its attention back to what it thought before, it is called forgetting or lack of skill. But when, either reasoning with ourselves or well questioned by another about certain liberal arts, we find the things we find nowhere else than in our mind; and since to find is not the same as to make or beget (otherwise the mind would beget eternal things by a temporal finding, for it often finds eternal things; for what is so eternal as the principle of the circle, or whatever else in arts of this kind is understood neither to have not existed at some time nor to be going to not exist?): it is clear also that the human mind is immortal, and that all true principles are in its hidden places, although it may seem, through ignorance or forgetting, either not to have them or to have lost them.

Now let us see how far a change of the mind is to be admitted. For if the mind is a subject, with art existing in it as in a subject, and a subject cannot be changed without what is in the subject being changed too, how can we maintain that art and reason are unchangeable, if the mind in which they are is shown to be changeable? And what greater change is there than into contraries? And who denies that the mind, to pass over other things, is foolish at one time and wise at another? First, then, let us see in how many ways what is called a change of the soul is taken. These, I think, are clearer and plainer to us only as two in genus, but more are found in species. For the soul is said to be changed either according to the affections of the body or according to its own. According to those of the body, as through ages, diseases, pains, labors, injuries, pleasures. According to its own, as by desiring, rejoicing, fearing, grieving, studying, learning. All these changes, if they are not a necessary proof that the soul dies, are not at all to be feared in themselves taken separately; but we must see that they do not contradict our reasoning, in which it was said that when the subject is changed, everything in the subject is necessarily changed. But they do not contradict it. For that was said of the kind of change of the subject by which it is compelled to change its name altogether. For if wax takes a black color from somewhere in place of white, it is no less wax; and so if it takes a round shape in place of a square, and hardens from soft, and grows cold from hot: these are in the subject, and the wax is the subject. And the wax remains no more and no less wax when these things are changed. So some change can take place in the things that are in a subject, while the subject itself, according to what it is and is called, is not changed. But if so great a change took place in the things that are in a subject that what was said to underlie them could no longer be so called at all, as when wax vanishes into the air through the heat of fire, and undergoes such a change that the subject is rightly understood to have been changed, since it was wax and is no longer wax, then in no way would anything of the things that were in that subject because it was this be thought to remain. Therefore, if the soul is a subject, as we said above, in which reason is inseparably, by the same necessity by which it is shown to be in the subject, and the soul cannot be a soul unless it is living, and reason cannot be in it without life, and reason is immortal, then the soul is immortal. For in no way would unchangeable reason remain if its subject did not exist. That would happen if so great a change befell the soul that it made it not a soul, that is, forced it to die. But none of those changes which take place either through the body or through the soul itself (although whether any take place through the soul itself, that is, of which it is itself the cause, is no small question) brings it about that the soul is not a soul. So they are now to be feared neither in themselves nor for our arguments.

I see, then, that we must apply all our powers of reasoning to know what reason is and in how many ways it can be defined, so that the immortality of the soul may be established according to all of them. Reason is the gaze of the mind by which it beholds the true through itself, not through the body; or the contemplation itself of the true, not through the body; or the true itself which it contemplates. No one doubts that the first is in the mind. About the second and third one may ask; but the second too cannot exist without the mind. About the third there is a great question: whether that truth which the mind beholds without the instrument of the body exists through itself and is not in the mind, or whether it can exist without the mind. But however that may be, the mind could not contemplate it through itself except by some union with it. For everything we contemplate, or grasp in thought, we grasp either by sense or by intellect. But the things grasped by sense are perceived to be outside us as well, and are contained in places, from which it is affirmed that they cannot even be perceived. But the things that are understood are not understood as placed anywhere other than the mind that understands them; for they are understood at the same time not to be contained in place. Therefore this union of the beholding mind and the truth it beholds is either such that the mind is the subject and that truth is in the subject; or, conversely, the truth is the subject and the mind is in the subject; or both are substances. If the first of these three is so, the mind is as immortal as reason, according to the earlier discussion, because reason can be in nothing but what lives. The same necessity holds in the second. For if that truth which is called reason has nothing changeable, as is evident, nothing can be changed which is in it as in a subject. So the whole contest remains over the third. For if the mind is a substance, and reason, to which it is joined, is a substance, someone might not absurdly think it possible that, while reason remains, the mind should cease to exist. But it is clear that as long as the mind is not separated from reason and clings to it, it necessarily remains and lives. And by what force can it be separated? By a bodily one, whose power is weaker, whose origin is lower, and whose order is more removed? In no way. By an animate one, then? But in what way? Can another mind, whichever is more powerful, not contemplate reason unless it separates the first from it? But reason would not fail anyone contemplating it, even if all contemplated it; and since nothing is more powerful than reason itself, than which nothing is more unchangeable, in no way will a mind not yet joined to reason be more powerful than one that is joined. It remains that either reason itself separates the mind from itself, or the mind itself is separated from it by its own will. But there is no envy in that nature to keep it from offering itself to the mind to be enjoyed. Further, the more it exists, the more it makes whatever is joined to it exist, and perishing is the contrary of this. And someone might say not too absurdly that the mind is separated from reason by will, if there could be any separation from one another of things that place does not contain. This indeed can be said against all the preceding arguments, to which we have opposed other objections. What then? Must we now conclude that the mind is immortal? Or, even if it cannot be separated, can it be extinguished? But if that power of reason affects the mind by its very union (and it cannot fail to affect it), it surely affects it in such a way as to give it being. For reason itself exists in the highest degree, where the highest unchangeableness too is understood. So the mind that it affects from itself it compels in a certain way to exist. Therefore the mind cannot be extinguished unless separated from reason; but it cannot be separated, as we reasoned above; so it cannot perish.

But, it is said, the turning away from reason itself, through which folly befalls the mind, cannot happen without some failing of the mind. For if it exists more when it is turned toward reason and clings to it, because it clings to the unchangeable thing which is truth, which exists both supremely and first, then when it is turned away from it, it has less of being itself, and that is to fail. And every failing tends toward nothing; and perishing is to be understood in no more proper sense than when what was something becomes nothing. Therefore to tend toward nothing is to tend toward perishing. Why this should not befall the mind, to which failing does befall, is hard to say. Here the rest is granted; but it is denied that it follows that what tends toward nothing perishes, that is, reaches nothing. This can be observed in the body too. For since any body is a part of the sensible world, the greater it is and the more place it occupies, the nearer it comes to the universe; and the more it does this, the more it exists. For the whole exists more than the part. So when it is diminished, it must also exist less. So it suffers failing when it is diminished. Further, it is diminished when something is taken from it by cutting off. From this it follows that by such taking away it tends toward nothing. But no cutting off brings it to nothing. For every part that remains is a body, and whatever it is occupies place in some extent of space. Nor could it do so unless it had parts into which it could be cut again and again. So by being cut infinitely it can be diminished infinitely, and therefore suffer failing and tend toward nothing, although it can never reach it. The same can be said and understood of space itself and of any interval. For from these too, even when they are bounded, by taking away, for example, half, and always half of what remains, the interval is diminished and moves toward an end which nevertheless is in no way reached. So much the less is this to be feared for the mind. For it is surely better and more alive than the body, since life is given to the body by it.

But suppose that what makes a body exist is not what is in its bulk but what is in its form, a view proved by more invincible reasoning; for a body exists the more, the more shapely and beautiful it is, and the less, the uglier and more deformed it is; and this failing comes about not by cutting off bulk, which has been dealt with enough already, but by loss of form. Then this matter must be carefully examined and discussed, lest anyone affirm that the mind perishes by such a failing: that since it is deprived of some form of its own while it is foolish, it may be believed that this deprivation can be increased so far as to strip the mind of form altogether, reduce it by that ruin to nothing, and force it to perish. Therefore, if we can succeed in showing that not even to a body can it happen that it is deprived of the form by which it is a body, we shall perhaps rightly maintain that much less can that by which the mind is mind be taken from the mind. For no one has looked at himself well who does not admit that any mind whatever is to be preferred to every body. Let the starting point of our reasoning, then, be this: that nothing makes or begets itself; otherwise it existed before it existed. If that is false, this is true. Again, what has not been made or come to be, and yet exists, must be everlasting. Whoever gives this nature and excellence to any body is greatly mistaken. But why do we contend? For we are much more compelled to give it to the mind. So if any body is everlasting, no mind is not everlasting, since any mind is to be preferred to any body, and all everlasting things to things not everlasting. But if, as is truly said, body has been made, it was made by some maker, and not by an inferior one. For he would not be able to give to what he made that which he was making, whatever it is that it is. Nor by an equal: for the maker must have something better for making than what he makes. For of a begetter it is not absurdly said that he is what that which is begotten by him is. So the whole of body has been made by some power and nature more powerful and better, and certainly not bodily. For if body was made by body, the whole could not have been made. For what we set down at the start of this reasoning is most true, that nothing can be made by itself. And this incorporeal power and nature, the maker of the whole of body, holds the whole by its present power. For it did not make it and then depart and abandon what it had made. For the substance which is not body, and does not, so to speak, move from place to place, cannot be separated from the substance that occupies place; and that making power cannot be idle from preserving what it has made and not letting it lack the form by which it exists, as far as it exists. For what does not exist through itself will certainly not exist if it is abandoned by that through which it exists; and we cannot say that the body received, when it was made, the ability to be content with itself even if it were abandoned by its creator. Yet if it is so, the mind, which clearly excels the body, has this more. And so it is proved immortal at once, if it can exist through itself. For whatever is such must be incorruptible and therefore cannot perish, because nothing abandons itself. But the changeableness of body is plain to see, as the universal motion of the whole universe of body shows well enough. Hence, to those who look carefully, as far as such a nature can be looked into, it is found to imitate by ordered changeableness what is unchangeable. But what exists through itself does not even need any motion, since it is wholly sufficient to itself; for every motion is toward something else, which what is moved lacks. So form is present to the whole of body, a better nature, the one that made it, sustaining and holding it. Therefore that changeableness does not take from body its being body, but makes it pass from form to form by a most ordered motion. For no part of it is allowed to be reduced to nothing, since that making power embraces the whole with a power neither laboring nor idle, granting to everything that exists through it that it exist, as far as it exists. Therefore no one should be so far astray from reason as either not to be certain that the mind is better than the body, or, granting this, to think that it does not happen to the body that it is not body, but happens to the mind that it is not mind. And if this does not happen, and the mind cannot exist unless it lives, then surely the mind never dies.

But if anyone says that the mind should not fear the perishing by which what was something becomes nothing, but the one by which we call dead those things that lack life, let him note that nothing lacks itself. Now the mind is a kind of life: hence everything that is animated is understood to live, and everything inanimate that can be animated is understood to be dead, that is, deprived of life. So the mind cannot die. For if it could lack life, it would not be mind but something animated. And if this is absurd, much less is this kind of perishing to be feared for the mind, since it is certainly not to be feared for life. For if the mind dies when that life leaves it, then the very life that leaves it is much better understood to be the mind; so that whatever is left by life is no longer the mind, but the mind is the very life that leaves. For whatever is called dead when left by life is understood to be left by the soul; but this life, which leaves the things that die, since it is itself the mind and does not leave itself, the mind does not die.

Unless perhaps we ought to believe that life is some tempering of the body, as some have thought. Surely this would never have seemed so to them if they had been able to see the things that truly exist and remain unchangeable, with the same mind estranged and cleansed from its habituation to bodies. For who that has looked at himself well has not found that he understood something the more clearly the more he could withdraw and draw away the attention of his mind from the senses of the body? But if the mind were a tempering of the body, this could certainly not happen. For a thing that had no nature of its own and was not a substance, but was inseparably in the body as its subject, like color and shape, would in no way try to turn itself away from that same body to perceive intelligible things; nor, in so far as it could do this, could it behold them in that degree, and become better and more excellent by that vision. For in no way can shape or color, or even the tempering of the body itself, which is a certain mixture of the four natures of which that body consists, turn itself away from that in which it is inseparably as in a subject. Besides, the things that the mind understands when it turns away from the body are certainly not bodily; and yet they exist, and exist in the highest degree, for they are always in the same state. For nothing more absurd can be said than that the things we see with the eyes exist, and the things we discern with the understanding do not exist, since it would be madness to doubt that the understanding is incomparably to be preferred to the eyes. And these things that are understood, being always in the same state, when the mind beholds them, show well enough that it is joined to them in a wonderful and likewise incorporeal way, namely not in place. For either they are in it or it is in them. And whichever of these is so, either one is in the other as in a subject, or each is a substance. But if the first is so, the mind is not in the body as its subject, like color and shape, because either it is itself a substance or it is in another substance, which is not a body, as in a subject. And if the second is true, the mind is not in the body as its subject like color, because it is a substance. But the tempering of the body is in the body as its subject, like color. So the tempering of the body is not the mind; but the mind is life; and nothing leaves itself; and that dies which life leaves; so the mind cannot die.