"The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul."
— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Author
Work Title
Date
w. 350 B.C.
Metaphor
"The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul."
Metaphor in Context
Some say that what originates movement is both preeminently and primarily soul; believing that what is not itself moved cannot originate movement in another, they arrived at the view that soul belongs to the class of things in movement. This is what led Democritus to say that soul is a sort of fire or hot substance; his 'forms' or atoms are infinite in number; those which are spherical he calls fire and soul, and compares them to the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows; the mixture of seeds of all sorts he calls the elements of the whole of Nature (Leucippus gives a similar account); the spherical atoms are identified with soul because atoms of that shape are most adapted to permeate everywhere, and to set all the others moving by being themselves in movement. This implies the view that soul is identical with what produces movement in animals. That is why, further, they regard respiration as the characteristic mark of life; as the environment compresses the bodies of animals, and tends to extrude those atoms which impart movement to them, because they themselves are never at rest, there must be a reinforcement of these by similar atoms coming in from without in the act of respiration; for they prevent the extrusion of those which are already within by counteracting the compressing and consolidating force of the environment; and animals continue to live only as long as they are able to maintain this resistance . The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul. These motes were referred to becuase that are always seen in movement, even in a complete calm.
(403b30-404a15, p. 160)
(403b30-404a15, p. 160)
Categories
Provenance
Reading On the Soul
Citation
Some text from The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton UP,1984).
Reading in Aristotle, Introduction to Aristotle, trans. R. McKeon. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1973).
Reading in Aristotle, Introduction to Aristotle, trans. R. McKeon. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1973).
Date of Entry
10/14/2003
Date of Review
12/30/2009
