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Subsection 9. the Rational Soul

Subsection 9. The Rational Soul

In the preceding subsections I have dissected the lower faculties of the soul. The rational faculty remains: a pleasant but uncertain subject, as one writer calls it, to be discussed with the same brevity. Many mistaken opinions concern its essence and origin: whether it is fire, as Zeno held; harmony, as Aristoxenus thought; or number, as Xenocrates maintained; whether it depends on bodily organs or is independent of them; whether it is seated in the brain, heart or blood; whether it is mortal or immortal; and how it enters the body.

Some hold that it is propagated from the parent, including Philip in book 1 of On the Soul; Tertullian; Lactantius in chapter 19 of On the Workmanship of God; Hugh in On the Spirit and the Soul; Vincent of Beauvais in the Mirror of Nature, book 23, chapters 2 and 11; Hippocrates; Avicenna; and many recent writers. One person begets another, body and soul: the soul is produced from the seed as one candle is lit from another.

Otherwise, they say, a person begets only half a person and is worse off than a beast, which begets both matter and form. Moreover, all three faculties of the soul would have to be infused together. This they consider utterly absurd, since in beasts the two lower faculties, which I mean here, are begotten, and in human beings they cannot properly be separated. Galen supposes the soul to be the bodily temperament itself.

Trismegistus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer, Pindar, Pherecydes of Syros and Epictetus, along with the Chaldeans and Egyptians, affirmed that the soul is immortal, as did the ancient British Druids. The Pythagoreans defend transmigration and rebirth: souls pass from one body into another after first drinking the water of Lethe. Human beings thus become wolves, bears, dogs or pigs, according to the inclinations they had during their lives or the traits they shared with those animals.

We may pass into the dwellings of wild beasts And be lodged within the bodies of cattle.

Lucian’s cock was first Euphorbus, a captain:

I was Euphorbus, son of Panthus, In the days of the Trojan War—for I remember.

Then a horse, a man, a sponge. Julian the Apostate thought Alexander’s soul had descended into his body. Plato, in the Timaeus and Phaedo, differs little from this opinion, so far as I can see: the soul came originally from God and knew everything, but once enclosed in the body it forgets and learns anew, which he calls recollection or remembering; and it was placed in the body as a punishment.

From there it passes into the body of a beast or a human being, as appears in his delightful fiction about souls drawing lots in book 10 of the Republic; and after ten thousand years it is to return to its former body again.

After many years, through a thousand forms, It is brought back to the beginnings of human life.

Others deny its immortality, a question Pomponazzi of Padua settled from Aristotle not long ago: Pliny the Elder, book 2, chapter 7, and book 7, chapter 55; Seneca, book 7 of the Letters to Lucilius, letter 55; Dicaearchus in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations; Epicurus, Aratus, Hippocrates, Galen and Lucretius, book 1—

Moreover, we perceive that the mind is born with the body, Grows with it, and grows old along with it—

Averroes, and I do not know how many modern writers. This question of the soul’s immortality has been attacked and debated in many extraordinary ways, especially among the Italians of late, says Jacob Colerus in chapter 1 of On the Immortality of the Soul. The popes themselves have doubted it. Leo X, that Epicurean pope, according to some accounts, had the question debated before him on both sides and finally concluded, like an irreligious and atheistical presiding judge, with that line of Cornelius Gallus:

And what was nothing before returns to nothing.

It began from nothing and ends in nothing. Zeno and his Stoics, as Augustine cites him, supposed the soul to last until the body had completely decayed and been dissolved into prime matter. After that it vanished into smoke, extinguished and gone. Meanwhile, as the body wasted away, it wandered far and wide, reporting many things from a distance, and, as Hermotimus of Clazomenae claimed, saw curious visions and underwent I know not what.

Bloodless shades wander, without bodies or bones.

Others grant its immortality, but invent many fabulous stories about it after it leaves the body, such as Plato’s Elysian fields and that Turkish paradise. They deified the souls of good people; the souls of the wicked, says Augustine, supposedly became devils. He has refuted these and many similarly absurd doctrines.

Jerome, Augustine and other Church Fathers hold that the soul is immortal, created from nothing and then infused into the child or embryo in its mother’s womb six months after conception. It differs from the souls of beasts, which are propagated from their parents and vanish into nothing when they die. To those holy treatises and to Scripture itself I refer all such atheistical spirits, just as Cicero referred Atticus, who doubted this point, to Plato’s Phaedo.

Or, if they want philosophical proofs and demonstrations, I refer them to the treatises on this subject by Niphus and Nic. Faventinus; to Francis and John Pico, in the digressions on book 3 of On the Soul; to Tholosanus, Eugubinus, To. Soto, Canas, Thomas, Peresius, Dandinus and Colerus; to that elaborate treatise in Zanchius; and to Toletus’s sixty reasons and Lessius’s twenty-two arguments proving the soul’s immortality.

1729.“Original” means origin. “Organical” and “inorganical” concern dependence on bodily organs, not the modern distinction between organic and inorganic matter. The ensuing catalogue reports positions as Burton groups them; it is not a verified history of each philosopher’s doctrine.

1731.Ex traduce means by propagation or transmission from the parent, the theory called traducianism. “Phil.” is expanded as Philip, conventionally Melanchthon. Burton’s inherited attribution of On the Spirit and the Soul to Hugh is retained; this and the individual references await collation.

1733.Matter and form name the constituents of a living being in the Aristotelian account. “Infused” means introduced into the body as a separately created soul. Crasin esse means to be the mixture or temperament; “temperature” here is the bodily constitution, not a thermometer reading.

1736.Metempsychosis is transmigration of souls; palingenesia, rebirth. Lethe is the water of forgetfulness. Burton combines traditions about rebirth, forgetfulness and resemblance between human and animal character. Trismegistus means Hermes Trismegistus.

1738.Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.457–458. Burton prints domus and corpora where the consulted Latin text has domos and pectora. His wording is retained and translated, including “bodies.”

1740.The verse is Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.160–161, spoken by Pythagoras about his earlier life as Euphorbus. Burton prints Ille ego where the consulted text has ipse ego. His surrounding reference to Lucian connects two treatments of the transmigration story; it does not make this Latin verse a quotation from Lucian.

1742.The scan reads “spunge,” retained as “sponge.” Lucian’s Cock includes Euphorbus, Pythagoras, Aspasia and Crates, then a king, pauper, satrap, horse, jackdaw and frog. The consulted Fowler translation does not establish Burton’s sponge or his shortened sequence; its immediate source remains unresolved. Julian is the emperor called “the Apostate” in Christian tradition. Reminiscentia means recollection.

1744.Burton combines Platonic narratives. De sortitione animarum refers to the allotment of lives in Republic 10’s myth of Er. Timaeus describes souls allotted to stars and subsequent rebirth according to conduct. Phaedrus 248e–249a, cited for the ten-thousand-year interval, describes return to the soul’s place of origin, not specifically its former body. These parallels do not establish every detail of Burton’s composite account.

1746.The soul is the understood subject. Burton’s verses adapt Claudian, Against Rufinus 2.491–493, rather than The Rape of Proserpine 1 named in the margin. Claudian describes three thousand years of changing forms, purification in Lethe and return to human form. Burton abbreviates and changes the wording; his printed quotation and reference are retained.

1747.“Plinius Avunculus” distinguishes Pliny the Elder from his nephew. “Neotericks” below means more recent writers. Pomponatus is Pietro Pomponazzi. This polemical list compresses distinct positions about the soul; the edition does not silently turn it into a uniform statement of belief by all the named authors.

1748.The quotation is from Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 3.445–446, although Burton gives book 1. The source reference is retained on the left and the correction recorded here.

1751.Burton expressly presents the Leo X story as a report and cites Colerus. “Epicurean,” “prophane” and “atheisticall” are his polemical descriptions. The alleged debate and conclusion have not been independently verified.

1752.The line occurs in Maximianus, Elegy 1.222, with ad nihilum rather than Burton’s in nihilum. Burton’s attribution to Cornelius Gallus is retained in the body. His following English gloss is also retained as a separate sentence.

1754.“Austin” is Augustine; “materia prima,” prime or first matter, the underlying matter remaining when particular forms are lost. The Latin phrases about smoke and reports from afar are incorporated into the modern prose. “Pretty” here means curious or remarkable. Burton’s account of Zeno and Hermotimus remains to be collated with its immediate sources.

1756.Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.443, describing the underworld. The line serves as a poetic illustration rather than evidence for the particular doctrine Burton has just described.

1758.Elysian fields are a blessed afterlife in classical tradition. “Turkie Paradise” is Burton’s dismissive reference to the Muslim paradise. His evaluation is retained as part of the historical argument. The marginal Latin distinguishes benevolent household spirits from frightening ghosts; the body compresses the latter into “devils.”

1760.The infusion and timing of the soul are historical theological claims, not statements of embryology. Burton himself records conflicting dates in the margin. The blanket attribution to the Church Fathers is retained without being endorsed as a precise account of each writer. “Rejourne” here means refer or send back.

1761.The compressed catalogue preserves uncertain names and abbreviations rather than replacing them with conjectural identifications. “Tolet” is rendered Toletus; “Marcennus” below is Marin Mersenne. The scan reads twenty-two arguments for Lessius and volume 2 for Naclantus. Verification of the individual treatises and numerical claims remains pending.