Now: if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain its efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within the bodies; it could but be latent; it will have lost that by which it is soul, just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the sweet disappears: we have, thus, no soul.
Two bodies [i.e., by hypothesis, the soul and the human body]
are blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the one is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and each the whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture: the one body thus inblended can have left in the other nothing undivided.This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable portions alternating; that would be described as collocation; no; the incoming entity goes through the other to the very minutest point- an impossibility, of course; the less becoming equal to the greater; still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout.Now if, thus, the inblending is to occur point by point, leaving no undivided material anywhere, the division of the body concerned must have been a division into (geometrical) points: an impossibility.The division is an infinite series- any material particle may be cut in two- and the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual.
Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole.But soul does this.It is therefore incorporeal.
8.C.(11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form, one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into soul by growing finer under that new condition.This is absurd at the start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has been tempered by cold: still that is the theory- the soul has an earlier form, and develops its true nature by force of external accidents.Thus these teachers make the inferior precede the higher, and before that inferior they put something still lower, their "Habitude." It is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle is last and has sprung from the soul, for, if it were first of all, the order of the series must be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and always the later inferior, as the system actually stands.
If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle- as later, engendered and deriving intellection from without- soul and intellect and God may prove to have no existence: this would follow if a potentiality could not come to existence, or does not become actual, unless the corresponding actuality exists.And what could lead it onward if there were no separate being in previous actuality? Even on the absurd supposition that the potentially existent brings itself to actuality, it must be looking to some Term, and that must be no potentiality but actual.
No doubt the eternally self-identical may have potentiality and be self-led to self-realization, but even in this case the being considered as actualized is of higher order than the being considered as merely capable of actualization and moving towards a desired Term.
Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body, and it exists always in actuality: Intellectual-Principle and Soul precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of body.
These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of as a body.
8.D.(12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? Is it something which, while distinct from body, still belongs to it, for example a harmony or accord?
The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of a lyre.When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way our body is formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing upon the bodily total.
That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length.
The soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the lyre.Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could not do these things.Soul is a real being, accord is not.That due blending [or accord] of the corporeal materials which constitute our frame would be simply health.Each separate part of the body, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul [its own accord or note], so that there would be many souls to each person.Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune.
Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered becomes orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to soul, soul itself owes its substantial existence to order- which is self-caused.Neither in the sphere of the partial, nor in that of Wholes could this be true.The soul, therefore, is not a harmony or accord.
8.E.(13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire how it is applied to soul.
It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body- not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a natural organic body having the potentiality of life.
Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is divided with it, and if any part of the body is cut away a fragment of soul must go with it.Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep cannot occur; in fact sleep itself cannot occur.