a combined bundle of sensations. What thus combines the
various sensations, and in {300} particular those received
from different sense-organs, what compares and contrasts
them, and turns them from a blind medley of phantasms
into a definite experience, a single cosmos, is the common
sense. Its organ is the heart.
Above the common sense is the faculty of imagination. By
this Aristotle means, not the creative imagination of the
artist, but the power, which everyone possesses, of forming
mental images and pictures. This is due to the excitation
in the sense-organ continuing after the object has ceased to
affect it.
The next faculty is memory. This is the same as imag-
ination, except that there is combined with the image a
recognition of it as a copy of a past sense-impression.
Recollection, again, is higher than memory. Memory im-
ages drift purposelessly through the mind. Recollection is
the deliberate evoking of memory-images.
From recollection we pass to the specifically human faculty
of reason. But reason itself has two grades. The lower is
called passive reason, the higher active reason. The mind
has the power of thought before it actually thinks. This
latent capacity is passive reason. The mind is here like a
smooth piece of wax which has the power to receive writing,
but has not received it. The positive activity of thought
itself is active reason. The comparison with wax must not
mislead us into supposing that the soul only receives its
impressions from sensation. It is pure thought which writes
upon the wax.
Now the sum of the faculties in general we call the soul.
And the soul, we saw, is simply the organization {301} or
form, of the body. As form is inseparable from matter, the
soul cannot exist without the body. It is the function of the
body. It is to the body what sight is to the eye. And in the
same sense Aristotle denies the doctrine of Pythagoras and
Plato that the soul reincarnates itself in new bodies, par-
ticularly in the bodies of animals. What is the function of
one thing cannot become the function of another. Exactly
what the soul is to the body the music of the flute is to the
flute itself. It is the form of which the flute is the matter.
It is, to speak metaphorically, the soul of the flute. And
you might as well talk, says Aristotle, of the art of flute-
playing becoming reincarnate in the blacksmith’s anvil, as
of the soul passing into another body. This would seem
also to preclude any doctrine of immortality. For the func-
tion perishes with the thing. We shall return to that point
in a moment. But we may note, meanwhile, that Aristo-
tle’s theory of the soul is not only a great advance upon
Plato’s, but is a great advance upon popular thinking of
the present day. The ordinary view of the soul, which was
Plato’s view, is that the soul is a sort of thing. No doubt it
is non-material and supersensuous. But still it is a thing; it
can be put into a body and taken out of it, as wine can be
put into or taken out of a bottle. The connection between
body and soul is thus purely mechanical. They are attached
to each other by no necessary bond, but rather by force.
They have, in their own natures, no connexion with each
other, and it is difficult to see why the soul ever entered a
body, if it is in its nature something quite separate. But
Aristotle’s view is that the soul, as form of the body, is not