separable from it. You cannot have {302} a soul without
a body. The connection between them is not mechanical,
but organic. The soul is not a thing which comes into the
body and goes out of it. It is not a thing at all. It is a
function.
But to this doctrine Aristotle makes an exception in favour
of the active reason. All the lower faculties perish with the
body, including the passive reason. Active reason is im-
perishable and eternal. It has neither beginning nor end.
It comes into the body from without, and departs from it
at death. God being absolute reason, man’s reason comes
from God, and returns to him, after the body ceases to
function. But before we hail this as a doctrine of personal
immortality, we had best reflect. All the lower faculties
perish at death, and this includes memory. Now memory
is an essential of personality. Without memory our experi-
ences would be a succession of isolated sensations, with no
connecting link. What connects my last with my present
experience is that my last experience was “mine.” To be
mine it must be remembered. Memory is the string upon
which isolated experiences are strung together, and which
makes them into that unity I call myself, my personality.
If memory perishes, there can be no personal life. And it
must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely
that, in that future life—if we persist in calling it such—
the memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in
the future life itself reason has no memory of itself from
moment to moment. We cannot be dogmatic about what
Aristotle himself thought. He seems to avoid the question.
He probably shrank from disturbing popular beliefs on the
subject. We have, at any rate, no definite pronouncement
from {303} him. All we can say is that his doctrine does not
provide the material for belief in personal immortality. It
expressly removes the material in that it denies the persis-
tence of memory. Moreover, if Aristotle really thought that
reason is a thing, which goes in and out of the body, an ex-
ception, in the literal sense, to his general doctrine of soul,
all we can say is that he undergoes a sudden drop in the
philosophic scale. Having propounded so advanced a the-
ory, he sinks back to the crude view of Plato. And as this is
not likely, the most probable explanation is that he is here
speaking figuratively, perhaps with the intention of propi-
tiating the religious and avoiding any rude disturbance of
popular belief. If so, the statements that active reason is
immortal, comes from God, and returns to God, mean sim-
ply that the world-reason is eternal, and that man’s reason
is the actualization of this eternal reason, and in that sense
“comes from God” and returns to Him. We may add, too,
that since God, though real, is not to be regarded as an ex-
istent individual, our return to Him cannot be thought as a
continuation of individual existence. Personal immortality
is inconsistent with the fundamentals of Aristotle’s system.
We ought not to suppose that he contradicted himself in
this way. Yet if Aristotle used language which seems to
imply personal immortality, this is neither meaningless nor
dishonest. It is as true for him as for others that the soul is
eternal. But eternal does not mean everlasting in time. It
means timeless. And reason, even our reason, is timeless.
The soul has eternity in it. It is “eternity in an hour.” And
it is this which puts the difference between man and the
brutes.