190 Aristotle and his school
The rationale for this seems to be as follows. If the gods really granted
knowledge of the future to humans, they would distribute this knowledge
according to the extent to which people meet the criterion of ‘being beloved
by the gods’, and this means for Aristotle that a person should realise his/her
moral and intellectual virtues to the highest degree and thus approach the
divine level.^29 However, Aristotle argues, we can observe that prophetic
dreams in reality occur also (or, exclusively) with simple-minded people,
who stand on a lower moral level, and even to animals, who do not even
have reason and thus lack the capacity to realise virtue.Ergo: dreams cannot
be sent by a god.^30
Aristotle thus presupposes that people with low moral and intellectual
capacities are particularly susceptible to prophetic dreams. His favourite
example is the melancholics, whom he mentions twice because of their
remarkable foresight (cf. chapter 5 above). He explains this by reference to
their physiological constitution, which brings about a certain receptivity
to a large number and variety of appearances: the chance that they meet
with a phantasm which resembles an actual future state of affairs is, from
a statistical point of view, greater than with other people. It is entirely
unclear how Aristotle arrived at this view (there are no antecedents of this
characteristic of the melancholics in medical literature).^31 It seems, rather,
that we have a case of ‘wishful thinking’ on the part of Aristotle here (and
perhaps an extrapolation of his own dreaming experiences). Of course, his
theory allows for prophecy in sleep to occur with intelligent people as well,
but then we are dealing with cases where the origin of the event foreseen in
the dream lieswithin the dreamer(for example, an action (s)he is going to
perform, a physical disturbance which is going to befall him/her and which
announces itself through another physical manifestation, namely, a dream).
But in those cases where the future event foreseen in the dream occurs, for
example, at the other end of the world, this must be a coincidence due
to the multiplicity of images befalling the melancholics in their sleep, he
seems to say.
The second presupposition underlying Aristotle’s reasoning here is of a
teleological kind: if some dreams can be shown not to be of divine origin,
then this applies to all dreams. In this way, Aristotle anticipates two possible
counter-arguments one might raise, namely that it is not necessary thatall
dreams are god-sent, or that it is not necessary thatalldreams are prophetic.
This kind of classification of various types of dreams is already found in
(^29) Cf.Eth. Nic. 1179 a 21 – 30 , discussed below in ch. 8.
(^30) For a parallel argument concerning ‘good fortune’ ( () see ch. 8 below.
(^31) See ch. 5 above.