This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
NERVOUS AND MENTAL FORCES.
209

has never been got over. That there should be an agency totally apart from, and entirely transcending, any known powers of inert matter, involves no difficulty—for who is to limit the possibilities of existence? The perplexity arises only when this radically new and superior principle is made to be, as it were, off and on with the material principle; performing some of its functions in pure isolation, and others of an analogous kind by the aid of the lower principle. The difference between the active and the passive reason of Aristotle is a mere difference of gradation; the supporting agencies assumed by him area total contrast in kind —wide as the poles asunder. There is no breach of continuity in the phenomena, there is an impassable chasm between their respective foundations.

Fifteen centuries after Aristotle, we reach what may be called the modern settlement of the relations of mind and body, effected by Thomas Aquinas. He extended the domain of the independent immaterial principle from the highest intellectual soul of Aristotle to all the three souls recognized by him—the vegetable or plant soul (without consciousness), the animal soul (with consciousness), and the intellect throughout. The two lower souls—the vegetable and the animal—need the coöperation of the body in this life; the intellect works without any bodily organ, except that it makes use of the perceptions of the senses.