Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/100

NOTES ON ARISTOTLE'S PSYCHOLOGY. 89 soul cannot be either a proportion or an adjustment he does not say, but unquestionably the enthymeme latent in the argument is that proportion and adjustment presuppose the existence of a rational and synthetic principle, presuppose the formative vovt. The modern analogue of the harmonic theory is the attempt made by biologists to identify the soul with a special form of that correspondence between organism and environment in which life is held to consist. Life according to Mr. Spencer is " the con- tinuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations," and intelligence he regards as the resultant of a higher degree of generality, speciality and complexity in the adjustment or corre- spondence. 1 It is obvious that the criticism to which Aristotle would have subjected this theory would have consisted in point- ing out that adjustment or correspondence implies a synthetic principle, a formative reason (Wvv). From the harmonic theory, Aristotle passes by a natural transition to the consideration of that which he calls the ab- surdest theory of all, 2 to wit that the soul is a self-moving number, a theory attributed to Xenocrates, a pupil of Plato, but which like the harmonic theory is not without its analogue in modern thought, especially in Leibniz. The theory of Xeno- crates appears to have been based upon atomism, to have been in fact atomism as interpreted by a Pythagoreanising Platonist. Thus he seems to have identified the Platonic ideas with numbers, and the Democritean atoms with the units of which the latter were composed, and to have regarded the soul as a certain e'co? or number. The soul, however, being active must be defined not merely as a number but as a self-moving number. That this is a substantially accurate account of the genesis of the doctrine of Xenocrates, a study of the fragments and scholia collected by Mullach will, I think, make fairly clear. While however we may not unreasonably conjecture that it was the object of Xenocrates to harmonise that form of the Platonic idealism which had most affinity with Pythagoreanism with the atomic theory of Democritus, 3 we know by his own avowal that Leibniz aimed at reconciling Plato with Democritus, and both with Aristotle and the Schoolmen and Descartes. 4 To this end it was essential that the atoms should surrender their corpo- real character, that they should become genuine indiscerptibles, or, as he calls them, real, i.e., purely formal unities. Even tb,e mathematical point was not sufficiently abstract for his purpose, 1 Principles of Psychology, 176. 2 TroXii 8e T>V dpijfjLfvuiv aXoya>Ta.Tov TO tyfiv apiQp.ov eivat TTJV ^rv^qv Ktvovvd' favrov (De An., i. 4). 3 That this was Aristotle's view seems probable from his statement, 8oeie 8' av ovftev 8iad)epiv uovaSas Xfyeii/ f) crw/jarta fMiKpd K. T. X. (De An., i. 4). 4 Opera, ed. Erdmann, pp. 205, 446.