Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/99

88 J. M. RIGG : eternal, and the supposition that consciousness can be accounted for as a process in time absurd. Thus empiricism destroys itself by disproving its own postulate. This fact of the eternity of consciousness is only now dawning as it were upon the English mind, but it was as clear as noon- day to Aristotle. Thus, in a remarkable passage in the Phi/tifi after defining time as apidfio? Kn>j]aeu}<} icma TO Trpo-repov teal vtrTCpov, he observes that it follows that time has no existence apart from consciousness. 1 In conformity with this doctrine we find Aristotle (De An., iii. 5), speaking of reason as formative or constructive (vov? ronfrico*) inasmuch as it is only for it that any object exists, and as eternal (( TOIITO fLovov aOava-rov leal atKiov). It has been suggested that this passage 2 has undergone revision by an Alexandrian hand, but with little reason, since not only is it confirmed by many incidental expressions scattered throughout his system, of which that in the treatise, De Qeneratione Animalium, ii. 3 (enre-m -ov vovv fidvov OvpaOev ^Tretatevai ic'ii 6e?ni> elvai fiovov) is perhaps the most remarkable, but it is complementary to the theory of nature expounded in the seventh and ninth chapters of the eleventh book of the Afetaphysica, and though not explicitly enunciated till so late in the work really dominates the DC Annan throughout. Thus in the first chapter he mentions as one among the many possible questions thei*e briefly referred to whether the soul has not some faculty which is pure in the sense of neither originating in sense nor being conditioned thereby ; which if it exists would be the reason. 3 In this passage the words X.O/JFV /it-i/ !-/ d-tW oi> paf.iuv ie are particularly noticeable as implying at once a preconceived theory and a sense of the special objection which has to be met an objection to which he recurs in the seventh and eighth chapters of the third book but which he can hardly be said to remove. So in his criticism of the physical theory by which Plato sought to explain the initiation of motion by consciousness, he points out that it assumes that the soul is extended, and this, he says, it clearly cannot be, since the universal soul must be sue 1 that which is called vnvt, and this, though it is continuous and one, is riot a continuous quantity is not extended. 4 The same conception of reason as a formative or constitute > faculty appears in his criticism of the harmonic theory of the soul. Harmony is, he says, either a proportion or an adjustment, and the soul cannot be either the one or the other. 6 Why the 1 a^iov 8' . . . dpidp.T]Td f<rriv (Physica, A 13). Torstrik's edition. 3 dnopiav 8* *x (l fivtv (rufuiTus flvai (/ -!?(., i. 1). 4 irp>Tov (itv ovv .... aXX' 011% wy TO ptytOos (De An., i. 3). Kciiroi ye 17 fjiev ApfjLOvia Xoyor ris rrt rasv p.itVT(av fj Ow6ttrtS t TTJV 8e ov8(Tpov oiov r' dual Tovrutv (De An., i. 4).