The soul, mind, or spirit is the principle of motion
Table of Contents
- The soul, mind, or spirit is the principle of motion.
There also exists an extended, inert, impenetrable thing, which is fundamentally different—a whole other kind of being.
The difference between thinking and extended things was first recognized by the very wise Anaxagoras.
- He declared that the mind has nothing in common with bodies, as Aristotle notes in the first book of De Anima.
Among moderns, Descartes also perceived this distinction clearly.
- Those who affirm that active force, action, the principle of motion, truly exists in bodies, embrace an opinion founded on no experience.
They establish it with obscure and general terms. Nor do they sufficiently understand what they want.
On the contrary, those who wish the mind to be the principle of motion put forth an opinion fortified by their own experience, and approved by the votes of all the most learned men of every age.
- First, Anaxagoras introduced νοῦς [nous, mind], which would impress motion on inert matter.
Aristotle also approves of this and confirms it with many arguments. He openly declares that the first mover is immobile, indivisible, and has no magnitude.
He rightly observed that saying that every moving thing is movable is the same as saying that every building thing is buildable, Physics, Book 3.
Plato in the Timaeus relates that this bodily machine, or visible world, is agitated and animated by mind, which escapes all sense.
Even today, the most learned philosophers acknowledge God as the principle of natural motions.
Newton everywhere and not obscurely suggests that not only did motion proceed from the divine power in the beginning, but that the world system is still moved by the same act.
This is consistent with the sacred writings. This is confirmed by the calculation of the Scholastics.
Even if the Peripatetics teach that nature is the principle of motion and rest, they nevertheless interpret the naturing nature to be God.
They understand that all the bodies of this world system are moved by a most powerful mind according to a certain and constant reason.
- Those who attribute a vital principle to bodies imagine something obscure and little in accord with things.
For what else is it to be endowed with a vital principle than to live? Or what is it to live other than to move oneself, to stop, and to change one’s state?
But the most learned philosophers of this age posit as an indubitable principle that every body perseveres in its state, either of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled by some external force to change that state.
On the contrary, in the soul we feel there is a faculty of changing both its own state and that of other things.
This is properly called vital, and distinguishes the soul far from bodies.