De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 69: The Incorruptibility of the Human Soul

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absolute, universally. When such a potency in the soul, understanding the soul existing, does not show that the soul is composed from matter and form. Now notice that kind of sets the stage for the reply to the second objection, right? The second objection was based upon the equivocation of the word we see, right? The equivocation of the word undergoing, huh? Okay? I told you about this philosopher my brother Richard knew, they were friends, and the guy was describing, you know, teaching, you know, in college, I think about the University of Colorado, teaching, you know. He was describing the student kind of, the looks on their face, you know, as you're teaching, you know, and the looks, you know, why are you doing this to me, you know? But as if you were acting upon them in a way that was, you know, harming them or hurting them or something like that, rather than acting upon them in a way that's going to bring them to understand something, right? But then you're kind of confusing the first meaning, you know, of, uh... Undergo. Yeah, yeah. Suffering. Yeah, to be suffering, you know, because it didn't look like they were suffering there, you know. It's kind of funny how the professor he sees. When I was first teaching in California, you know, I had a very good student in the sense that he would make good objections, right? And, uh, these objections that I had heard before, I mean, that, you know, that Aristotle or Thomas brings up and solved, you know, so I knew how to meet all these objections, right? But he'd think of the objections that were new to him, see? And he thought, well, he won't be able to answer this tomorrow, right? And he'd come to class, I'd answer, right? But I used to know, he'd be like this, you know, he'd come up with this objection, and then as I tried to answer it, he'd kind of, you know, sew it back, you know, relax, you know, like that. So he knew when you were answering the objections. It was beautiful to see a student like that, huh? Uh, because he had a good objection, but he knew when the objection had been answered, you know. But he'd tell me afterwards, you know, he used to think, you know, these things up at night time. He said, oh, I'll have them tomorrow, you know. I used to know everything, you see, but it's not, you know, that I discovered all these things, but I've read Thomas before, and these are, I've heard these a million times, so to speak, you know, I've heard them many times, and I, you know, I expect them to be making the same mistake over and over again, you know, or being, you know, seeing the same difficulties. Okay? Do you become a philosopher? I don't think so, but you never know. Yeah. I had another student who wanted to be an accountant, and I said, why do you want to be an accountant? He says, well, I heard you can make a lot of money fast, he says. He wanted to buy a big, you know, boat and take his friends out in the Pacific Ocean. So then what he finally did, brother. Yeah. So now the second objection now is clear from something we saw in the first reply to the first objection, right? That there are different kinds of ability, right? Whose receiving is different in kind, right? To the second it should be said that to be subject and to be transformed belong to matter according as it is in potency. But just as there is another ability of the understanding or potency of the understanding, another of first matter, so there is another, what? Definition, you might say, of being subject to and of being, what? Transformed, right? Okay? Of course, Thomas will use that word, what? Transforming when he is talking about love, too, right? That is another meaning of transforming, huh? Or Shakespeare will use the word, what? Metamorphosis, talking about love. So, in this way the understanding is subject to knowledge and change of ignorance to knowledge according as it is in potency to the understandable forms. But these are something universal as opposed to singular, right, huh? If we seize things universally and not singularly, huh? If we seize them, the understandable form of contraries are not contrary in the soul, are they? So the definition of what? Virtue doesn't kick out the definition of what? Vice. But the definition of virtue helps me to understand the definition of vice, huh? Virtue, moral virtue is a habit in the middle, right? Towards us is to determine the right reason. And vice is a habit in the extreme, right? So I can understand one better through understanding the other. Is that clear enough, the second, reply to the second objection? Mm-hmm. Now the third one is taken from the text or the eighth book of the metaphysics. And there I say you have to understand this in the way Aristotle is proceeding there, right? He's dealing with the material substances at that point, right? And as you start to go from the material substance towards the immaterial substances, right? The material substances are produced from matter, right? And they have existence through the form that they receive, right? And through the agent that is transforming the matter, right? But when you turn to the immaterial substances, they're just form alone, right? So they don't proceed from matter, do they, right? Nor do they proceed from an agent transforming matter, huh? Now some people, you know, thought that Aristotle didn't know about creation, but Thomas is a pretty good case for Aristotle knowing about creation, right? But at this point, you don't see them. They would seem to be simply, what, forms, right? And form has existence as such, so. So he says form is the cause of being for matter and the agent. Whence the agent, insofar as it reduces matter to the act of form by transforming it, is a cause of being. If, however, something is a subsisting form, it doesn't have a, a what? It doesn't have existence through some formal principle, then you have a form of a form, right? You have to have a form of that form and that form, right? Okay. Nor does they have a cause of transforming, huh? Changing over, I suppose you have to translate, transmittant, huh? Changing over from potency to act, huh? Because they're not generated from potency. Whence after the foresaid words, the philosopher, what's the name of that figure of speech there where he calls Aristotle the philosopher? Tona Messiah. Tona Messiah, yeah. He often calls St. Paul the, what? The apostle, right? And I guess if you look in the New Testament, you'll see that the other apostles don't call themselves apostles in the way that, um, Paul and, uh, and Peter do, right? So they're the apostles by Tona Messiah. And also John Paul II will call Peter and Paul the, what? The princes of the apostles. So the philosopher concludes that those things which are composed from matter and form, there is no other cause except what? What moves them from potency to act, right? Whatever things do not have matter, all these things are, what? Simply, right, huh? And they are truly beings, huh? So they are through themselves, right? Not through a form of their form. So they're, they're, they're really elegant, uh, beings, those angels, huh? You've heard my, uh, little paraphrase, you know? You know how there are, uh, forefathers gathered there in Independence Hall and so on, and our friend, uh, came out with some words, you know? We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Did I tell you my little thing? Uh-huh. The angels came together, right? And they said, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all angels are created unequal. Because they're all a different kind, right? There can't be two angels of the same kind because there's no matter there, right? So all the differences are formal. They're all a different kind. And so, uh, my little teacher because they're used to say, you know, God hates equality. You see, we're, we're much closer to being equal, you know? But still, you know, um, uh, in heaven we'll be, what? Unequal, right? Star differs from star, you know? Like, uh, Paul VI there says in his encyclical on, uh, on St. Francis de Sales, huh? Star differs from star. So I don't know, democracy doesn't have much future. What did Plato say comes out from democracy? Tyranny. Tyranny, yeah. You know, I, you know, they're getting concerned about the invasion of privacy now, you know? Yeah. And, uh, as far as I can see, it's necessary, right? That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That Check up on these people, you know, but if you got somebody in there, you know, if this thing gets established right, you know, and then you get somebody in there who is really, you know, tyrannical in mind, you know, you know, you have the instruments there already, you know. Hillary Clinton? Yeah, Hillary, yeah. That's scary. Yeah. No, Gore's scary, too. Yeah. He got a very low rating, though. You know, they had a, you know, one of these, you know, Bushley got 65% favor rating, Gore got 18% favor rating, and 45 negative or something, you know. Oh, why? I don't know. He's got much chance to run again. That's a sign of hope. What did he do again? I don't know. He's not openly running yet. Okay, now the fourth objection, right? Right. Now the fourth objection is saying that what does not have matter but is form only is pure act and effect, right? And, but my old teacher, Peseric, used to say, you know, you go through the wisdom there, the metaphysics, you know. Well, this is God, or this is the best thing there is, you know. Well, it is compared to everything that's gone before, right? But beyond that, there's something even better, right? Okay. And, you know, what I was saying, what he was saying about, first your great angel said, this is God. He said, no, no, no. But then, you know, he's up higher, so you go from the angels up to the archangels and say, oh, okay, this is God now. And now he comes, you know, because they'll be so much greater than the angels. Because the great angels are in the lowest, huh? And then the archangels, and you go up to the princes and all the way up to the archangels, you know, to the seraphim, you know. True. And you say, ah, this is God. No, no, no, no. This is God. And none of them are God, but they really are marvelous creatures, huh? Marvelous creatures. As Jesus said, you know, if you run and roll all the best minds together, you know, Einstein and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Plato and all the, you know, great medical doctors and so on, you still wouldn't have a mind equal to them. To the lowest angel, yeah. A seraphim used to say, you know, you're a great angel watching you trying to make a decision, you know. Like you're watching, you know, an ink war or something down there, right, to decide what to do. He says, to the fourth it should be said that everything partaken, right, is to the one partaking, right, as its act, right? Now he says, every created form, subsisting by itself, right, is necessary that it partake of what? Being, to be, right? Because even life itself, or whatever is thus said, partakes of being itself, as Dionysius says in the fifth book of the Divine Names. But the being partaken is limited to the capacity of the one partaking. Whence only God, who is his own, what, being, who is being itself, is a pure act and infinite, huh? In understanding substances, there is a composition from act and potency, not from matter and form, right, but from form and the being, the existence, partaken, right? Whence, by some it is said, huh, that they're composed from what is and that by which it is. For the being is that by which something is, huh? So only God is I am who am, right, huh? I think I mentioned how, who was it, Hilary, you know, the Poitier who wrote these famous works on the Trinity, defending the divinity of Christ, you know, the second person, the Son. And there's one I think Thomas quotes the most, you know, after Augustine. Augustine is obviously the greatest there, but he quotes Hilary a lot. But Hilary was originally a Greek philosopher, right? And if you look at his work on the Trinity, he has a little autobiographical sketch of his life there, you know, or his conversion. And he somehow came into contact with the scriptures, right? And he started looking at Exodus, and then he ran across these words, you know, I am who am, right? And as a philosopher, right, that was a motive of credibility for him, right, to come into, you know? There must be something about these books and, you know, about this religion. We saw that, you know? Wow. And it's kind of striking, you know, when you read the second book of Wisdom there, which maybe we'll read someday, but Aristotle is showing how being and truth go together and how the cause is more true than the effect and so on. But notice, if he had gone from the Old Testament, God is I am who am, to Christ in the New Testament, I am truth itself, he would have made the connection right away as a philosopher, you know? Yeah. And how true that was, you know? Yeah. And so it would have been a motive of credibility for Aristotle if he had lived at the time of, what, Christianity, right? But again, you never know. Yeah, right. I mean, Augustine speculates there that Porphyry, you know, it's pride that keeps him out of the church, right? Yeah, right. Because Porphyry was kind of out of the anti-Christian, you know? Mm-hmm. So even though he had quite a philosophical background, you know? Pride can blind you, huh? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The first time I met Charles DeConnick, you know, he came down on this lecture tour, you know, and so on. So Kosurik calls me up on the phone and invites me over, you know? I mean, he made DeConnick say it. And I was supposed to ask DeConnick, you know, I'd asked, I'd read into some questions that Kosurik couldn't answer if I knew. And so Kosurik said, well, when DeConnick comes down, you ask these questions of DeConnick, you know? Mm-hmm. And then Kosurik said, you know, but wait, there's something to tell you, he says. So he had me explain to DeConnick my ideas about Mozart and music, you know? Oh. And he says, good, he says, write them up, he says, and we'll publish them, he says. Oh, no. But I mean, just kind of humility there, sticking this thing to me, you know? Right, yeah. This kid, you know, from the college, you know, huh? You know? But I mean, he really, really, uh, well, I remember, too, when I was writing my doctoral thesis, I was writing it under Monsignor Deon, you know? Mm-hmm. And, uh, of course, DeConnick, you know, really, you know, respected much of Deon, you know, and would have Deon read his things before he published them, you know? Mm-hmm. So anyway, but there was this one particular difficult question, you know, and I just thought I'd go and see what DeConnick thought about, you know? So when I asked him what he thought about it, he says, I'm like, why are you bothering to ask me, you know? You've got Deon. Oh, sure. And I said, well, I'd like to see what you think anyway, you know? And he said, okay, so he told me what he thought, you know? But, I mean, that's kind of the humility, you know, huh? Mm-hmm. And I guess what, you know, what happened, you know, they were both parity, you know, for the Vatican II, you know, you know, for the, you know, attached there to Cardinal Quebec, so. Oh. I guess they were in Europe there, and they were discussing something, and something in the philosophy of nature came up, and of course, that's what DeConnick was teaching, you know, for three years, and Deon apparently pointed out something that DeConnick had never seen, you know? Oh. And DeConnick stopped, I guess, and he said, how could I have missed that after all these years, you know? You know? It's a marvelous, that humility, you know? How could you have seen that, you know? And I've heard other people, you know, who, you know, DeConnick used to go to the lecture tours, people who knew DeConnick, you know, and they might have thought DeConnick was a greater mind than Deon or something, you know? Sure. And when you tell them these stories, you know, they, you know, they think, well, that's just, you know, like false humility or something, you know? But I don't think it was at all. Yeah, sure. I remember when Mary Shane went to study in Quebec there, and she stayed with Mrs. DeConnick, you know, just after DeConnick had died, you know? And if anybody admired her husband, it was Mrs. DeConnick, you know? Oh. She had 12 children by him. But I mean, the first time I met Mrs. DeConnick, you know, she, her, what's her first sense was she met my husband, you know? I mean, it's like, she's absorbed, you know, kind of in her husband's greatness and so on. Right. But when Mary Shane stayed there, Mrs. DeConnick said that Charles DeConnick had made absolutely clear to her that Deon is the greatest mind up here, you know? You know? You know? So when the wife, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's no question about the Deconic recognize the excellence of Dion, you know. I know sometimes I'd come back from the university there, and I lived fairly near to where Deconic lived, you know, and I guess they were going to discuss that afternoon, Deconic and Dion. And I'd see Dion out there walking back and forth, you know, he's thinking about something. And so I knew I had to say, you know, very quickly, you know, hello and move on, you know, about a disturbance. It's kind of like that. But, so, interesting. I find the, I guess, converted, you know, find it at the end. That's kind of interesting, you know. Very, yeah. Yeah. 98 or something? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I used to say to him, you know, why don't you become a Catholic? He says, well, I'd say, you know, faith is a gift, you know, and I guess it is. But, you know, he said he could see this, huh? And I guess he'd go sometimes to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and, you know, he meets even these, you know, priest philosophers, you know, and, oh, you can't be, you know, for him, you know, Thomas and Aristotle were the only really great philosophers, the ones he'd learn more from them than from the other philosophers put together, you know, and, oh, you can't possibly mean that, you know? Yes, he does mean this, you know? But it's good to have somebody around like that who is not a Catholic, right, but who can see the excellence of Plato and Aristotle, you know? See, my teacher Kosurik at one time had given up to study philosophy because he had just kind of this dogmatic teaching, you know, where you're Catholic, you read Thomas, something like that, but with no real understanding of the text, you know? Of the reality, yeah. But then he ran into Deconic, you know, and he'd heard about Deconic, and when he first went up, he was a little bit older than most students, you know, so a little different relation there with, and he said, you know, if you teach philosophy the way I was taught to me in the States, he said, I'd get up and leave your class right away. He told Deconic that. Deconic says, fine. But then you could see how, you know, attached Kosurik was to Deconic, you know, because he really got what he needed, right? And I can remember myself when the first time I met Deconic, I kind of saw him when he came down and he, you know, gave a series of lectures at various places, and I gave one talk, I remember, at the St. Paul Seminary and one of the colleges and a number of other places. And so I remember one time, he'd get up on the stage, and he'd go and just talk, and there's some little problem with the microphone, you know, and he jumps up, runs up the stage, fixes the microphone, you know, runs down again, you know? But you could see that, you know, even little things like that, you know? So on. Oh, oh, oh, so. But, you know, this pride is really, you know, what Thomas called in the Summa Concentile is the Mater Arorisa, you know? But in the commentary in the Epistles of St. Paul, you know, where St. Paul talks about the causes of deception and so on, and Thomas says that, you know, false imagination and pride, you know, it's like the roots are there and so on. And then he goes in, you know, explaining how pride is a cause of deception, you know? Mm-hmm. And two ways, you know, one way is you overestimate your abilities, so you apply your mind to judging something beyond your capacity, and you easily fail that way. Mm-hmm. And the other way is that you don't, you know, respect the teacher, you know, the one that the teacher you should respect, like Thomas, you know? Mm-hmm. And then you, he would prevent you from making a lot of errors or call you back from a lot of errors, right? And so pride is, in those two ways, a cause of deception. The first one, again, was what, going beyond your ability? Yeah, yeah, because of pride, you overestimate your abilities. You think you're better than you are, right, huh? And therefore, you can judge something, you know? Yeah, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, and get him to shoot his mouth off, you know, like most professors would do for you, you know, and, but then I say the other thing is, they say that it makes you unteachable, you know, because you don't listen carefully to the teacher and so on, and. Does this pride thing, I was thinking about it, it seems like one of the characteristics with the modern philosophy is this emphasis on will, is that correct? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And is that correct? They put, they put the will above reason, so. Yeah, what's, and, you know, part of it is, of course, it's for the democratic customs, because the love of freedom is kind of absolute, so for Hegel, for example, who's a very influential philosopher, Hegel's dates are about 1770, 1831, but for Hegel, the end of all history is freedom, so it's like the supreme good of all things, huh? Right. And, you know, people like Sartre, who in the 20th century were influenced by Hegel there, you know, for Sartre, it's not important what you do, but that you do it freely, that you admit that you're freely doing it, huh? And in one sense, Sartre is good, because he's defending the reality of our freedom, right? But he's making that kind of, you know, what's important is that it'd be done freely, you know? But what? You know, you can do, you know, good things or bad things freely, you know? So freedom is good if used, you know, wisely and so on, but freedom absolutely is not an absolute good. But if they see freedom as the greatest good, it's the will that is free. It's not reason that is free, huh? And remember that beautiful phrase there of Aristotle in the first book of Natural Hearing, where he speaks of how all the Greek natural philosophers were trying to understand change by contraries. And usually when I get to that point, you know, I'll kind of stop and I'll say, unbeknownst to Aristotle, the Chinese at the same time were trying to explain change by the yin and the yang as contraries. And unbeknownst to Aristotle, the modern natural scientists are trying to explain things by attraction, repulsion, and other contraries. But when Aristotle speaks of this, he says that they all say that change is by contraries without giving me any reason for this, as if being forced by the truth itself, he says. And it seems that anybody ancient or modern or East or West, for that matter, when they think about change, they think of contraries. But the phrase of Aristotle is interesting, forced by the truth itself, huh? And Thomas takes that phrase over, too, and uses it in the Summa Congentilis for a number of things. But that's kind of, you know, perfection of reason, right? I mean, it's forced by the truth itself, but force is the word, you know. It's not exactly freedom, you know. So, I mean, they prefer the will to the reason, but also the imagination to the reason. Because the imagination is more free than what? Oh, yeah. Reason, huh? Yeah. And remember, Aristotle's contrasting imagination and reason, and he says, showing the difference, and he says, I can imagine something good or bad, right, without any reason to do so, right? But I can't really think that there's something good or bad without some reason. So, I'm free to imagine terrorists out there going to come in here, and they hate monks, and they're going to rub us out, they hate philosophers, and rub us out. I can imagine that, but I can't think right now that there are terrorists out there, because I don't have any reason to think there are terrorists out there, right? See? Or I can imagine somebody out there is going to, you know, bring us in some, to eat and drink, you know? But I don't think so. I have no reason to think so, right? Mm-hmm. See? And if I just imagine this horrible person out there, I don't feel any fear now. I'm so brave. But if I thought there was somebody out there, terrorists, then I'd be looking for a way out of here, you see? And so it's a freedom for the imagination, you know? Mm-hmm. See? Now, they're also influenced, you know, by experimental science and preferring the imagination to reason. Because experimental science sees, you know, the wonderful thing is the invention of the hypothesis, right? Mm-hmm. And then the testing of it is just experimenting and calculating and so on. But the real mover is the imagination that imagines these hypotheses, huh? Or as Einstein says, they're freely imagined, huh? So they kind of reduce reason to something mechanical like a calculating machine. And the real glory is the imagination that imagines these wonderful things that they do imagine, well, in science, huh? Yeah. So, but from Democrats... In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelic Doctor, help us to understand all that you've written. Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. So we're going to look at Article 6 and 7 here in Question 75 today. So it says to the six, one proceeds thus. It seems that the human soul is corruptible. Now the first argument on the opposite side now. Of those things of which there is a like beginning, right? Now like proceeding or going forward, there seems to be a like end. But the beginning of the generation of men and beasts is alike. Because they're both made from the, what, earth. And likewise is there a process of life in both. Because, as it says in Ecclesiastes, in like manner, all breathe, right? And man has nothing more than the, what, beast. Therefore, as is concluded there, one is the dissolution of men and of beasts, and equals condition of, what, both. But the soul of the brood animals is corruptible. Therefore, the human soul is what? Corruptible, huh? Got that? Okay. Second objection. Morbor. What is from nothing can be turned back into nothing, right? Because the end ought to correspond to the, what, beginning, huh? But it is said in the Book of Wisdom, we are born from nothing, okay? Which is true not only as far as the body is concerned, but also as far as the soul that was created. And therefore, as is there concluded, after this will be as those who had not been, right? Even according to the, what, soul, this will be so. Now, the third objection. Moreover, no thing is without its own operation. But the operation which seems to be proper to the soul, or private to the soul, is to understand with a, what, image, huh? And that cannot be without the body, right? Because the image is in the body. For the soul understands nothing without an image, huh? We saw this in the third book about the soul, huh? But the image or phantasm, to use the Latin, I had a Greek word, phantasma, is not without the body, as said in the book about the soul. Therefore, the soul is not able to remain when the body is, what, destroyed, huh? Okay, but against this is what Dionysius says in the fourth chapter of the Divine Names. Of course, Dionysius, I was thought to be the Dionysius that St. Paul had, what, converted at Athens there. So he had quite a bit of authority, Dionysius, huh? Yeah. Now they're not so sure that he is the Paul that, the one that Paul converted, but... When did they change their minds about the certain people? Well, all the modern scholars, I guess, you know? I think it was Gregory the Great, huh, who brought him back from Constantinople, huh? When he was a people legate there, or a people nun seal, or something of that effect there. I think it was, it goes back to him, yeah. Maybe before his pope, I think. He brought his works back? Yeah. We made him known in the Western church, huh? Wow. So let's look at the body of the article now. I answer that it is necessary to say that the human soul, which we call the understanding principle, it's necessary to say that the human soul is incorruptible, right? Now Thomas begins here with a distinction, right? For in two ways something is corrupted, huh? In one way, per se, as such, through itself. In another way, per accidents, huh? Now what is that distinction he's making there? It's self is corrupted, or it ceases because something else that it belongs to is corrupted. Okay, and that'd be protodent, right? Yeah. Okay. Is it possible, however, that something, what? Subsisting, huh? Something that has existence by itself, which is what we saw in the other article where we said the soul was subsisting, the human soul, that is to say, is it possible, however, that something subsisting be generated or corrupted protodent, that is for something else, right? Generated or corrupted. For in the same way it belongs, huh? For something to be generated or corrupted as for it to be, because it's through generation that to be, or existence is acquired, right? And through corruption that is lost, huh? Whence what has being or existence by itself, huh? Cannot be generated or corrupted except, what? By itself being generated or corrupted, huh? But things that do not subsist as accidents and material forms, huh? They have existence only in matter. are said to come to be and to be corrupted through the generation and corruption of the, what? Composite, huh? Things. Let's stop on that for a moment, right? Let's take a very holy example here of something that is not subsistent. Let's take the shape of a, what? Rubber ball, right, huh? Okay. Now, um, how does the shape of a rubber ball come to be? Does it come to be by itself? Or does the shape of the rubber ball come to be when the rubber ball comes to be? The rubber would exist before it. Yeah. Something has to impose a shape on the rubber. Okay. And when the rubber is shaped into, what? A ball, right? Then the shape of the ball, right? That spherical shape. Comes to be, right? Yeah. Okay. Um, the spherical shape doesn't come to be by itself, huh? No. It's not created out of nothing. Right. And does the spherical shape come to be from rubber? Remember, we talked about this before. Does it? No. See? Because if there was so, you know, if the shape of the rubber came to be from the rubber, like the ball comes to be from the rubber, then some other shape, right, would have to also come to be from what? The rubber, right? If they both came to be from rubber, why would they be different? Yeah. But you have to have a form of a, what? Form, right? Okay. And then you ask the same question about that. That comes to be, right? Okay. So, the shape of the rubber ball didn't come to be from the rubber, right? And it wasn't created out of nothing, right? So how does it begin to be there? See? Well, it begins to be when a rubber ball begins to be. So it's said to be generated for accidents, right? Because it comes into existence when something else, named a rubber ball, comes into existence. Do you see that? Can you say that last again? Yeah. Um... How does the shape of the rubber ball, that spherical shape, how does that come to be, right? It's not created out of nothing, right? And it doesn't come to be from the rubber. So how does it come to be? Well, it doesn't come to be as such at all. But when a rubber ball comes to be something else, right, then the shape comes to be, right? It comes to be per accidents. Per accidents, then, we'd say, yeah. Yeah, see? Likewise, when my body, if I've been sick or something, my body becomes, what, healthy, right? Okay. What has come to be here is a healthy body, right? Oh, yeah. Now, what about my health? Does that come to be? It's a pair of accidents. Yeah. Yeah. My health can be said to come to be when this healthy body comes to be, right? Okay. So that sort of thing is said to come to be a per accidents, huh? Okay. And something else coming to be, right? Okay. But if something is subsistent, right, then it has being, not just in another, right, but it has being by itself, huh? And so that can't come to be, what, or cease to be, crotchet-dense, huh? It has to come to be or cease to be itself, huh? Okay. Like a dog or a tree dying, right? Or a dog or a tree being generated, right? Okay. So a dog comes to be, not because something else is coming to be, but the dog itself is coming to be. And the dog dies, not because something else is dying, but the dog itself is dying. Okay. Now we saw before that the soul was something, what? Subsisting, right, huh? So Thomas is eliminating, in a sense, since he's got disjunctive soldiers in here, right? If he's going to say the soul is incorruptible, he could say, well, if it's corruptible, you have to be corruptible paraceric rotidans, right? Because it's subsistent, it can't be corruptible paraceric rotidans. Well, then could it be corruptible per se, like the man or like the dog, let's say, or the cat or the tree, right? Okay. Well, he's got to go on and address himself to that now. Okay. It has been shown, however, above, that the souls of the brute animals or the beasts are not, what, subsistent by themselves, huh? Okay. And the reason why we say that is that the soul, the sensing soul, which is the soul of the beast, the sensing soul has no operation that is not in the body and through the body, right? And even the most elevated operation, which is at a sensing, right, clearly that involves the body, huh? And that's why, you know, the excess of the object, right, corrupts the senses and so on. But as we saw before, the human soul has an operation, namely understanding, right? And we see this to be true later on about willing, too, huh? But it has an operation that is not in the body, right? And therefore it has an existence by itself and not only an existence in the body. In fact, the body, you might say, shares, right, in existence of the soul, but not completely. So sometimes they express that by saying that the human soul is not immersed in the body, right, huh? Okay. Just like when you have something floating on top of the water, right? And part of it's under the water and part of it's above the water, right? In that sense, like, the human soul is in the body, but it's, what, existence is not entirely surrounded by the body, huh? And so it has some operation above the body. So we're really a rather strange composition, you and I. The Arab philosophers used to say we're on the horizon, right, between the material world and the immaterial world. But we have a kind of a foot in both, right? And so we have understanding and will in common with the great angels there that we were imploring before in the prayer. And we have senses and emotions in common with the cats around here, okay? But we have the life of the senses and of the emotions, or can have them, in a higher way than the beast has, right? Well, we have the life of the understanding and willing in an inferior way, huh? Okay. What does C.S. Lewis say? The love of the angels is ferocious, huh? Well, we're kind of, you know, lukewarm as we learn in the Acts of the Apostles and so on, right? We're kind of divided and so on, huh? So, it's only in some of the great saints that you see, you know, some of that intensity of the love of the, what, angels, huh? Like, you see in St. Catherine of Siena or St. Teresa of Avalon, people like that. Okay. So, we saw before that the souls of the beasts are not subsisting by themselves, but only the human soul. Whence the souls of the beasts are corrupted, when the bodies are corrupted, right? When the animal is corrupted, huh? So, they're said to be corrupted, then, what? Piracidans, right? Yeah. Okay. It's the dog as such that is corrupted, right? When the dog is corrupted, then the soul of the dog is what? It can be said to be corrupted, right? Okay. It seems to be, huh? Okay. Just like when the rubber ball is squashed, right, huh? You destroy the rubber ball. But when you destroy the rubber ball, you, what, eliminated the shape that the rubber ball had, too. Okay. But the human soul is not able to be corrupted, since it has existence per se, right? Except it be, what? As such, corrupted, right? Okay. Now, he's going to reason against this, right? Because the human soul is just a form, right? Okay. Which is altogether impossible, not only about the human soul, but about anything subsisting that is a form only, huh? Now, something that is composed, something subsisting that's composed of matter and form, that could be corrupted, right, if the matter could lose the form it has, right? Because it has existence through that form, huh? But if something is a form only, and something has existence through a form, how can you separate that? Okay. And Thomas gives the more general reason here. It is manifest that that which belongs to something, secundum se, is what? Inseparable from it, huh? That which belongs to something, as such, right, is inseparable from it, huh? So, could there be a two that is not a number? Because to be a number belongs to two, secundum se, as such, huh? Okay. In other words, through being two, it is a number. Okay. Same thing would be true about a property, too, huh? Could two not be half a four? That's inseparable. That's an inseparable property of two, right? It's a property that belongs to two because it is two, huh? It's half a four because it is two, right? But say, if a triangle is green, right, could green be separable from a triangle? Because it doesn't belong to a triangle as triangle to be green, does it? It's neither part of the definition of what a triangle is, nor is it something that follows upon the nature of the triangle, like having interior angles equal to two right angles does, huh? Okay. Now, he's going to apply this. I just, you know, illustrated this principle in something easier to see, right? Okay, now he's going to apply it to the question about form and being. Essay, existence, right, belongs as such to form, which is what? Act, huh? Whence matter by this acquires existence and act, that it acquires form, huh? You see that, first of all, in accidental form, don't you? How does the rubber get to be a ball? Yeah, yeah. So through its form, it has being, right, huh? Okay. And how does my body get to be healthy? Through health. Yeah, so health is like a form of the body, accidental form, right? And through what does my reason become, I'd say, wise, if it is? Through wisdom, right, huh? It has a form, right, huh? Okay, yeah. That's just the Greek word for act. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, when Aristotle says the soul is the first act of an actual body composed of tools, right? The Greek word for actor might be entelekea, which is kind of a word that Aristotle kind of coined, they say. But anyway, okay? It has the idea of act, huh? Yeah. You mentioned last week, too, when you say first act of an actual body composed of tools, I suppose another usage would be an organic body, and we spoke of an organic body as well. Well, see, in English, when you hear the word organic body, you don't realize it comes from the Greek word meaning, an adjective, yeah, taken from the Greek word organon, which means tool. So, and a body organon, you probably say in Greek, right? Okay. It would be a body that's composed of tools, that's made up of tools, huh? Is that the term that's used in some of the Greek texts? In Aristotle's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Aristotle first says it's a body having life and ability, right? And such a body is a body composed of tools for the different operations of life. And, you know, one of the reasons why your body, or even a dog's body, has got more diversity of organs than, say, a tree is because it has a higher life and has more, it needs more tools, right? Okay. Incidentally, I think I mentioned before the use that Thomas makes, you know, I guess it's in the Athanasian Creed, I think it is, but... But the, saying that the union of the divine and the human nature in Christ, right? Nothing is more like this than the union of the soul and the body, huh? Yeah. See? And how should you understand that, see? Because it's not like form and matter. This is the heresy of the Arians, right? Who said the word was made flesh, right? Yeah. You have the flesh, the body there, and the place of the human soul, you have the verbal, right? No, no. No, that's not where the likeness is. But the body is also what? The tool or tools of the soul, right? And the important distinction they make, the difference between your ballpoint pen, let's say, and your hand. Your hand is a tool that's really joined to you as part of you, right? Yeah. But the ballpoint pen is an extrinsic tool that you use to write, huh? Like a hammer or a saw or something like that, right? So, the human nature of our Lord is as a tool of his divinity, right? And that's why what he does by his human nature has an efficacy, right? That nothing done by any other human being could have, huh? Because this human nature of Christ is a tool joined in the same person, right? Who is God, right? So, it has a strength in that, huh? I mean, Thomas says, quotes the Dionysius, you know, he'll say, I assume in the Latin there, you know, theendricum, you know? Kind of run together with theos and andros, you know, God and man, right? But there's a kind of efficacy, right? And so, when you talk about, you know, Christ dying on the cross, huh? You see? Well, Thomas has, if you look in the Summa in the Territia Paras there, he has a beautiful dialectic there from Augustine there, a number of these things, huh? One thing is, would be to say, man should make reparation for the sin of Adam and so on, because he's the one responsible for this. But man cannot make reparation for the whole of the human race, huh? So, you've got an insoluble problem here, right? Well, God found the solution to it. I shouldn't use the word found, he saw the solution for it. And that is that God would become man, right? So, as man, it's man doing what? Preparation for man, huh? But as the, what, tool, right, of the divinity, it has, what, efficacy to redeem the whole, what? Human race, huh? Like Thomas says there in the little, right? The one drop of which can cure the whole world, right, huh? See? So, it has an efficacy, right? It's a tool like a hand instead of the pen, though, because of the... Yeah, it's a tool, join, yeah, join to the second person, right? Okay? It's his person. So, that's why it has an efficacy, right? And God also uses the saints as tools, right? But the saints are not, what, joined to his person, huh? In the way that the human nature of Christ is joined to the person, huh? So that the Son of God is also man, right? But the Son of God is not St. Francis or St. Dominic, right? Or St. Peter, you know? So, I mean, not to say that what they do doesn't have some efficacy, right? Right. But it can't have a efficacy that what the divine, the human nature of Christ does, right? Okay? So, it's important to see that connection. And, of course, Aristotle himself, huh, when he's arguing against the Platonists, you know, who speak of the transmigration of souls and the Pythagoreans, I guess, before him. And the anecdote there is, you know, someone was beating a dog with a stick, and Pythagoras says, stop, stop, recognize the soul! Oh, the whelping of the dog, the soul of Berkwist or somebody else. One of his friends who had died, you know? But Aristotle says for, you know, the soul of a man to go into the body of a dog, take that example, would be like for the art of the carpenter to go into the art of the violinist or something, right? You see? That, uh, so the soul, in a way, is to the body a bit like an art is to, uh, you know, the tools that it uses, right? Okay? Of course, they're joint tools in this case, huh? But there's, again, that likeness, huh? So, when you hear the word organ, even, in English, right? You know, it's a familiar word, but we don't think of the word tool there, right? Which would be the common English word, huh? And, uh, a lot of times, you know, if you take the Anglo-Saxon word, it's more meaningful to us than the Latin-derived word, huh? When I was in college, you know, someone comes back. Berkwist! He knows I'm a philosophy major. You know, what do you mean by first principles? Well, that just means that it's the first beginnings of a knowledge, oh. I always think the example, you know, about, you know, the student in the, uh, in the, uh, on the science seminar, I said, Assumption there. He's saying, desiccation is a greater problem with land animals than with water animals, huh? And, uh, people don't quite show what you're saying, right? But if you say, drying up or drying out is a greater problem for a land animal than for a fish, you know, it becomes pretty obvious, right? Okay. So, no, it's going back to the principle here that he's saying here, huh? You have to see that it's through form, right, that something has, what, existence, right? With the accidental existence, like by... being healthy, right? Or by being wise or, you know, the rubber being a sphere, right? Or through the substantial form that has existence, right? Okay. So if the form has existence by itself, right? And it's not just that the case of material form or an accidental form, that by it something else has existence, right? Okay. But it has existence by itself. Well, then it's inseparable from it, existence, huh? Okay. To be per se as such belongs to form, which is act. Whence matter by this acquires being an act, that it acquires a what? Form, huh? And by this there happens in it corruption, that the form is separated from it, huh? But it's impossible that the form be separated, right, from itself, huh? Whence it is impossible that a subsisting form would cease to what? Be, huh? Now, I know if you people have read the Phaedo, you know, but Socrates and the Phaedo, and the question comes up about the, does the human soul survive death, right? And he develops three arguments that have some interest, you know, in them, although there may be some weakness in them. And everybody's more or less satisfied, except Simeas and Cebes, right? And they come in with these objections out of the blue, and then Socrates has to, you know, encourage them to get going again. And he replies to the objections, but Simeas, or rather, Cebes, rather, is pushing Socrates to come up with a necessary reason. And Socrates is getting very close to this, right? Because he's saying that life is in the very definition of the soul. And one opposite cannot admit of the other opposite. Life can never admit of death, right? And if one of two opposites is in the definition of a third thing, that third thing can in no way admit of the, what? Other opposite, right? Now, you're just, you're simply not familiar. Can the odd ever be even? Can something be odd and even? No. No. Now, if odd is in the definition of a third thing, belongs to that thing as such, like odd belongs to three as such, could three ever be even? No. No. See? But now, if you take this here, can the wet ever be dry? The wet itself cannot be dry. No. Now, suppose there's a third thing, like, say, a cloth. Yeah. Now, could the cloth become dry? Yes. Why? Well, because wet isn't in the definition of cloth, right? Right. Okay. If cloth was by definition wet, cloth could never be dry, right? Okay. Or take another example here. Virtue is never vice. Now, virtue is in the definition of, let's say, justice. Can justice ever be a vice? No. No. Okay. Then you take the opposites, living and death. And you talk about the body, right? And you talk about the, what? Soul. Well, the body that is living can become, what? Dead. Right. Why? Because living is not in the definition of body, right? Right. But the soul is the cause of life and living bodies, right? Right. So life seems to be in the very definition of what the soul is. Therefore, it cannot admit a death. Therefore, it's deathless or immortal. You use the Latin word, huh? Now, there may be a little bit of a problem there, right? Right. Because some souls, right? Immortal trees. They're causes of life to the concept, right? But they don't have life or the operations of life by themselves, right? But the human soul has, what? An operation by itself that's not in the body. And therefore, it has an existence that is not just in the body. And therefore, it's not only that by which the composite is alive, but it has life by itself, huh? So to have the life belongs to the soul as such is very close to what is being said here, but it has to be, you know, a few distinctions have to be seen and in what way life pertains to the what? Soul. Now, if by life you mean not just the operations of life, although they're a sign of this, but you mean by life the existence of a living thing, right? Well, then the existence belongs to form as such, right? So if the form has existence by itself, and that existence belongs to it as form, how can it ever be, what? Separated from it. Okay? That's the point he's making here. Once it is impossible that a subsisting form cease to be, huh? Okay. Now, he goes into a little complication here for the sake of those people who want to still think of the soul as being composed of some kind of spiritual matter, right? And so on, huh? And he compares it here to the thinking that he derived from Aristotle, where Aristotle thought that the sun, the moon, and the stars were, what, incorruptible, right? Now, this was a reasonable guess because they don't seem to, what, ever be diminished, right? Yeah. And when Thomas is going into this in some detail, like in the commentary on the De Cielo Bundo, the book on the universe of Aristotle, he remarks that Aristotle's reason may be what? Yeah, because maybe the time that it takes, you know, for the sun or the moon or the stars to corrupt is much greater than the lives of many men or, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You see? Okay. So Thomas is aware of the probability of that, right? Yeah. And we mentioned, I think, when we talked in the Dianima there about light, huh? Right. Aristotle and Thomas himself, you know, thinks of light as propagating, what, instantaneously, right? Yeah. And therefore it's not being a, what, a locomotion, right? Right. Right. Okay. But it seems he could have, you know, made the same point, that maybe the speed of light is so great that we can't notice any time, right? It takes a little time. And of course the speed of light, you know, they say it was 186,000 miles per second, something like that. It's incredibly fast compared to anything that we can, what, follow the motion of, right? Right. And so it's, but nevertheless, you could say, nevertheless, maybe it's faster than we can, what, follow, right? You know, these magic tricks, the hand is faster than the eye. The light is really faster than the eye, right? And, okay. But nevertheless, the sun, the moon, the stars are, what, material, right? And so Aristotle's thought that they must be a different kind of matter than down here, right? And secondly, that the form, what, completes the whole potentiality of the matter up there, see? As opposed to the forms down here, where when the clay is actually a sphere, it's still able to be a cube or a cylinder or something else, right? And so it's always in potency to some other form, and therefore it can, the clay sphere can, it can cease to be a sphere, right, huh? Because it could lose that form and acquire another one. But if the form was to exhaust all of the, what, ability of the object, then it could have done. Now, notice if you compare Aristotle, say, with Anaxagoras, close to the truth, even our point of view, because Anaxagoras is saying the sun is a stone on fire, right? And apparently he got the idea from one of these meteors, you know, that came to the earth from the sky, still burning, right? Like, that happens occasionally in the earth here, you know. It's pretty dangerous that it happens very often, right? Usually they're consumed, you know, before or else they come down in the form of, you know, ashes. But there's one down in the southwest United States where the India is.