Aristotle
| Aristotle, in De Anima ('On the Soul'), proposed three forms of soul, | |
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1. the vegetative soul possesed by
plants in that they grow and decay and enjoy
nutriment but hat they do not have motion and
sensation, 2. the animal soul which confirms motion and sensation upon the animals, and 3. the rational soul which is the "conscious and intellectual soul that is peculiar to man." (Singer, 1941, p43). |
| Each higher form
possesses in full the attributes of the lower
souls so that the human is the sole possessor of
the rational soul. (see the discussion of Galen,
below) Aristotle also built his ideas up from the four Platonic solids, (via the four elements manifesting as humours) but added a fifth essence, the 'pneuma' which was carried from the heavens into the lungs and then to the heart, and distributed from the heart to the rest of the body. This 'quintessence' was composed of pentagonal-faced, twelve sided solids called the dodecahedron, (a secret form in the Pythagorean school). In Aristotle's hierarchy of living things, man came at the top and had an extra 'element' which was the body or the fuel of intelligent thought, this was the pneuma and it was evidently (evidence generated by a faulty dissection procedure involving strangulation of the animal) transmitted around the body by the heart. Thus the heart was the seat of the rational soul. Erasistratus (300-260 BC), an anatomist working a century after Aristotle; on finding three tubular structures going to every organ of the body - an artery, a vein and a nerve - decided that the pneuma (quintessence) was conveyed via the carotid arteries from the heart, up to the brain and then flowed from the brain down through the nerves to all organs. The brain was seen as the vessel for distilling the pneuma. |
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