De triplici vi animae et solum hominem ratione praeditum.
The Threefold Power of the Soul
The soul's power is threefold—vegetative life in plants, sensory judgment in animals, and reason in humans—each higher power encompassing and ruling the lower.
The soul's power, taken as a whole, is seen as threefold in the work of animating bodies: one part gives life to the body alone, so that by being born it may grow, and by being nourished it may be sustained. Another part provides the faculty of sensory judgment. The third is sustained by the power of the mind and by reason. Of these, the first has this as its role: to be at hand for creating, nourishing, and feeding bodies, but it offers no judgment of reason or sense.1 This is the power of herbs and of trees, and of whatever is fastened to the earth by its roots. The second is compounded and joined, taking the first to itself and making it a part of itself, and from these it can form a varied and multiform judgment. For every animal that is vigorous in sense is at the same time both born, and nourished, and fed. But the senses are diverse and grow in number all the way to five, so that whatever is fed only does not also perceive; but whatever can perceive is also fed, and to it the first power of the soul as well — namely, that of being born and of nourishing — is proven to be subject.
Memory, Imagination, and the Limits of Sense
Creatures with sensation retain images in memory but cannot fully combine or recall them, and they have no knowledge of the future.
But where sensation is present, creatures receive not only the forms of things that strike a sense-capable body when it is present, but even when the sense has withdrawn and the sense-objects are set aside, they retain images of the forms they once sensed, and form memories, and each creature keeps them for a longer or shorter time according to its capacity. But they take in those confused and unexamined mental images in such a way that they can produce nothing by combining or arranging them, and so while they can indeed remember, they cannot recall everything equally, and they cannot recover or bring back what has slipped into forgetfulness. But of the future, these creatures have no knowledge at all.
Reason Alone: The Human Soul's Divine Power
The rational soul, unique to humans, uses nourishment and sensation as servants, grasps present, absent, and unknown things, names concepts, and seeks the nature, kind, and cause of each thing.
But the third power of the soul, which draws the earlier powers of nourishment and sensation along with itself and uses them as servants and obedient helpers, is itself wholly constituted in reason, and it operates either in the firmest reasoning about present things, or in the understanding of absent things, or in the investigation of unknown things. This power alone is available to the human race, which receives not only complete and well-formed senses and mental images, but also, by the full act of understanding, unfolds and confirms what imagination has suggested. And so, as has been said, for this divine nature not only are the things it grasps through the senses sufficient for knowledge, but it can also give names to things conceived in the imagination from sense experience and to things that are absent, and it opens up what it grasps through the power of understanding by means of words as well. It is also proper to this nature that through what it already knows it tracks down what it does not know, and it must recognize not only whether each thing exists, but also what it is, and what kind of thing it is, and indeed why it is. This threefold power of the soul, as has been said, only human nature has received, and the power of this soul does not lack the movements of understanding, by which it properly exercises the power of reason in these four ways.
The Fourfold Work of the Reasoning Soul
The human soul inquires whether a thing exists, what it is, and why it is so, devoting its whole effort to knowing the natures of things and to the moral knowledge that shapes right living.
It either asks whether something exists at all, or, once its existence is settled, doubts what it is. And if reason has given it knowledge of both, it tracks down what each thing is, and along the way it thoroughly investigates all the other attendant circumstances. Once these things are known, it asks why they are so, and still it tracks down the answer through reason. Since, then, this is the activity of the human soul — that it is always engaged either in grasping present things, or in understanding absent things, or in inquiring into and discovering unknown things — there are two areas in which the whole effort of the reasoning soul devotes itself: the first, to know by rational inquiry the natures of things; the second, by contrast, to arrive at the knowledge that moral seriousness afterward puts into practice.
Read the original Latin
Triplex omnino animae vis in vegetandis corporibus deprehenditur, quarum una quidem vitam solum corpori subministrat, ut nascendo crescat, alendoque subsistat. alia vero sentiendi iudicium praebet. tertia vi mentis et ratione subnixa est. quarum quidem primae id officium est, ut creandis, nutriendis alendisque corporibus praesto sit, nullum vero praestet rationis sensusve iudicium. haec autem est herbarum atque arborum, et quidquid terrae radicitus affixum tenetur. secunda vero composita atque coniuncta est, ac primam sibi sumens, et in partem constituens varium de quibus potest capere, ac multiforme iudicium capit. omne enim animal, quod sensu viget, idem et nascitur, et nutritur, et alitur. sensus vero diversi sunt, et usque ad quinarium numerum crescunt ita quidquid tantum alitur, non etiam sentit, quidquid vero sentire potest, etiam alitur, ei prima quoque vis animae, nascendi scilicet atque nutriendi, probatur esse subiecta.
quibus vero sensus adest, non tantum eas rerum capiunt formas quibus sensibili corpore feriuntur praesente, sed abscedente quoque sensu sensibilibusque sepositis, cognitarum sensu formarum imagines tenent, memoriamque conficiunt, et prout quodque animal valet, longius breviusque custodit. sed eas imaginationes confusas atque inevidentes sumunt, ut nihil ex earum coniunctione ac compositione efficere possint, atque idcirco meminisse quidem nec aeque omnia, amissam vero oblivionem recolligere ac revocare non possunt. futuri vero his nulla cognitio est. sed vis animae tertia, quae secum priores alendi ac sentiendi trahit, hisque velut famulis atque obedientibus utitur, eadem tota in ratione est constituta, eaque vel in rerum praesentium firmissima conclusione, vel in absentium intelligentia, vel in ignotarum inquisitione versatur. haec tantum humano generi praesto est, quae non solum sensus imaginationesque perfectas et non inconditas capit, sed etiam pleno actu intelligentiae, quod imaginatio suggessit, explicat atque confirmat. itaque, ut dictum est, huic divinae naturae non ea tantum in cognitione sufficiunt, quae subiecta sensibus comprehendit, verum etiam ex sensibilibus imaginatione concepta, et absentibus rebus nomina indere potest, et quod intelligentiae ratione comprehendit, vocabulorum quoque positionibus aperit. illud quoque ei naturae proprium est, ut per ea quae sibi nota sunt, ignota vestiget, et non solum unumquodque an sit, sed quid sit etiam, et quale sit, nec non et cur sit, oportet agnoscere. quam triplicem animae vim sola, ut dictum est, hominum natura sortita est, cuius animae vis intelligentiae motibus non caret, qua in his quattuor proprie vim rationis exercet.
aut enim aliquid an sit inquirit, aut si esse constiterit, quid sit addubitat. quod, si etiam utriusque scientiam ratione possidet, quale sit unumquodque vestigat, atque in eo cetera accidentium momenta perquirit. quibus cognitis, cur ita sit quaerit, et ratione nihilominus vestigat. cum igitur hic actus sit humani animi, ut semper in praesentium comprehensione, aut in absentium intelligentia, aut in ignotarum inquisitione atque inventione versetur, duo sunt in quibus omnem operam vis animae ratiocinantis impendit, unum quidem ut rerum naturas inquisitionis ratione cognoscat, alterum vero, ut ad scientiam prius veniat, quod post gravitas moralis exerceat.
Notes
- 1 ↩The ut after officium est is taken as a complementizer ("this as its role, to...") rather than a purpose clause; the contrast introduced by vero sets the first power apart from any rational or sensory judgment.
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