CHAPTER IV
POMPONAZZI's PSYCHOLOGY
THE great question with which Pomponazzi concerned himself was the question of the soul's relation to reason or intelligence. This was the question of his time. Anima and Intellectus were then the watchwords of the schools: their relation, or the nature of anima intellectiva, was the point round which discussion moved and on which was invoked the authority of Averroes, Alexander, or St Thomas. When the audiences in the Italian class-rooms called out "Quid de anima?" this was the subject which they desired to hear treated 1 .
The prevailing tendency was towards a metaphysical dualism of "Soul" and "Reason." Averroism had its professed adherents; but the spirit of Averroism had also deeply penetrated the orthodox schools. Even among those who rejected the Averroist doctrine of a common Intelligence, the "separateness" of intelligence in some sense or other was a fixed presupposition, a dogma that found expression in the character attributed to superior Intelligences, angelic or astral, and which led to the separation of the intellectual from the natural soul of man, or of the soul qua intellectiva from the body. The doctrine of Averroes continued to be seriously discussed, even if it was rarely held in its primitive simplicity; and men's minds were haunted by the phantom of an impersonal Intelligence of humanity.
1 See Symonds, Renaissance, v. p. 479.
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Pomponazzi was not occupied at all with physical speculations about the nature of the soul, such as have been agitated before and since his day. He neither introduced irrelevant physical enquiries as to the substance of the mind nor sought the "seat of the soul" in the body. The reason is not that he was superior to many of the superstitions of his age, but that he was preoccupied with the question about intelligence and the soul. Body and Soul were the simple terms of his thought of man; and Thought and Matter for him the poles of meta physical speculation.
In the enquiry as to the nature of the human soul, and the character of intelligence as in man, Pomponazzi substituted for the method of abstract speculation a method of positive analysis. The Arabians, going by what they conceived to be the necessary nature of Reason, postulated a "separate" rational principle (their intellectus agens). St Thomas was led partly by a similar a priori conception of the nature of a thinking principle and partly by a theological and ethical interest in the immortality of the soul to affirm the existence of "separate" spiritual substances. Pomponazzi, instead of pursuing a priori speculations as to what the nature of an intellectual principle must be, proposed simply to determine our conception of human intelligence by the actual character of intelligence as exhibited by man.
St Thomas had recalled Averroes to the real problem of intelligence as actually exercised by man the individual, and shewn the irrelevancy to that problem of his theory of intellectual action in a separate principle. Pomponazzi deals in the same way with St Thomas's own postulate of a separate intellectual principle in the individual; he asks for evidence ("naturale signum") of its existence, and contrasts the hypothesis with the fact that in man, as he actually is, intelligence is always exercised in dependence on a bodily organisation.
He presses constantly against both Averroes and St Thomas, and against every theory of a separate intellectual soul in man, the Aristotelian definition of soul as the form of body 1; and his
1 Comm. de An., ff. 251 253; 2ca&. passim.
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assent to Aristotle's formula is more than a mere verbal agreement. He occupies Aristotle's standpoint of empirical observation, and pursues his method of a positive analysis of the facts before him. Doing so, he finds, as Aristotle did, that the soul of man yes, and his "intellectual" soul exists in body. It is known only there. We know nothing of it except in that relation. So far as known to us it has no other mode of existence. What is before us is corpus animatum.