e lower is called passive reason,
the higher active reason. The mind has the power of thought before it
actually thinks. This latent capacity is passive reason. The mind is
here like a smooth piece of wax which has the power to receive
writing, but has not received it. The positive activity of thought
itself is active reason. The comparison with wax must not mislead us
into supposing that the soul only receives its impressions from
sensation. It is pure thought which writes upon the wax.

Now the sum of the faculties in general we call the soul. And the
soul, we saw, is simply the organization {301} or form, of the body.
As form is inseparable from matter, the soul cannot exist without the
body. It is the function of the body. It is to the body what sight is
to the eye. And in the same sense Aristotle denies the doctrine of
Pythagoras and Plato that the soul reincarnates itself in new bodies,
particularly in the bodies of animals. What is the function of one
thing cannot become the function of another. Exactly what the soul is
to the body the music of the flute is to the flute itself. It is the
form of which the flute is the matter. It is, to speak metaphorically,
the soul of the flute. And you might as well talk, says Aristotle, of
the art of flute-playing becoming reincarnate in the blacksmith's
anvil, as of the soul passing into another body. This would seem also
to preclude any doctrine of immortality. For the function perishes
with the thing. We shall return to that point in a moment. But we may
note, meanwhile, that Aristotle's theory of the soul is not only a
great advance upon Plato's, but is a great advance upon popular
thinking of the present day. The ordinary view of the soul, which was
Plato's view, is that the soul is a sort of thing. No doubt it is
non-material and supersensuous. But still it is a thing; it can be put
into a body and taken out of it, as wine can be put into or taken out
of a bottle. The connection between body and soul is thus purely
mechanical. They are attached to each other by no necessary bond, but
rather by force. They have, in their own natures, no connexion with
each other, and it is difficult to see why the soul ever entered a
body, if it is in its nature something quite separate. But Aristotle's
view is that the soul, as form of the body, is not separable from it.
You cannot have {302} a soul without a body. The connection between
them is not mechanical, but organic. The soul is n