ot a thing which
comes into the body and goes out of it. It is not a thing at all. It
is a function.

But to this doctrine Aristotle makes an exception in favour of the
active reason. All the lower faculties perish with the body, including
the passive reason. Active reason is imperishable and eternal. It has
neither beginning nor end. It comes into the body from without, and
departs from it at death. God being absolute reason, man's reason
comes from God, and returns to him, after the body ceases to function.
But before we hail this as a doctrine of personal immortality, we had
best reflect. All the lower faculties perish at death, and this
includes memory. Now memory is an essential of personality. Without
memory our experiences would be a succession of isolated sensations,
with no connecting link. What connects my last with my present
experience is that my last experience was "mine." To be mine it must
be remembered. Memory is the string upon which isolated experiences
are strung together, and which makes them into that unity I call
myself, my personality. If memory perishes, there can be no personal
life. And it must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely
that, in that future life--if we persist in calling it such--the
memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in the future life
itself reason has no memory of itself from moment to moment. We cannot
be dogmatic about what Aristotle himself thought. He seems to avoid
the question. He probably shrank from disturbing popular beliefs on
the subject. We have, at any rate, no definite pronouncement from
{303} him. All we can say is that his doctrine does not provide the
material for belief in personal immortality. It expressly removes the
material in that it denies the persistence of memory. Moreover, if
Aristotle really thought that reason is a thing, which goes in and out
of the body, an exception, in the literal sense, to his general
doctrine of soul, all we can say is that he undergoes a sudden drop in
the philosophic scale. Having propounded so advanced a theory, he
sinks back to the crude view of Plato. And as this is not likely, the
most probable explanation is that he is here speaking figuratively,
perhaps with the intention of propitiating the religious and avoiding
any rude disturbance of popular belief. If so, the statements that
active reason is immortal, comes from God, and returns to God, mean
simply that the world-reason is eternal, and th