animates man.

31. THE MIND AS IMMATERIAL.--It is scarcely too much to say that the
Greek philosophy as a whole impresses the modern mind as representing
the thought of a people to whom it was not unnatural to think of the
mind as being a breath, a fire, a collection of atoms, a something
material. To be sure, we cannot accuse those twin stars that must ever
remain the glory of literature and science, Plato and Aristotle, of
being materialists. Plato (427-347, B.C.) distributes, it is true, the
three-fold soul, which he allows man, in various parts of the human
body, in a way that at least suggests the Democritean distribution of
mind-atoms. The lowest soul is confined beneath the diaphragm; the one
next in rank has its seat in the chest; and the highest, the rational
soul, is enthroned in the head. However, he has said quite enough
about this last to indicate clearly that he conceived it to be free
from all taint of materiality.

As for Aristotle (384-322, B.C.), who also distinguished between the
lower psychical functions and the higher, we find him sometimes
speaking of soul and body in such a way as to lead men to ask
themselves whether he is really speaking of two things at all; but when
he specifically treats of the _nous_ or reason, he insists upon its
complete detachment from everything material. Man's reason is not
subjected to the fate of the lower psychical functions, which, as the
"form" of the body, perish with the body; it enters from without, and
it endures after the body has passed away. It is interesting to note,
however, an occasional lapse even in Aristotle. When he comes to speak
of the relation to the world of the Divine Mind, the First Cause of
Motion, which he conceives as pure Reason, he represents it as
_touching_ the world, although it remains itself _untouched_. We seem
to find here just a flavor--an inconsistent one--of the material.

Such reflections as those of Plato and Aristotle bore fruit in later
ages. When we come down to Plotinus the Neo-Platonist (204-269, A.D.),
we have left the conception of the soul as a warm breath, or as
composed of fine round atoms, far behind. It has become curiously
abstract and incomprehensible. It is described as an immaterial
substance This substance is, in a sense, in the body, or, at least, it
is present to the body. But it is not in the body as material things
are in this place or in that. _It is as a whole in the whole body, and
it i