DIGRESSIO. Digression.

Io. Scotus It is known among moderns that Scotus John Duns Scotus attempted in the fourth book of his commentaries on the Theological Sentences to dissolve some of the arguments we have touched upon, although many have taken care to rebuild and restore them. It is not at all difficult to restore and rebuild them, and the others as well, which others try to weaken. But also, the authorities of philosophers can be opposed by authorities. Porphyrius Porphyry, who is held to be a distinguished expositor of Aristotle among the Peripatetics, and who was greatly observed by Severinus Boethius in his commentaries on the logic of De Interpretatione, and who is of such authority among the Platonists that he was called "the philosopher" by excellence—he writes to Boethus that men have agreed on asserting the immortality of the soul and that arguments for this were brought forth by philosophers, which others try to refute. Porphyry himself, in his book on the causes that lead to intelligible things, judges the soul to be immortal, and he was so inclined toward this opinion that in the third book of On Abstinence from Animal Food, he did not deny that the souls of brute animals are rational and immortal, possessing both sense and memory; which Numenius of Apamea also thought. Numen. Certainly, Numenius himself and certain Platonists believed the souls of irrational creatures to be immortal. But let us set aside these Platonic things; nor let us bring forth those things which are accustomed to be commonly known, nor let us recount those most celebrated things about the motion of the soul agitating itself, and thus, I would say, revolving in a circle; since