ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

Note diligently, assertor of mortality.

...in it, that is, that by which it is closest to the higher minds separated from matter. Therefore, they are most deeply mistaken who have thought that the nature and properties of the human soul have been explored and discovered by them from the property of corruptible forms. For they were absent i.e., distant from the truth not otherwise—nay, and much more—than if one were to measure the properties of fire, which has never been seen, from the properties of earth placed before one's eyes, which are especially wondrous among the sublunar the region beneath the moon, associated with change and decay things. I say that those who would hunt, with the sagacity of their wit, the properties of a lion from a plane tree, or the properties of an olive tree from a bear, are much more in error, since those species are compared to one another under one genus. These, however, differ by more than a genus, namely by the mark of reason and irrationality. And so, all those things which have been brought forward as objections are most easily dissolved; they are refuted without effort by the different considerations brought into the middle, and by diverse distinctions. For as far as it pertains to the binding of the subject and the corporeal object, so that for that reason it is necessarily always joined to it, they are mistaken because they perceive those things which were brought forward by Aristotle under condition and supposition without condition and without supposition, which will be revealed most clearly a little later in this very digression. Then they err at that step which we marked above, because the soul, joined to the body, has that proper to it in which it communicates with none of the lower things, so that it can be separated both in action and in nature, both from the subject and from the corporeal object: as will be made manifest in the progress, both with reasons and with the authorities of the Peripatetics followers of Aristotle. Therefore, it will be able both to understand and to remain by its own use, and it will be able not only to be a survivor, but it will be,