ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

What Aristotle felt about the immortality of the soul by the testimony of his Greek interpreters.

...and it is indeed held to be much more likely that the immortal soul was considered by Aristotle. And I shall not, indeed, endeavor to make it seem as though a great accession is made to our Christian religion from that business. For what does it have to do with Aristotle, who, as long as he lived, was blind in the darkness of superstitions and walked about in a certain Hippodrome of sublunar things, more manifold and convoluted than that one in Pindar, which is curved twelve times? We, through our religion, both proceed rightly and are illuminated by the super-celestial rays of divine truth; regarding which matter, if God grants, we are to write in dedicated volumes. But let us execute what now presses. First of all, it is sufficiently certain that Aristotle, in the first book On the Soul, brought forth his own definition in general and rejected those of others. In the second, he discussed its sensible powers. In the third, he disputed about the intellectual power. In the vestibule of which, if we follow the division of the books that we established at the beginning, he began to open the immortality by the force of a single word: when he cited the intellectual power itself not by the name of a 'part', but of a 'particle'—that is, in Greek, morion small part/particle. For if he had called it a 'part', some might have suspected it to be disjointed. For that famous distinction concerning the parts of the soul, and not the particles, existed even before Aristotle, when some assigned one part to the heart, another to the head, and another to another member, separated; which slip is not easily committed in the name of 'particle', as that which is accustomed to inhere, not to consist separated. Of which matter we made mention among the principles of this commentary. But since he had said that that particle understands the soul, and becomes...