ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

...that it was that express opinion of Simplicius, as we shall show a little later with their own words. Moreover, those older Peripatetics did not speak so clearly that they opened the soul's immortality beyond controversy, while simultaneously rejecting those who had thought it mortal. For they themselves, just as Aristotle, have endured various declarations and interpretations, yet they were all so inclined toward asserting immortality that it even came into suspicion for some that it pleased them that the sentient soul, or if you prefer to say, the sensual soul, should be vindicated from perishing, which is manifest in Themistius in the second book On the Soul; nor would they have been rejected by Thomas if they had understood the sentient soul as an essence, not as a potentiality. But in later centuries, there was altogether greater study among the Greeks in explaining the opinion of Aristotle and Theophrastus as clearly as it could possibly be done: to whom Saint Thomas came very close in his commentaries, though he was far different in that most of them wanted the human intellect to be full of forms; which, although Alexander did not want, the Platonists contend are not alien from the ancient Peripatetics, so that in this matter also, little business would have been exhibited to my uncle, Giovanni Pico, in reconciling Plato and Aristotle. He was also different in that some of them thought that that intellect, which is said to arrive from outside, is not a part of the soul but a more divine substance. Others interpreted that 'from outside', or 'from abroad' (as is commonly said), in a different way; so far is it that they clearly decreed that the sentient soul arrives from outside, as some have surmised. That difference also...

What is the difference between S. Thomas and the ancient Greek expositors.

Io. Picus.