Summa I, q. 78, a. 1: Why Five Genera of Powers, Four Grades of Life, Three Souls

Orientation #

He opens by “beginning question seventy-eight” and reads the proemium; he says the second article will treat the three species of the plant part, the third the exterior senses, the fourth the interior senses. He refers back to “the earlier articles” for the rule that we know the soul through its powers, the powers through acts, the acts through objects, and to “those of you who were with me when he did the third book on the soul” (Aristotle). The previous class treated q. 77 a. 8 (whether all powers remain in the separated soul); the next treats q. 78 a. 2 on the three vegetative powers.

The class, in order #

1. The proemium of q. 78 (“preambles to the faith, the things that”) #

Point: why the theologian treats the lower powers at all, and the plan of the question.

• Theologian’s proper business: only the intellectual and appetitive powers, “in which the virtues are found”; but knowledge of these depends on the others, so three parts: preambles, intellectual powers, appetitive powers. Aside on “preambles”: things that “walked before,” as in preambles to the faith.
• Four things about the first part; first, the genera of powers. Genus = general kind; under each of the five genera, particular kinds will be distinguished.
• Parallel with Aristotle, De Anima II: after defining the soul he distinguishes the five genera, then the feeding/vegetative soul, then the exterior senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching), then the interior senses. Thomas is “more complete” on the interior senses than Aristotle in De Anima III (Aristotle adds some in On Memory and Reminiscence), with help from “the Arab philosophers”; elsewhere Aristotle is lengthier.

2. Article 1 stated; the order of the five; two or three (“the rule of two or three”) #

Point: the five genera in Thomas’s order and why that order.

• Five: feeding (vegetative), sensing, desiring, motive according to place, intellectual.
• Order by inclusion: vegetative in plants, animals, man, and all the plant has; sensitive in beasts and man; desiring third because “some kind of desiring power” follows on sense; motive according to place next, because with the higher senses (seeing, hearing) you know and desire distant things — but not all animals have it: low animals fixed in the ground or ocean, “their food comes to them with the movement of water”; intellectual: man has all plus these.
• The logic “rule of two or three”: five looks like an exception, but two and three do come up: obj. 1 (three parts), and a division into two — powers acted upon by their object (sensing, intellectual, desiring, “originally at least”) vs. powers that act upon their object (vegetative, e.g. digestion acts on food; locomotion). Aristotle and Thomas touch on the twofold division, but where they formally distinguish the powers they divide at once into five.

3. The four objections and the sed contra (“the eye desires what is gracious”) #

Point: three, four, and reductions to fewer than five.

• Obj. 1: powers are the soul’s parts (“potential parts”); commonly three parts: living/vegetable soul (life first found there), sensing, rational. Aristotle and followers distinguished just three souls, so three genera.
• Obj. 2: De Anima II, “in many ways to live is said” — intellect, sense, motion and rest according to place, motion according to food, growth and decrease — the four grades of life: plants; animals that don’t move but “feel pain if you stick them with a needle”; animals that move; human. His preview of the answer: desire always follows a knowing power (sense desire on sense, will on understanding), so no animal has sense without desire, no one understanding without will; desire gives no separate grade.
• Obj. 3: what is common to all powers should not be a special genus; but every power desires its suitable object — sight desires the suitably visible; “Ecclesiastes, chapter forty, verse twenty-two: the eye desires what is gracious and beautiful” [ed.: Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 40:22 (inferred)]. His illustrations: at the nursery “this plant likes a lot of sun,” “likes the shade”; southern trees that “want water” and get around your pipes; Aristotle’s “matter desires form,” which only means matter is ordered to form as its perfection.
• Obj. 4: De Anima III, the moving principle in animals is sense or understanding or desire — the animal sees, desires, moves toward it — so reduce the motive power to sense and desire.
• Sed contra: De Anima II names the five, in the same order as the article’s opening.

4. Five, four, three (“the first sides of a right angle triangle”) #

Point: the response opens by distinguishing five genera, four grades, three souls, and the task is to see how five reduces to four and to three.

• Mnemonic: 3, 4, 5 are the sides of a right triangle (9, 16, 25). The same triple appears in the Trinity: five notions, four relations, three persons — “we’re not going to talk about the Trinity today.”
• The reasons for the three counts are “different somewhat,” but connected: we know the soul through powers, powers through acts, acts through objects, so the five genera are the way we eventually know the souls.
• Five to four (the easier): desiring powers always accompany knowing powers. Ladder of possibility: plant powers without sense (plants); nothing has sense without plant powers; sense (at least touch) without locomotion; no locomotion without sense; locomotion without understanding; whatever understands has all. Sense brings pleasure or pain (agreement or not), hence “something like desire”: the plant-like animals retract from a pin, grab what the water brings; a fortiori reason brings a desire tied to reason, choice, the will. But touch is not automatically followed by locomotion, so that is a separate grade.
• Student asks what a fortiori means: “even more so.” If fornication is bad, adultery is bad; if stealing is bad, murder is bad; a dialectical place — what belongs where it is less apt to belong belongs where it is more apt; the argument does not reverse (adultery bad does not force fornication bad).

5. Why only three souls: rising above matter (“as an automobile shows”) #

Point: souls are distinguished by distinct ways the soul’s operation rises above mere bodily nature; there are three.

• The common idea of soul is something “above the merely material.” Plant soul rises least: it uses the qualities of matter but has an order matter lacks — old chemistry: earth and water go down, air and fire go up, each determined to one; the tree grows “down and up.” Sense is much more immaterial than digestion, reproduction or growth; reason is entirely immaterial, with no bodily organ. Locomotion is not characteristic of rising above matter, “as an automobile shows.”
• Reading Thomas: bodily nature is subject to the soul as matter and as tool.
  1. An operation exceeding bodily nature so much it is not exercised through a bodily organ: the rational soul (understanding, and willing too).
  2. An operation through a bodily organ but not through a bodily quality: sense. Hot, cold, wet, dry are required only for a well-disposed organ, not as that by whose power sensing proceeds. Examples: he recognizes you by shape and color kept in his sense memory, but cut open his head and there is no little statue of you — an immaterial way of being there, unlike how a plant receives. The man in the shower: at first the water feels hot, later not, so he turns it up — two receptions: receiving the heat of the water as the water’s heat (sensing) vs. receiving it as any body does, becoming hot yourself; the same with getting into the cold ocean, which “feels wonderful once you get in there” because your body has taken the cold as its own. Thomas goes from the most immaterial downward, the reverse of Berquist’s order, because “our soul, in some ways, is most known to us.”
  3. The lowest: through an organ and by a bodily quality — digestion by chemicals one could imitate in the non-living world, though organized as only the living thing does. Still above bodily nature: non-living bodies are moved from an exterior principle, the plant’s operations from an intrinsic one; “everything that has a soul in some way moves itself.” Digestion comes about instrumentally by heat: Aristotle’s question whether the soul or the fire digests — fire as the soul’s tool; inanimate fire burns as long as there is material, the living thing digests and arranges the food to fill out its body.
• Conclusion: three souls, distinguished by the notion of soul as rising above matter, hence people are surprised a plant has a soul (aside: at Spags with his wife Rosalie, “everyone’s got a soul”). Genera of powers still matter for distinguishing souls, but the emphasis is on rising above matter, which happens distinctively only three times; this is alluded to in “plants and animals and man.”
• Asides: the cat has a “personality” though not a person — Tabitha hunts after breakfast, Moppet sits in the window; the priest’s three kinds of people (make things happen, watch, ask why).

6. The genera distinguished by objects; the threefold order (“the higher a power is, the more universal”) #

Point: how the five genera themselves are derived.

• Genera are distinguished by acts, ultimately by objects; the higher the power, the more universal the object. Threefold order: (a) only the body united to the soul — the living powers act only there (the tree seems unaware of bodies around it, all its operations tied to its own body, roots down, shoots out); (b) every sensible body — sense; (c) universally every being — understanding, extending “even to the angels and God,” truth and immaterial things.
• The last two have an operation toward something extrinsic, and since the operator must be joined to its object, the extrinsic thing is compared to the soul in two ways: as apt to be joined to the soul and in it by its likeness — two knowing powers, sense (sensible body, less common) and intellect (being, most common); and as the soul is inclined toward the exterior thing — desiring power (compared to the thing as end, first in intention) and motive according to place (as limit of its motion): “falling upon something being desired, every animal is moved towards that.”
• His gloss: color comes into the eye, sound into the ear, kept as likeness in memory; but hungry for the food sensed, “by my desire I tend to go out to the thing itself.” Aristotle “at the end of the sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI (inferred)]: truth is primarily in the mind, the good is in things. Hence the will is more proportioned to God in this life. Augustine’s boy with the ocean and the hole in the beach: I can’t put the ocean into me but I can jump into it — knowing is putting the ocean into me, loving is jumping in. Angels too have understanding and will: full connection to what is outside needs bringing it in (sense, reason) and going out (desire, locomotion).
• Student’s story: his five-year-old nephew Jack meeting a black friend from Ghana, Francis, all the powers working at once; Berquist adds the child and the toy — the toy acts on the senses first, then hand-eye coordination reaches for it. Aside: his mother from a small Minnesota town, “go home and wash your face.”

7. The contrariety of love and knowledge (“I left my heart in San Francisco”) #

Point: knowing brings in, loving goes out — not contraries strictly, but “a kind of contrariety in the way they work” (his first talk at Thomas Aquinas College).

• To grasp is the perfection of knowing; love is giving; taking vs. giving corresponds to knowing vs. loving. Love is in the thing loved: the song; Christ, “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be”; Augustine, the soul is more ubi amat quam ubi animat; “my heart’s not in it”; “it’s always bad to lose your mind, not always bad to lose your heart — depends on who you lose it to.”
• Application: will more proportioned to God in this life because the mind is not adequate to hold Him; so in faith the reason is moved by the will; you can love God in Himself but not know Him in Himself in this life, only when He comes into the mind as that by which you understand.
• Student asks about “in this life”: in the next life, seeing face to face, you love Him more. Christ on John the Baptist — the least in heaven is greater: while in this world he does not see God as He is, so has less love than the lowest saint who sees; omnia in omnibus.
• Shakespeare: lovers and madmen have “seething brains, such shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.” Why love hot, reason cold: the hot expands and overflows (“my heart goes out to you”); the cold contracts — “concentrate,” “concentric”; distraction impedes thought (Tarkov: “the age of distraction”). Thomas at the opening of De Hebdomadibus quotes the Sapiential books, “run into your house and play with your thoughts”: the mind withdraws into itself; play is pleasant and chosen for its own sake, as the life of the mind is; Mary kept these things in her heart.
• Student: love seems both doing what doesn’t make sense (emotion) and a choice (marriage). Answer: either way you go outside yourself; ecstasy is an effect of love (to be treated in love and friendship), “beside yourself”; the mind is concentrated in itself.
• Student: what did you say about love and heat? A metaphor, but expressive: the body may actually get cold thinking — late classes at Laval, ten-cent hot shower and a swim before the Quebec cold.

8. The third distinction: modes of living (“the ways of living, which are distinguished”) #

Point: Thomas calls the grades of life modi (ways) of living and derives four.

• Plants (living powers only); with sense, at least touch, but immobile — conchilia, clams, shell animals; with locomotion — the perfect animals, needing many things and so seeking them at a distance; with understanding — men. Desire is no extra grade “because in whatever things there is sense, there is also desire” (De Anima II).
• This solves obj. 1 and 2: four grades because one of the five always goes with another; the harder point, three souls, by the three ways of rising above corporeal nature.

9. Reply to obj. 3: natural vs. animal appetite (“I don’t want to just smell my dinner”) #

Point: the desire common to all powers is natural appetite, not the genus in question.

• Natural appetite: the inclination of each thing to something from its own nature — the plant “likes” sun and grows toward it, likes moist soil; follows nature, not knowing. Animal (soul) desire follows a form apprehended by sense or reason and needs a special power: the thing is desired as it is in its own nature, but is in the knowing power only by likeness. Sight naturally desires the visible only for its act, seeing; the animal desires the thing seen for its uses, to eat it. If the soul needed sensed things only for sensing, the powers’ natural desire would suffice.
• His gloss: “want” goes all the way down — the screw “doesn’t want to go there” (not made for it) — a different sense from “I want my dinner,” where knowing precedes wanting; the nose’s inclination to smell doesn’t explain wanting to eat; that needs hunger and thirst.

10. Reply to obj. 4: why a separate motive power (“the cat sees the bird”) #

Point: sense and desire move the animal but are not sufficient.

• The cat sees the bird and desires it; why not say sight and desire suffice? Thomas: sense and desire as such are not sufficient without another power — the immobile animals have sense and desire and do not move. The motive power is not only in sense and desire as commanding motion but in the bodily parts made suitable to obey the appetite; sign: when members are put out of their natural disposition (injury, stroke) they do not obey the appetite to motion. So Aristotle is not denied, and the five genera stand.

His words #

• preambles: things that “walked before”; here to the understanding, as elsewhere to the faith.
• genus: “a general kind of thing,” each containing particular kinds of powers.
• feeding / living / plant / vegetable soul: his renderings for the vegetative soul; “life is first found in those powers.”
• the rule of two or three (from logic): divisions normally into two or three; the five genera an apparent exception.
• potential parts: powers as “parts of its power.”
• grades of life: plant, immobile animal, mobile animal, human; Thomas’s modi, “ways of living.”
• a fortiori: “even more so”; a dialectical place of less-apt to more-apt.
• rising above matter: his gloss of Thomas’s operation exceeding bodily nature; the notion of soul everyone has.
• matter and tool: the two ways bodily nature is subject to the soul.
• likeness: how the extrinsic thing is in the knowing power.
• natural appetite: inclination of a thing from its nature (plant “likes” sun); vs. animal/soul desire, following apprehension.
• conchilia: clams, shell animals; the immobile animals.
• ecstasy: being outside/beside yourself, an effect of love.
• truth in the mind, good in things: Aristotle, “sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI].
• ubi amat quam ubi animat: Augustine, the soul is more where it loves than where it animates.
• omnia in omnibus: God all in all.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, proemium (read and glossed).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, a. 1: four objections, sed contra, response, replies to obj. 3 and 4 (read through).
• Aristotle, De Anima II, the passage on “in many ways to live is said” (as quoted in obj. 2).

Mentioned

• Thomas, ST I, q. 78, a. 2–4 (plan of the question); “the earlier articles” (soul known through powers, acts, objects).
• Aristotle, De Anima II (five genera; where sense, desire) and III (moving principle; interior senses); On Memory and Reminiscence; “sixth book of wisdom” (Metaphysics VI, inferred).
• Ecclesiasticus 40:22 (inferred; he says “Ecclesiastes 40:22”), the eye desires the gracious and beautiful.
• Augustine: the boy and the ocean; ubi amat quam ubi animat.
• Thomas, opening of the commentary on De Hebdomadibus (“run into your house and play with your thoughts”).
• Gospel sayings: where your treasure is; the least in heaven greater than John the Baptist; omnia in omnibus (loci not given).
• Shakespeare, “lovers and madmen” (locus not given).
• Trinity: five notions, four relations, three persons (deferred).

His questions #

• Why are there five genera of powers but only four grades of life? Because the desiring power always accompanies a knowing power (sense desire with sense, will with understanding), so it is no separate step.
• Why only three souls, given four grades and five genera? Souls are distinguished by ways of rising above bodily nature, of which there are three (no organ; organ without bodily quality; organ with bodily quality but from an intrinsic principle).
• What does a fortiori mean? “Even more so”: if fornication is bad, adultery is; the argument does not reverse.
• If you cut open my head, would you find a little statue of you? No — the likeness is in the sense memory in an immaterial way.
• Why does the shower water feel less hot after a while? Its heat has become your body’s heat, received as matter receives; sensing received it as the water’s heat.
• Is it the soul or the fire that digests the food? Fire, as a tool of the soul’s power.
• Why is the will more proportioned to God than reason in this life? Knowing puts the thing into the mind, which cannot hold God; loving goes out to Him in Himself.
• Why do we speak of love as hot and reason as cold? Hot expands and overflows, as the heart goes out; cold contracts, as the mind concentrates.
• Why isn’t sight and desire enough to explain the cat moving toward the bird? Immobile animals have sense and desire without moving; a further power in the obedient bodily parts is needed.