De Anima (On the Soul)
61. Is the Soul a Body? Objections, and Why We Picture the Soul as a Body
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/4-de-anima/061-is-the-soul-a-body-objections-and-why-we-picture-the-soul/

[0:00] So let's look here now at the first article, huh? Whether the soul is a body, right? Now, what Thomas does in the Summa, you know, it's kind of like an abbreviation of what they call the quaestiones disputate,

[0:20] and they say this is the way it was done. I don't know. It was always observed exactly this way, but I think it makes some sense. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, I will lecture. Now, in my lecture, there will be many things covered, right? And some things are more controversial than others, right? Some things and other writers and down through time have been disputed about more than others, right?

[0:53] And you know what we're going to do on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday? We're going to pull out those more difficult questions, and you might call them quaestiones disputatae, huh? Questions about which famous thinkers, right, have thought opposite things about, right? And so now we're going to divide the class up here, you know, and you ten guys are going to argue on the affirmative, and you ten guys are going to argue on the negative, right?

[1:29] Okay. Now, whether they had some help from the teacher, even that we, no. Okay, then it was the duty of the magister, the master, to solve the question, right? See. And if he came down the affirmative side, he'd have to go back to all the arguments the negative side and answer every one of them. Sure. And vice versa, right? Okay. But if he thought that there was an element of truth on both sides and both sides had some defect in them, right?

[2:04] Then he would have to answer the questions or the objections on both sides, right? Okay. Now, the best quaestiones disputatae are the ones that come down to us from what Thomas, right? You have the questiones disputatae de veritate, and I said bonitate, okay, about truth. You have the questiones disputatae de malo, right, on evil, right? You have the questiones disputatae de anima, right? There's a whole series of these questiones disputatae, and in them you will have as many as fifteen or twenty objections, sometimes on the false side, and maybe even ten or fifteen on the what other side, right?

[2:49] And then in the body of the articles is called Thomas will determine what the truth is, right? And then if the whole truth was on one side, you answer all the objections on that opposite side, right? Sure. If the whole truth involved elements of both, you answer both sets of objections, right? Mm-hmm. When I said the Summa Theologia is written for you know beginners, and what Thomas does is to cut that down to some of the chief objections, right?

[3:21] And usually just about three. Occasionally it is four or five, but usually only about three objections, right? But they're usually, you know, very important ones, and then the opposite side usually is very short, just like I said, contra, right? See, so it's kind of an abbreviation of the question, disputata, right? But appropriate for a beginning, because logically, twenty-five objections, you know, and so on, and and so you have therefore the objections against what he's going to determine is the truth in the body of the article, right?

[3:58] But you have just a set contra, you know, somebody using authority, right? Make you stop and wonder, right? And then the body of the article, Thomas will solve the question, answer the question, so on, and then you reply to the objections on the other side, right? Now, really, the ideal way to read an article would be to read the objections and the set contra, and then see no more for a while, right?

[4:22] And then just sit back and say, now, how would I, what would I think about that, right? And try to kind of anticipate because you think a little bit on your own, and how would I answer these objections too if I think they're wrong, right? No, and then read Thomas, right? When I was teaching the,

[4:43] the corpus or the, or the responses. Well, I do all three separately, right? See, in other words, you would get a piece of paper with just the objections and the set contra, and you know, think about that for a while, and then later on, we're going to give you the body of the article, right? And once you absorb the body of the article, then see if you could answer the particular objections, right?

[5:12] And then finally, go to Thomas, right? I don't want to prolong this too much because you make a little bit frustrated with your your own deficiencies, right? That's kind of the way to do it, you know. I know when I was teaching the love and friendship course, right?

[5:30] Kind of at the end of that, I thought I'd say a little bit about charity, right? And Thomas has a article on whether charity is is is a form of friendship, huh? Well, of course, they didn't have the text with them. I was going to reproduce it for them, right? The English translation of the text, right? So I put on a separate piece of paper the objections and the set contra.

[5:53] Now, if you studied the the treatise on friendship in the eighth book there of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, right? Then you can understand the objections against saying charity is friendship, huh? And they're very interesting objections, and like one objection will say, you know, that friendship is what mutual love, right? And and as if I love you, you love me in return. We're not friends, okay? Well then, the objection says, but by charity you're supposed to love your enemies, those who don't love you, right?

[6:34] So how can it be friendship when friendship is what mutual love? See, I mean they've already understood that friendship is mutual love. So how can charity be this? If you're loving your enemies? And then they also saw the different kinds of what friendship. Aristotle, you know, speaks of friendship of useful friends, which is the lowest kind, you know, and we're mutually useful, but we don't really, Okay.

[7:01] And then the friendship of pleasure, right? We enjoy each other's company, right? And then the highest friendship, which is based on virtue, right? Okay. Of course, the another objection will say, well, if charity is friendship, it's got to be the highest kind of friendship, and that's the friendship between the virtuous, right? But we're told to love sinners. Therefore, can't be friendship, right? See, so I mean. very good objections you see.

[7:29] but I gave them those one day, you know, and I left them kind of, you know, sinking in and realized they wouldn't probably be active enough to go look up the text, you know. And then he come back, you know, and and solve it, you know. And it's kind of marvelous the way Thomas kind of solves it, right? Because he he sees the distinction there between the primary object of friendship, right, and a secondary object of friendship, and it's a distinction you could make in philosophy, though it's not usually made there.

[7:59] But because of this difficulty, right? See, so if I'm a friend of of some a man who's married, right, and has children, right, if I become a friend of that man and they were both philosophers and like that, I take a certain interest in his what children and their welfare and so on, right? I just had a had a email the other day there from a friend, you know, and he wants me to do something for his son, right?

[8:25] Okay. But I love his friend, I mean his son rather, because I I love him. He's a primary object of my friendship, right? See. But it's a very amusing scene there, and you read Boswell's Life of Johnson. But Johnson goes up to visit Boswell there in Scotland. This is the most famous biography, right, in English language, Boswell's Life of Johnson. But Johnson goes up to visit Boswell in Scotland, right?

[8:53] And because of his somewhat sloppy habits around the house and so on, he becomes a kind of persona non grata, Mrs. Boswell. So you have he's trying to placate here, you know, and making you know references to the fact that you make the best impression upon Mrs. Boswell, right? In the letters back and forth between him and Boswell, right? They're very amusing, you know. I think he finally got to like him so much, you know.

[9:20] But but the immediate reaction, you know, I mean, he's a guy who would you know spill his ashes wherever's on the floor and and he little messes around and other things that don't endear you to the wife of the of the household and so on, right? And so, but nevertheless, he makes an attempt to get along with Mrs. Boswell, right? And and to reconcile with her and so on.

[9:44] Something he wouldn't do if he wasn't what? attached to the same thing, okay. Well, then Thomas makes the same distinction there, right? That friendship is primarily between the saints and God, but because of that, then it extends to everything in the image and likeness of God and so on, right? It's kind of like a secondary thing, right? So I mean, he makes the proper distinctions, but but but one may not think of that, right?

[10:10] Sure. And Aristotle doesn't talk about that, but coming back upon it, you realize we don't experience a friendship, you know. I have people who are friends of mine, and they are really very good friends, and and they they want to be friends with my my brothers and so on, right? You know. And, but that's because of what? Because of you. Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I have friends, you know, who are the godparents, you know, or godfather of one of my sons or something, right?

[10:42] Huh? Okay. Mm-hmm. But it's not because of any direct connection between my son and this man, but because he's a son of me, who is a friend of this man, right? So there's some concern for my, my son, right? Enough to make him a godfather, you know. Okay. So, but you know, it's kind of funny the way these texts are written, see, because in the old days you had the Summa they print the kind of the answer there in bold print, they say, okay, look at it right away for the answer.

[11:16] But you kind of, kind of gotta guide yourself from, from doing that, right? Huh? You know. Um. Sometimes, I used to do with the Summa Contra Gentiles you know, I'd, I'd see what the title of the chapter was, and I try to think out some arguments in favor of what Tom is going to show there, right? And even after I heard his arguments, and I haven't been away from the text for a while, you forget the arguments, you know, and I come back and I'd say, now, see, he had seven arguments in there to show something, right?

[11:48] Let's see how many I can think of those seven, right? Maybe I can think of four or five of them or something, right? But I missed two of them, right? And then when I read the text again, I'm struck by the argument that I had missed, right? Yeah. You know, and you kind of, you know, kind of save that argument because it's something that you had not been able to remember.

[12:05] Yeah. So let's look at the objections here, right? The first that's what we see, It seems that the soul is a body, right? Now this is the argument on the other side, right? Huh?

[12:24] Now he says the soul is the what? Mover of the body, huh? Motor, corporis, huh? But it is not a what? A mover that has not moved itself, right?

[12:45] For first, because it seems that nothing is able to move another unless it itself be moved, huh? Okay. Now, of course, this is going back to our senses, right? Huh? If my hand is going to move this glass, my hand has to be also moving, right? Okay. Um, if I'm using what this book here to move that book, this book has to be moving too, right? To move that.

[13:16] So it's move something else. You gotta be moved yourself. It seems, right? Okay. And it gives the reason there, even, because nothing gives to another what it doesn't have. So how could I give motion to this glass? How could my hand give motion to this glass if my hand was not itself in motion? Quite reasonable, right?

[13:47] Here's an example from another kind of motion or change. Just as what is not hot does not heat something, right? Then also because if something is a mover that is not moved, right, it causes an eternal motion, and one that has itself in the same way as is proved in the eighth book of the physics. I know Aristotle was showing this in the eighth book of the physics, which does not appear in the motion of animal, which seems kind of irregular, right?

[14:23] It's not always moving and moving in the same way, right? Therefore, the soul is a moved what? Mover, huh? But every mover that is moved is a body. Therefore, the soul is a body, right?

[14:44] Now, if you know the first book, which we didn't go through, the first book about the soul, Aristotle, you have a premium that I think we looked at, but then the rest of book one after the premium is, as I mentioned before, who are recounting what his predecessors said about the soul, right? And also why they said this about the soul, right? And then Aristotle, you know, enters in some kind of a critique about the sufficiency what they're saying about the soul, huh?

[15:16] But Aristotle points out in that particular part of book one, he says that they investigated the soul through two things: through the idea that the soul is moving the body, right? And of course, this is our first idea of of light that means what? Self-motion, right? So

[15:49] they investigated the nature of the soul through the fact that it moves the body. But as Thomas explained in the body article there, they didn't see how it could move the body unless it itself were in motion. And of course, it's a body that is in motion, right? So they thought of the soul as being some kind of a body that's very mobile, right? And so the the atomists like like Democritus would think of the soul as atoms, right?

[16:25] And the atoms, you know, are some kind of body that seem to be constantly in motion. You see a stream of light coming in. You see little particles that always seem to be moving in the air. Well, that's what the atoms are like, right? So you need some kind of a body that's always in motion to be causing what our own body to be moved, right? Right.

[16:43] So that's one way to investigate it. Now, connected with that, as Thomas will say, and you meet this in when Aristotle was discussing in the fourth book of Natural Hearing, the fourth book of the Physics, he's discussing place, right? He takes up place. He quotes the common opinion of the Greek philosophers that whatever is must be somewhere, and if isn't somewhere, it doesn't exist.

[17:12] And that's what they're thinking. They're thinking that whatever is must be in some place, right? And if it isn't in some place, it doesn't exist. Now, if you went down and asked the man on Main Street, you'd probably agree with that. Yeah. You see, but to be in some Place to be contained, that is to say, in some place, right? Is really a property of bodies, right?

[17:34] So they're thinking that all that is is bodies, right? And part of the reason why they think this is because we don't think about anything without imagining, and we don't imagine without the continuous, and that's what a body is—something has length and width and depth. So it seems impossible that there be anything other than bodies or what is in bodies, huh? And a body seems to move another body only by being moved itself.

[18:04] So they look for some kind of a, you know, body. that's certain. Now there are other opinions there that are more abstruse, you know, like the Pythagoreans, you know, where everything was explained by numbers. But you meet the strange opinion that the soul is a self-moving number.

[18:23] But this is a more probable opinion, right? That's the body, right? It's moving, huh? Yeah, sure. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, you know, people imagine soul to be kind of an air-like what body, really? Sure. A very fine, you know, ghost-like body, but nevertheless, a body with length and width and depth, huh? It's moving this, huh? That's a very probable opinion, right? Now, the other way they investigated life was from the from knowing, and of course, they didn't distinguish really clearly between understanding and sensing, huh?

[19:00] And sensing is more known. So the second objection is taken from what? The second way they approached the soul through the fact that it what knows in some way, right? Now,

[19:17] I think Aristotle was right because life of the plants is kind of hidden, right? And it's not so clear when a plant is alive or dead, right? And

[19:35] but if you take all these metaphors and so on in Shakespeare and in the other poets too, Homer and so on, sleep, thou ape of death. But in sleep, what part of the soul is inactive? The reason. The reason. Yeah. Now the the senses, right? You're not sensing your surroundings, and you're not moving around from one place to another when you sleep, right? But you're digesting your food, right?

[20:05] Right. You see. But that's kind of hidden, right? Yeah. See. And so we even use the expression of dead sleep, you know, a guy is meeting a kind of hard to wake him up, you know, and a lot of times you wake up right away, you know, when something comes in or something like that. But a dead sleep, you know, you're asleep where you resemble death, right?

[20:23] There's all kinds of allusions there in the poets, you know. I see it in Shakespeare all the time, huh? But death is the opposite of what life, right? So they speak of sleep as being a kind of death, or being like death, or resembling death. I remember that terrible scene there in the tempest, you know, where the one brother is urging other brother to kill his brother and take his throne over.

[20:50] And Chris, he's laying on the ground to sleep, you know. He's almost like a dead person, anyway, you know. It just turned him into what he resembles already, you know, kind of. But the point is that if you think of of sleep as being like death, and sleep is the what absence of sensing, right, and the absence moving around, then you're thinking of life as being exactly those two things that come up in these first two what objections, right?

[21:21] Now the second objection, and this is you're thinking here very much of the opinion of what the great Empedocles, right? Empedocles, if you remember from our study of his fragments, Empedocles saw that the thing known must be in the knower in order to be what known. Remember that? Yeah. So there seems to be truth to that, right? I mean, how do you recognize people that you you know in life, huh?

[21:58] Well, haven't you got their shape and their color and so on inside of you, right? Certainly. How do I recognize you again? I mean, how come you're not a complete stranger every time I come up here? See?

[22:17] I have your shape, your color inside my head, don't I? If I didn't have them in me, I wouldn't know you, would I? Okay. Say who are you?

[22:28] So, but the mistake that Empedocles made was that he thought that what was materially in you. Yeah, there was actually in you, right? So he thought that you know, earth, air, fire, and water, and love and hate, because you're composed of these things, right? So the second objection is falling on those lines. Thomas is a student of Aristotle, right? He's a student of Plato. He says all knowledge is through some what likeness, right?

[23:05] But there cannot be a likeness of a body to to a what incorporeal, an unbodily thing, right? If therefore the soul were not a body, it could not know what bodily things. Okay. The third one goes back again to the first way that they investigated the soul through its being a mover, right? Moreover. There must be some contact between the mover and the moved, right? But contact is only of bodies, huh?

[23:45] Since therefore the soul moves the body, it seems that the soul is a body, right? Okay. So the first and the third arguments are based upon one of the two ways that they always investigate what the soul was: through the fact that it moves the body, right? Okay. And the second one, through the fact that it knows bodies, right?

[24:15] Now, against this is what Augustine says in the sixth book about the Trinity: that the soul is said to be simple with respect to the body, right? Huh? Because it is not what?

[24:39] It's not diffuse, right? Through the space of place, huh? Okay. So they're a magnitude. Okay. Can I look now at the? Is that mole? Yeah. Mole. Yeah. Was that sense? How do you translate mole there? I got the. In English, how do you translate that? Quote. What? What's the quote? Bulk. Space. Yeah, bulk. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[25:12] Another text where Thomas often quotes Augustine. You know that what is not great in mole in size or bulk, right? Yeah. It's great in the sense of being better. Okay. Okay.

[25:32] Molecule, little. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, much for the same thing. Yeah, that's clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Little body. Yeah. Now we should, you know, think of this, huh? You know. Mm-hmm. And kind of make it discreet, right? Huh? Okay. Yeah. Um.

[25:52] So us nowadays we're completely what? Distracted from one thing to another all the time. We're always going from one thing to another. I just got through reading that biography of Solzhenitsyn there by Pierce. Oh yeah. And Solzhenitsyn sees that very well. This is a defect in our age, right? We're always jumping from one thing to another, and we never really what? Think very much about anything. Huh?

[26:14] We're completely superficial. Too much information. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, uh, I remember when there was one philosopher I knew. Who took me some kind of a speed reading course, and I almost laughed in his face. Yeah. What good is speed reading for this? You got to slow down, and always use your finger again, like your wrist. Yeah. But you kind of, you know, you know, think about what you said, and so on.

[26:47] Okay. You can see how that those objections there fit in very well at the first book on the Dianima. I told you the famous dinner they had in honor of Charles de Coninck and Jacques de Molion at Leval one time. You know, then how many years they'd been there? Twenty-five years or three years, whatever the occasion was, right? And so, so a lot of laudatory things said, and so on, and then finally de Coninck and de Molion had to respond to it.

[27:23] Hmm. So de Molion responded first, and he thanked them, and so on. A very polite man. He says you shouldn't have been praising me. You should have been praising Thomas Aquinas.

[27:34] All this praise wasted on me, right? So then DeConnick had to get up and say something, and because he had to top the morning on. But you should be praising Aristotle, right? Thomas got these ideas.

[27:51] So, but DeConnick used to say it very humbly, though, you know just here you know to show you how to read Thomas, you know, and then you can go out and on your own, right? Pursue your education. Okay. Want to take a break? Is it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's made out of things that can be found in the non-living world, and the sign of this is that when the living body dies, right?

[28:28] Now you've got a non-living body, right? But you've got apparently the same materials that you had before, right? But they've lost their what? Harmony, their organization, their coordination, and so on, right? Okay. So the difference between the living and non-living is in terms of some kind of what? Form, meaning by form, not just shape, but order, arrangement of the matter, right? Okay. So ready to begin again here now?

[28:59] Okay. Okay, he says, I answer that it ought to be said. Get used to this grammar over and over again. Respondeo dicendum quod huh Sometimes he'll say "dicendum est." It ought to be known. Yeah. Okay.

[29:24] I was trying to get a friend into Latin quickly, you know, reading Thomas and with except you respondio. For the most part, you're using the third person, right? So you don't have to know all the persons. Very very simple as Latin. Even I can read it.

[29:44] Okay. So I answer it ought to be said that to investigating to inquiring about the nature of the soul. It's much better to use the word nature of the soul than the essence of the soul, right? The kind used to always make fun of that word essence, huh? Oh. Because in in Latin in French it it means gasoline, right? Oh. Okay. Ah, to ah inquiring about the nature of the soul.

[30:20] in order to do that is necessary to presuppose that the soul is said to be. And this is like the what meaning of what the word right the first beginning of life in those things which among us live right being these living bodies around us right okay

[30:45] now you always have to when you teach the De Anima say of Aristotle you always have to explain that this is what is meant by the word soul which is used to translate the word what psyche in Greek right you get the word psychology or the Latin word anima right because what strikes you when you look at the first book about the soul after the proemium and Aristotle recounts what his predecessors thought about the soul there is no doubt that no disagreement that we have a soul or even that a dog has a soul right but there's all kinds of disagreement as to what the soul is

[31:31] now if you look at discussions about uh in in modern times or in recent times people you know wonder whether they have a soul right

[31:46] as if that was a question do I have a soul and for the Greeks there's no question there do I have a soul but the question is what is that soul now I think the confusion comes in that when we hear the word soul we probably think you know something second third fourth fifth and we've heard maybe from the priests right we're thinking of some kind of a kind of spiritual substance right right and it's not obvious that we have that see okay but when the Greeks asked what is the soul they were thinking of the first beginning right primum principium the first beginning or the first cause of life in what living bodies right okay now that's important to see because you're not saying

[32:48] anything about the nature of that cause huh you say the soul is the first beginning or first cause of life within living bodies huh okay now

[33:21] everybody knows that some bodies are alive and some are not. So the child playing with his dog, his pet dog, in the backyard, has no difficulty in realizing that the dog is alive and the stones are not alive. Okay.

[33:41] Secondly, we all have the idea that something is alive because it has self-motion. It moves itself, right? Not just that it moves, but that it seems to move itself, like the dog does. So if we're walking through the woods there, a good path, and we kick a stone as we go along, and the stone rolls, we don't say it's alive, do we? But if we step on something without what, kicking it or pushing it, and all of a sudden it just goes, huh, it's alive, we say, right?

[34:18] You know, because it seems to be moving itself, right? Okay. I had this grand aunt, you know, that didn't know anything about, but we were told she's kind of mysterious woman, you know. And one time she came and visited us at the house, right? And we were still boys at the time, and she sat down in the living room there. She took out a handkerchief, right? And she wrapped it up to look like a little mouse.

[34:49] Oh, yeah. And then she put it under her arm and wrapped the arm. How did she do that? I don't know. We just sat there you know, in her eyes. That's going to be a lie, right?

[35:03] I don't know. They say she's on some kind of shows at one time. Oh yeah. I didn't know what her background was. Very mysterious woman. But it seems to be a lie, you know? But no self-motion. The very words themselves imply that the cause of the motion is within, right? Yeah. So if it's obvious that some bodies are alive, that they have self-motion, right? Then that there is a cause within them of their motion of their life, therefore, that there is such a thing as obvious, huh?

[35:38] And I think the problem for us is that we have already too particular a meaning, or understanding of what the soul is, that we've heard secondhand from the priest or something else or from our environment, and that's not obviously existing, right? Yeah. Well, if you take soul in this sense, then even the modern biologist who would never use the word soul or talk about the soul of a dog, he has an opinion about the soul, even though he doesn't use the word.

[36:06] Right. But his opinion about the soul in this sense, huh? Now, as we mentioned before, a sign of this is the common word animal, which the philosophers did not invent, huh? But the animal is named from the Latin word for what? Soul. And the reason why the animal is named from this rather than the plant is that life in the plant is hidden, right?

[36:37] But the life in the dog is manifest, right? Because the dog moves from one place to another, and because the dog senses, right? The plant doesn't do any of those things, right? It's kind of hard to tell, right? And if you have any experience in gardening or in your yard or something like that, you know sometimes a plant dies and you don't know right away that it's died, right?

[37:00] Because it doesn't move around from place to place, but no, it's a living plant doesn't do that, right? And you can't really—it doesn't sense, right? So you can't stick it in and know whether that's alive or not, right?

[37:15] I mentioned how you know you find this reflected too in the words there of Beatrice there and much ado about nothing, right? And her cousin has. Been falsely accused, right? And she knows her cousin is innocent, right? And she wants Benedict to challenge the man, right, who is accusing her. And Benedict asks her, you know, are you sure, you know, about another innocence? And she says, I'm as sure as I have a soul.

[37:51] See, well, the very expression indicates that that everyone took for granted. It was obvious that they had a soul, right? Be like if I was to say as sure that as the two plus two is four, right? It'd be a way of speaking, you know, saying for sure about it. So

[38:11] this is what the word psyche meant in Greek, right? And psyche was translated in Latin by anima, and by soul in English, right? But unfortunately, as they say, we don't begin where we should begin, right? We begin with a something we've heard, maybe in a cardboard version, but heard about the human soul in particular, right? And that it's really not obvious and is need to be shown and investigated, right?

[38:44] Okay. So Thomas is going back to where you have to begin. That's why the Greeks, they say, there's no question that there is a soul. The question is, what is it? Is it is it some other body, right? That's the first thing, right?

[39:05] Now again, he's using what Aristotle has pointed out in the first book about the soul that life is most of all made manifest by two operations, right? That of knowing, right, and of motion, meaning by motion from what one place to another, right? As I mentioned before, in the first book about the soul, when Aristotle recounts the opinions of his predecessors, he shows that they what arrived at their opinions by investigating the cause of the motion of the body from one place to another, right?

[39:42] Or the cause of its what knowing, right? Okay. But notice you're investigating the soul here through its operations, like I mentioned before, right? Okay.

[39:57] Now he says the beginning or cause of these things, the ancient philosophers, not being able to transcend the imagination, they posited this cause to be some what body, right? Okay. I mentioned that before when I said that

[40:20] it's a common opinion among the Greeks and among maybe men in our day too that whatever it is must be somewhere. It isn't somewhere; it doesn't what exist, right? I was kind of amused by the time you know when the communists were still in power in in Moscow, and they sent some astronaut up into the sky there, right? And he you know spoke back to Earth, right?

[40:46] There's no God up here. This is like the the final reputation of a religion, right? Even God, there's no God up there. Not even Zeus. But no, no, how how the poet you know thought of Zeus and and the other gods being up in top of what Mount Olympus, right? Now there where the clouds are or something like that. Um, but the gods had what bodies, right?

[41:17] Zeus has a body, right? A mortal body maybe, but still has a body, huh? So when they said that nothing, whatever is, must be somewhere. If it isn't somewhere, it doesn't exist. They're thinking of the what what is to be always a body, right, or something in a body, huh? They can't transcend, therefore, the imagination because imagination never what imagines without the continuous, and that's length, width, and depth, right?

[41:51] That's what a we mean by a body in a way, huh? What is length and width and depth, right? So because of our thinking being tied to imagination, there we can't, huh? Now when when Thomas Aquinas is commenting there on the way this De Trinitate, I think I mentioned this before when he doing book six, the De Trinitate, you know, I mean Boethius is talking about the need to transcend the imagination, right?

[42:17] When you think about God, you imagine, and you have to therefore what learn to negate what you imagine. But when you negate what you imagine, you're nevertheless imagining.

[42:33] Remember a conversation one time between my cousin Donald and and who was a philosopher, and his mother, right, who was a good good Catholic, right? And they're talking about God, and my cousin Donald was trying to explain to his mother that God in His divine nature has no body, and she just couldn't couldn't imagine that. Of course, you can't imagine that, but she just couldn't imagine it, right?

[42:58] And he's trying to show her this, you know, and and she's getting more and more frustrated trying to understand it, and finally she says, "What difference does make anyway?" She said, "What do they say, come on, difference?" I mean, I mean, I just mentioned this because he was a pious you know believer, right? But even with with belief, they have a hard time what transcending the what imagination, huh?

[43:24] They've been digging up, you know, Sir Isaac Newton. Apparently, wrote a lot of works in in theology, much more than in science. But you know, he speaks of space as a sensorium of God.

[43:39] Well, well, the the sensorium of God is a sensorium, okay? Yeah, sensorium, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, he's kind of imagining what God's ability to know things as being what spread out like a you know his immensity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, immense, yeah, yeah. And and like go down, you know, you know, the God is kind of a light diffused through space, you know, that's what God is, you know.

[44:10] But they tend to imagine, yeah, because they can't transcend the imagination. But they have that difficulty even in what logic, huh? And there's a passage that I've used in a number of my articles there, from the dialogue called the Parmenides of Plato. In the dialogue called the Parmenides, Parmenides and his pupil Zeno come to Athens, and they talk to a young man named Socrates, and they ask him what he thinks, and they examine him and what he thinks, just like the same Socrates does when he gets older with other men.

[44:53] And nobody knows whether there is any historical basis for this, right? In terms of you know, even time wise, you're not sure the dates of these people, but could at least not of Parmenides, but could Parmenides actually have come to Athens and talked to Socrates? Nobody knows that, right? I don't think that's what's important. I think what's important is the fact that Parmenides emphasizes what the Socratic method is based on.

[45:26] Parmenides is the first man to very explicitly say that something can't both be and not be, and only a two-headed mortal, he said, could think that. It'd be a monster to think that. And

[45:42] Socrates' method of examining people is based upon seeing whether what they say fits together, right? And people don't usually contradict themselves directly and say something is and is not, but they'll say that something is, and then other things they say will lead to the conclusion that it is not, and then they got a contradiction, right? And Socrates will what point that out? See, and that's always a sign that there's something false in what you're saying.

[46:15] And even Perry Mason examines the what the witness on the stands there, and the witness contradicts himself, right? He's in trouble, isn't he? Right. See.

[46:29] With with judges these days, you know, they're in contradiction now because if I hit a pregnant woman and cause the death of the baby within her, then I can be charged with homicide. I killed a human being. But then if the mother herself doesn't want the baby and the abortionist can kill it, then it's not homicide. So it is and is not. You can't have your cake and eat it.

[46:57] It's a contradiction. And so Socrates would go around examining people like the judges and make enemies by showing that their thinking was what not in harmony, right? Or as Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, there with the truth, all things harmonize; they all fit together, right? But if you're saying something false, like a jigsaw puzzle, it's got the wrong piece for it; it won't fit in there.

[47:27] But anyway. More in coming back to what the reason I brought it up here. In there, Socrates is trying to understand what we call the universal, and he imagines universal to be what, like a a tent or something, cloth spread over all of those, right? So man, for example, is spread over all of us here. Well, he starts getting the contradictions, right? Because if man, which is said of all of us, was over all of us like a big cloth, right, that fits we all fit under, only part of what a man would be on top of me, right?

[48:05] Another part of what man is to be on top of you, right? And yet, you know, the whole what is meant by man is found in you. You are an animal with reason, right? Not just a part. One of us is an animal, the other is reason, or no? Every man is an animal with reason. He has the whole of what is meant by man, huh? So Socrates is trying to imagine universal as what something continuous, huh?

[48:35] That's covering all of us, huh? And so he's can't transcend his imagination. Well, as I mentioned, I think with John Locke, huh? You know, in the Essay on Human Understanding, John Locke is trying to understand the general idea of triangle, and he's trying to what imagine a triangle, right? It's neither equilateral nor isosaceous nor scalene. But he can imagine a triangle that isn't one of these. So he's so confused, he says it's all none of these.

[49:07] But again, he's trying to imagine something, the universal, that he cannot what imagine, huh? So as Monsignor Dionne pointed out there, right? Logic, in a way, disposes for theology, huh? Because in logic, you have to learn to transcend your imagination.

[49:32] So and this is what we speak of, you know. False imagination is the main cause of deception on the side of our knowing powers. And false imagination means imagining things other than they are, right? Now we can imagine things that can be imagined other than they are, right? Okay. Now before you meet somebody famous or like that, you sometimes imagine how tall they are or what they look like, and you're kind of surprised by the fact that they're they're shorter, you know.

[50:06] And the but if it's your you try to imagine something that cannot be imagined, right? Well, then necessarily you're false, right? If you follow that imagine that image that you have of the thing, huh?

[50:25] And so people, as I say, they they always seem to imagine, you know. I think the average person does anyway, like the poets do. They do imagine the soul to be a kind of what? Airy body. Yeah, an airlike body, right? They can't transcend the imagination, right? Well what a career isn't that, you know. You take away, you know, length and width and depth, get nothing left.

[50:50] Yeah. Got nothing left to imagine, right? Yeah. So they're they're tied to that, huh?