These animal stories, like those of the Fairies, set us wondering how much was actually believed. Home-dwellers in an unscientific age will believe almost anything about foreign parts; but who could have believed, and how, what the Bestiaries told them about eagles, foxes, or stags? We can only guess at the answer. I am inclined to think that an absence of vocal and clearly held disbelief was commoner than a firm positive conviction. Most of those who helped either by speech or writing to keep the pseudo-zoology in circulation were not really concerned, one way or the other, with the question of fact; just as today the public speaker who warns me not to hide my head in the sand like an ostrich, is not really thinking, and does not want me to think, about ostriches. The moralitas is what matters. You need to ‘know’ these ‘facts’ in order to read the poets or take part in polite conversation. Hence, as Bacon said, ‘if an untruth in nature be once on foot . . . by reason of the use of the opinion in similitudes and ornaments of speech, it is never called down’.12 For to most men, as Browne puts it in Vulgar Errors ‘a piece of Rhetorick is a sufficient argument of Logick; an Apologue of Esop, beyond a syllogysme in Barbara; parables than propositions, and proverbs more powerful than demonstrations’ (I, iii). In the Middle Ages, and indeed later, we must add another source of credulity. If, as Platonism taught—nor would Browne himself have dissented—the visible world is made after an invisible pattern, if things below the Moon are all derived from things above her, the expectation that an anagogical or moral sense will have been built into the nature and behaviour of the creatures would not be a priori unreasonable. To us an account of animal behaviour would seem improbable if it suggested too obvious a moral. Not so to them. Their premises were different.
C. THE HUMAN SOUL
Man is a rational animal, and therefore a composite being, partly akin to the angels who are rational but—on the later, scholastic view—not animal, and partly akin to the beasts which are animal but not rational. This gives us one of the senses in which he is the ‘little world’ or microcosm. Every mode of being in the whole universe contributes to him; he is a cross-section of being. As Gregory the Great (540–604) says, ‘because man has existence (esse) in common with stones, life with trees, and understanding (discernere) with angels, he is rightly called by the name of the world’.13 This is almost exactly reproduced by Alanus,14 Jean de Meung,15 and Gower.16
Rational Soul, which gives man his peculiar position, is not the only kind of soul. There are also Sensitive Soul and Vegetable Soul. The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable, or a double soul, or even—though misleadingly—two souls. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason. As Trevisa (1398), translating the thirteenth-century De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, puts it, there are ‘thre manere soulis . . . vegetabilis that geveth lif and no feling, sensibilis that geveth lif and feling and nat resoun, racionalis that geveth lif, feling, and resoun’. The poets sometimes allow themselves to talk as if man had, not a three-storied soul, but three souls. Donne, claiming that the Vegetable Soul by which he grows, the Sensitive Soul by which he sees, and the Rational Soul by which he understands, are all equally delighted in the beloved, says,
all my souls bee
Emparadis’d in you (in Whom alone
I understand, and grow, and see).
(A Valediction of My Name, 25.)
But this is merely a trope. Donne knows he has only one soul, which, being Rational, includes the Sensitive and the Vegetable.
The Rational Soul is sometimes called simply ‘Reason’, and the Sensitive Soul simply ‘Sensuality’. This is the sense of these words when the Parson in Chaucer says, ‘God sholde have lordschipe over reson, and reson over sensualite, and sensualite over the body of man’ (I. 262).
All three kinds of soul are immaterial. The soul—as we should say, the ‘life’—of a tree or herb is not a part of it which could be found by dissection; nor is a man’s Rational Soul in that sense a ‘part’ of the man. And all soul, like every other substance, is created by God. The peculiarity of Rational Soul is that it is created in each case by the immediate act of God, whereas other things mostly come into existence by developments and transmutations within the total created order.17 Genesis ii. 7 is no doubt the source for this; but Plato had also set the creation of man apart from creation in general.18
The soul’s turning to God is often treated in the poets as a returning and therefore one more instance of ‘kindly enclyning’. Hence Chaucer’s ‘Repeireth hoom from worldly vanitee’ in Troilus, V, 1837, or Deguileville’s
To Him of verray ryht certeyn
Thou must resorte and tourne ageyn
As by moeving natural.
(Pilgrimage, trans. Lydgate, 12,262 sq.)
Such passages perhaps reflect nothing more than the doctrine of man’s special and immediate creation by God; but it is hard to be sure. The doctrine of pre-existence (in some better world than this) was firmly rejected in the scholastic age. The ‘inconvenience’ of making the Rational Soul begin to exist only when the body begins to exist and also holding that it existed after the body’s death, was palliated by the reminder that death—one of those ‘two things that were never made’19—had no place in the original creation. It is not the soul’s nature to leave the body; rather, the body (disnatured by the Fall) deserts the soul.20 But in the Seminal Period and the earlier Middle Ages the Platonic belief that we had lived before we were incarnate on earth, still hung in the air. Chalcidius had preserved what Plato says about this in Phaedrus 245a. He had also preserved Timaeus 35a and 41d. These very difficult passages may not really imply the pre-existence of the individual soul, but they could easily be thought to do so. Origen held that all those souls which now animate human bodies were created at the same time as the angels and had long existed before their terrestrial birth. Even St Augustine, in a passage quoted by Aquinas,21 entertains, subject to revision, the view that Adam’s soul was already in existence while his body still ‘slept in its causes’. The full Platonic doctrine seems to be implied—with what philosophic seriousness I do not know—by Bernardus Silvestris22 when Noys sees in Heaven countless souls weeping because they will soon have to descend from that splendor into these glooms.
At the Renaissance the recovery of the Platonic corpus and the revival of Platonism re-awoke the doctrine. It is taken with full seriousness by Ficino and, later, by Henry More. Whether Spenser in the Hymne of Beautie (197 sq.) or in the Garden of Adonis (F.Q. III, vi, 33) has more than a poetic half-belief in it, may be doubted. Thomas Browne, not venturing on the doctrine, would gladly retain the flavour of it: ‘though it looks but like an imaginary kind of existency to be before we are’, yet to have pre-existed eternally in the divine foreknowledge ‘is somewhat more than a non-entity’ (Christian Morals). Vaughan’s Retreate and even Wordsworth’s Ode have been diversely interpreted. Only with the late nineteenth century and the Theosophists does pre-existence—now envisaged as the ‘wisdomn of the East’—recover a foothold in Europe.
D. RATIONAL SOUL
We have noticed that the term angels sometimes covers all the aetherial beings and is sometimes restricted to the lowest of their nine species. In the same way the word reason sometimes means Rational Soul, and sometimes means the lower of the two faculties which Rational Soul exercises. These are Intellectus and Ratio.
Intellectus is the higher, so that if we call it ‘understanding’, the Coleridgean distinction which puts ‘reason’ above ‘understanding’ inverts the traditional order. Boethius, it will be remembered, distinguishes intelligentia from ratio; the former being enjoyed in its perfection by angels. Intellectus is that in man which approximates most nearly to angelic intelligentia; it is in fact obumbrata intelligentia, c
louded intelligence, or a shadow of intelligence. Its relation to reason is thus described by Aquinas: ‘intellect (intelligere) is the simple (i.e. indivisible, uncompounded) grasp of an intelligible truth, whereas reasoning (ratiocinari) is the progression towards an intelligible truth by going from one understood (intellecto) point to another. The difference between them is thus like the difference between rest and motion or between possession and acquisition’ (Ia, LXXIX, art. 8). We are enjoying intellectus when we ‘just see’ a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply ‘seen’ would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply ‘seen’ and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man’s mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia which constitute intellectus.
When ratio is used with this precision and distinguished from intellectus, it is, I take it, very much what we mean by ‘reason’ today; that is, as Johnson defines it, ‘The power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences’. But, having so defined it, he gives as his first example, from Hooker, ‘Reason is the director of man’s will, discovering in action what is good’. There would seem to be a startling discrepancy between the example and the definition. No doubt, if A is good for its own sake, we may discover by reasoning that, since B is the means to A, therefore B would be a good thing to do. But by what sort of deduction, and from what sort of premises, could we reach the proposition ‘A is good for its own sake’? This must be accepted from some other source before the reasoning can begin; a source which has been variously identified—with ‘conscience’ (conceived as the Voice of God), with some moral ‘sense’ or ‘taste’, with an emotion (‘a good heart’), with the standards of one’s social group, with the super-ego.
Yet nearly all moralists before the eighteenth century regarded Reason as the organ of morality. The moral conflict was depicted as one between Passion and Reason, not between Passion and ‘conscience’, or ‘duty’, or ‘goodness’. Prospero, in forgiving his enemies, declares that he is siding, not with his charity or mercy, but with ‘his nobler reason’ (Tempest, V, i, 26). The explanation is that nearly all of them believed the fundamental moral maxims were intellectually grasped. If they had been using the strict medieval distinction, they would have made morality an affair not of ratio but of intellectus. This distinction, however, even in the Middle Ages, was used only by philosophers, and did not affect popular or poetic language. On that level Reason means Rational Soul. Moral imperatives therefore were uttered by Reason, though, in the stricter terminology, reasoning about moral questions doubtless received all her premises from Intellect—just as geometry is an affair of Reason, though it depends on axioms which cannot be reached by reasoning.
Johnson, in the passage quoted from his Dictionary, is for once confused. He wrote when the older ethical view was in rapid decline and the meaning of the word reason consequently in rapid change. The eighteenth century witnessed a revolt against the doctrine that moral judgements are wholly, or primarily, or at all, rational. Even Butler in the Sermons (1726) gave the role which had once been Reason’s to ‘Reflection or Conscience’. Others handed the normative function over to a moral ‘sentiment’ or ‘taste’. In Fielding the source of good conduct is good feeling, and the claims of Reason to be that source are ridiculed in the person of Mr Square. Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771) carried this process further. In Wordsworth ‘the heart’ can be favourably contrasted with ‘the head’. In some nineteenth-century fiction one particular system of feelings, the domestic affections, seem not only to inspire but to constitute morality. The linguistic result of this process was to narrow the meaning of the word reason. From meaning (in all but the most philosophical contexts) the whole Rational Soul, both intellectus and ratio, it shrank to meaning merely ‘the power by which man deduces one proposition from another’. This change had begun in Johnson’s time. He inadvertently defines the word in its newer and narrower sense, and immediately illustrates it in that which was older and larger.
The belief that to recognise a duty was to perceive a truth—not because you had a good heart but because you were an intellectual being—had roots in antiquity. Plato preserved the Socratic idea that morality was an affair of knowledge; bad men were bad because they did not know what was good. Aristotle, while attacking this view and giving an important place to upbringing and habituation, still made ‘right reason’ (ὀρθὸς λόγος) essential to good conduct. The Stoics believed in a Natural Law which all rational men, in virtue of their rationality, saw to be binding on them. St Paul has a curious function in this story. His statement in Romans (ii. 14 sq.) that there is a law ‘written in the hearts’ even of Gentiles who do not know ‘the law’, is in full conformity with the Stoic conception, and would for centuries be so understood. Nor, during those centuries, would the word hearts have had merely emotional associations. The Hebrew word which St Paul represents by καρδία would be more nearly translated ‘Mind’; and in Latin, one who is cordatus is not a man of feeling but a man of sense. But later, when fewer people thought in Latin, and the new ethics of feeling were coming into fashion, this Pauline use of hearts may well have seemed to support the novelty.
The importance of all this for our own purpose is that nearly every reference to Reason in the old poets will be in some measure misread if we have in mind only ‘the power by which man deduces one proposition from another’. One of the most moving passages in Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the Romance of the Rose (5813 sq.) is that where Reason, Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess, deigns to plead with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love. This is frigid if Reason were only what Johnson made her. You cannot turn a calculating machine into a goddess. But Raison la bele is ‘no such cold thing’. She is not even Wordsworth’s personified Duty; not even—though this brings us nearer—the personified virtue of Aristotle’s ode, ‘for whose virgin beauty men will die’ (σᾶς πέρι, παρθένε, μορϕᾶς). She is intelligentia obumbrata, the shadow of angelic nature in man. So again in Shakespeare’s Lucrece we need to know fully who the ‘spotted princess’ (719–28) is: Tarquin’s Reason, rightful sovereign of his soul, now maculate. Many references to Reason in Paradise Lost need the same gloss. It is true that we still have in our modern use of ‘reasonable’ a survival of the old sense, for when we complain that a selfish man is unreasonable we do not mean that he is guilty of a non sequitur or an undistributed middle. But it is far too humdrum and jejune to recall much of the old association.
E. SENSITIVE AND VEGETABLE SOUL
The Sensitive Soul has ten Senses or Wits, five of which are ‘outward’ and five ‘inward’. The Outward Senses or Wits are what we call the Five Senses today: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Sometimes the inward five are called simply Wits, and the outward five simply Senses, as in Shakespeare’s
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from loving thee.
(Sonnet CXLI.)
The inward Wits are memory, estimation, imagination, phantasy, and common wit (or common sense). Of these, memory calls for no comment.
Estimation, or (Vis) Aestimativa, covers much of what is now covered by the word instinct. Albertus Magnus, whom I follow throughout this passage, tells us in his De Anima that it is Estimation which enables a cow to pick out her own calf from a crowd of calves or teaches an animal to fly from its natural enemy. Estimation detects the practical, the biological, significance of things, their intentiones (II, iv). Chaucer is referring to it, though not by name, when he says
naturelly a beast desyreth flee
Fro his contrarie if he may it see,
Though he never erst had seyn it with his ye.
(Nun’s Priest’s Tale B, 4469.)
The distinction between Phantasy and Imagination—(vis) phantastica and (vis) imaginativa—is not so simple. Phantasy is the higher of the two; here Coleridge has once more turned the nomenclature upside down. To the best of my knowledge no medieval author mentions either faculty as a characteristic of poets. If they had been given to talking about poets in that way at all—they usually talk only of their language or their learning—I think they would have used invention where we use imagination. According to Albertus, Imagination merely retains what has been perceived, and Phantasy deals with this componendo et dividendo, separating and uniting. I do not understand why boni imaginativi should tend, as he says they do, to be good at mathematics. Can this mean that paper was too precious to be wasted on rough figures and you geometrised, so far as possible, with figures merely held before the mind’s eye? But I doubt it; there was always sand.
This psychological account of Phantasy and Imagination does not, in any case, cover popular usage in the vernacular. Albertus warns us that Phantastica is called cogitativa by the vulgar; that is, they say they are ‘thinking’ about something when in reality they are playing with mental images of it, componendo et dividendo. If he had known English he would probably have been interested to learn that in it an almost opposite fate had overtaken the word imagination (or imaginatyf which, as an ellipsis of vis imaginativa, often means the same thing). For in English Imagination meant, not merely the retention of things perceived, but ‘having in mind’ or ‘thinking about’, or ‘taking into account’ in the largest and loosest sense. Langland’s Ymaginatyf, having explained that he is vis imaginativa, goes on to say