The Child in the Womb

First of all, I cannot allow that the soul is capable of losing its memory, because Plato has granted it so large a share of divine quality that he sets it on a level with God. He makes it unborn — and that one attribute by itself I might bring forward as proof enough of its perfect divinity. Then he adds that the soul is deathless, incorruptible, and bodiless (since he held God to be the same), invisible, beyond drawing, uniform, supreme, rational, and intelligent. What more could he have given the soul, if he had wanted to call it God? [a]

We, however, hang nothing onto God as his equal, and by that very fact we reckon the soul far below him. We hold that it is born, and that it therefore has something of a diluted divinity and a thinned-out happiness — God’s breath, though not his Spirit. It is deathless, since that belongs to divinity; but for all that it can be acted on, since that goes with having been born, and so from the first it can run off the track of what is perfect and right, and consequently can fail in memory. I have argued this point at sufficient length with Hermogenes.

But there is more to notice. If the soul is to deserve being counted a god, on the ground that all its qualities are equal to God’s, then it must be subject to no passion, and therefore to no loss of memory. Forgetting does as much damage to whatever you say it of as memory does it honor — and memory is the very thing Plato himself calls the safeguard of the senses and the intellect, and Cicero has called the treasury of all the sciences. We need not even raise the question whether a faculty as divine as the soul could lose its memory. The question is rather whether it can get back afresh what it has lost. I could not decide whether a thing that ought to have lost its memory, once the loss had happened, would still have power enough to recollect itself. Either answer will suit my account of the soul well enough. Neither suits Plato’s.

My second objection to him runs like this. Plato, do you give the soul a natural competence to understand those famous ideas of yours? Your answer will be: “Certainly I do.” Well then, no one will grant you that a knowledge of the natural sciences, a knowledge you say nature gave, can fail. And yet the knowledge of the sciences does fail. The knowledge of the various fields of learning and of the arts of life fails. And so perhaps does the knowledge of the faculties and feelings of our minds, which look as though they belonged to our nature and really do not — because, as I have already said, they are affected by accidents of place, of manners and customs, of bodily condition, of a person’s health, by the influence of the powers above, and by the turns of a person’s free will.

Now the instinctive knowledge of natural things never fails, not even in animals. The lion, no doubt, will forget his ferocity if he is hemmed in by the softening influence of training; with his beautiful mane he may become the plaything of some Queen Berenice and lick her cheeks with his tongue. A wild animal may lay his habits aside, but his instincts he will not forget. He will not forget his proper food, nor his natural remedies, nor his natural fears. If the queen offers him fish or cakes, he will want meat; if some antidote is prepared for him when he is sick, he will still want the ape; and if no hunting spear is held out against him, he will still dread the crowing of the cock.

It is the same with man, who is perhaps the most forgetful creature there is. The knowledge of everything natural to him stays fixed in him and cannot be rooted out — but that alone, since that alone is instinct. He will never forget to eat when he is hungry, or to drink when he is thirsty, or to use his eyes when he wants to see, or his ears to hear, or his nose to smell, or his mouth to taste, or his hand to touch. These, to be sure, are the senses, which philosophy runs down out of preference for the intellect. But if the natural knowledge that belongs to the senses lasts, how does it come about that the knowledge belonging to the intellect fails — the very thing the superiority is given to?

And where does that power of forgetting itself come from, the forgetting that has to come before recollection? “From a long lapse of time.” But that is a shortsighted answer. Length of time cannot happen to a thing that on his own account is unborn, and that must therefore be reckoned most certainly eternal. Whatever is eternal on the ground of being unborn admits neither a beginning nor an end of time, and so no measure of time applies to it. What time does not measure undergoes no change from time, and a long lapse of time has no influence over it at all.

If time is the cause of forgetting, why is it from the soul’s entrance into the body that memory fails, as if only from then on the soul were subject to time? For the soul, being undoubtedly older than the body, was certainly not outside of time before. Does the forgetting take place immediately on the soul’s entrance into the body, or some while afterwards? If immediately, where is the long lapse of time, which on that showing is not yet available? Take the case of an infant. If some while afterwards, then during the interval before the moment of forgetting the soul will still have been exercising its memory. And how does it come about that the soul afterwards forgets, and then afterwards remembers again? How long, too, must we suppose the lapse of time to have been during which the forgetting weighed the soul down? The whole course of one lifetime, I take it, will not be enough to blot out the memory of an age that lasted so long before the soul took up the body.

But then Plato throws the blame on the body — as if it were at all believable that a born substance could put out the power of one that is unborn. Bodies, however, differ from one another in a great many ways: in rationality, in bulk, in condition, in age, in health. Are we then to suppose that forgetfulness comes in similar varieties? But forgetfulness is uniform and identical. So bodily peculiarity, with all its many varieties, will not turn out to be the cause of an effect that never varies.

There are also, on Plato’s own testimony, many proofs that the soul has a power of divination, as I have already argued against Hermogenes. And there is not a man alive who has not felt his own soul seized with a presentiment and a foreboding of some omen, some danger, or some joy. Now if the body is no obstacle to divination, I suppose it will not be a hindrance to memory either. One thing is certain: souls in the same body both forget and remember. If some bodily condition breeds forgetfulness, how will it let in the opposite state of recollection? For recollection after forgetting is nothing less than the resurrection of the memory. How should the very thing that is hostile to memory at the first stage not damage it at the second as well?

Finally — who has a better memory than small children, with their fresh, unworn souls, not yet sunk in household and public cares, and given over only to studies whose acquiring is itself a remembering? Indeed, why do we not all recollect equally, since we are all equally forgetful? But this holds only of philosophers, we are told. And not even of all of them. Among so many nations, in so great a crowd of wise men, Plato is apparently the only man who has put together the forgetting and the recollecting of ideas.

Since this main argument of his does not keep its ground, the whole structure raised on it must come down with it: that souls are unborn, that they live in the heavenly regions and are taught the divine mysteries there, that they come down to this earth, and that here they call to mind their earlier existence — all of it, of course, so as to supply our heretics with the fitting materials for their systems.

I shall now go back to the point this digression started from, so that I can explain how all souls are derived from one, and when and where and in what way they are produced. On this subject it makes no difference whether the question is raised by the philosopher, by the heretic, or by the crowd. Those who profess the truth care nothing about their opponents — least of all about the ones who begin by maintaining that the soul is not conceived in the womb, and is not formed and produced at the time the flesh is molded, but is stamped on the infant from outside, after the birth is over and before he is fully alive. [j]

Their account is this. The human seed, once deposited in the womb in intercourse and quickened by a natural impulse, thickens into nothing but the substance of flesh. In due time that flesh is born, warm from the furnace of the womb, and is then let out of its heat. It is like a piece of hot iron plunged at that moment into cold water: struck by the cold air it is born into, it receives on the instant the power of animation and lets out a cry. This is the view the Stoics hold, and Aenesidemus with them, and now and then Plato himself, when he tells us that the soul is quite a separate formation, originating elsewhere and outside the womb, and is led in when the newborn infant first draws breath, and by and by led out again with a man’s last breath. Whether that view of his is anything but a fiction, we shall see.

Even the medical profession has not lacked its Hicesius, a man who turned traitor to nature and to his own calling. These gentlemen, I suppose, were too modest to come to terms with women about the mysteries of childbirth, which the women know so well. But they have far more to blush at, when in the end they have the women refuting them instead of commending them. In a question like this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness as the sex that is itself concerned in it.

Give us your testimony, then, you mothers — whether still pregnant or already delivered; let barren women and men keep silence. The truth of your own nature is in question; the reality of your own suffering is the point to be settled. Do you feel in the child within you any life of its own, not your own — a life that makes your insides tremble, your sides shake, your whole womb throb, and the weight that presses on you shift its position all the time? Are those movements a joy to you, and a real lifting of anxiety, because they make you sure your infant is alive and enjoying his life? Or if his restlessness stops, is not your first fear for him? And he is aware of it inside you, since he is disturbed at the strange sound; and you would crave foolish foods, or else turn against your food, all on his account; and then the two of you, so closely bound together, would share your ailments — so far that your knocks and bruises would actually mark him, inside you and on the very same parts of the body, as he peremptorily snatches to himself his mother’s injuries.

Now wherever a livid color and a flush belong to the blood, the blood will not be without the vital principle, the soul. And when disease attacks the soul, that is itself proof that the soul is really there, since there is no disease where there is no soul, no principle of life. Again, since taking food and going without it, growth and decay, fear and motion are all conditions of the soul, whoever experiences them must be alive. And in the end he stops living when he stops experiencing them. And so, by and by, infants are stillborn. But how could that be, unless they had had life? For how could anyone die who had not first lived?

Sometimes, though, a cruel necessity requires that an infant still in the womb be put to death: when he lies crosswise at the mouth of the womb and blocks the birth, and kills his mother if he is not himself to die. Accordingly there is among surgeons’ tools an instrument made with a nicely adjusted flexible frame, for opening the womb first of all and keeping it open. It is further fitted with a ring-shaped blade, by which the limbs inside the womb are cut apart with anxious but unfaltering care; and its last attachment is a blunted or covered hook, by which the whole fetus is dragged out in a violent delivery. There is also a copper needle or spike, by which the actual killing is carried through in this furtive robbery of life. From what it does to the infant they give it the name embryosphaktēs, the slayer of the infant — who was, of course, alive.

Such equipment was owned by Hippocrates, and by Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus, that dissector even of grown men, and by the gentler Soranus himself. Every one of them knew perfectly well that a living being had been conceived, and they pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death so as to escape being tortured alive. Of the necessity of such harsh treatment I have no doubt even Hicesius was convinced — although he imported the soul into infants after birth out of the stroke of the frosty air, on the ground, if you please, that the very Greek word for soul answers to such a cooling.

Well then, have the barbarian nations and the Romans received their souls by some other process, I wonder, seeing that they have called the soul by another name than psychē? How many nations are there who begin life under the broiling sun of the torrid zone, scorching their skin into its dark color? Where do they get their souls, with no frosty air to help them? I say nothing of the well-warmed bedrooms and all that apparatus of heat which women in childbirth need so badly, when a breath of cold air might put their lives in danger. Why, in the bath itself a baby will all but slip into life, and his cry is heard at once. But if a good frosty air is a treasure the soul cannot do without, then beyond the German and Scythian tribes, and on the heights of the Alps and of Mount Argaeus, nobody ought ever to be born. The fact, however, is that population is greater within the temperate regions of the East and the West, and men’s minds are sharper there, while there is not a Sarmatian whose wits are not dull and humdrum. Men’s minds would also grow keener by reason of the cold, if their souls came into being amid nipping frosts — for as the substance is, so must its active power be.

After these preliminary statements we may also bring up the case of those who, having been cut out of their mother’s womb, have breathed and kept their lives — your Bacchuses and your Scipios. If, however, there is anyone who holds with Plato that two souls can no more exist in the same person than two bodies could, I could show him not merely two souls existing in one person, and two bodies in the same womb as well, but a good many other things besides joined to the soul in a natural connection — possession by a demon, for instance, and that not by one only, as in the case of Socrates’ own demon, but by seven spirits, as in the case of the Magdalene, and by a legion of them, as in the Gadarene. Now one soul is naturally more capable of being joined to another soul, since they are of the same substance, than an evil spirit is, whose nature is different.

But when the same philosopher, in the sixth book of the Laws, warns us to take care that a corruption of the seed does not pour a stain into both body and soul out of an unlawful or degraded intercourse, I hardly know whether he is more at odds with himself over one of his earlier statements or over the one he has just made. For here he shows us that the soul comes from human seed, and warns us to be on our guard about it — and not, as he had said before, from the first breath of the newborn child. Then how does it come about that from likeness of soul we resemble our parents in disposition, as Cleanthes testifies, if we are not produced from this seed of the soul? And why did the old astrologers cast a man’s nativity from his first conception, if his soul too does not draw its origin from that moment? To that nativity belongs the inbreathing of the soul as well, whatever that may be.