The Soul, Sleep, and Dreams

What is left is to speak about the soul, though how it works and what it is by nature cannot be perceived. That does not keep us from understanding that the soul is immortal: whatever is alive and in motion of itself at all times, and can neither be seen nor touched, must be eternal. But what the soul is, the philosophers have not yet agreed, and perhaps never will agree. Some have said it is blood, some fire, some wind — and from wind it got its Latin name, anima or animus, because in Greek the wind is called anemos. Yet not one of them appears to have said anything at all. [a]

Suppose the soul does seem to be put out when blood pours from a wound, or drained away by the heat of a fever: it does not follow that the soul’s working is to be located in the substance of the blood. It would be as if someone asked what the light we use is, and the answer came back that it is oil, since when the oil is used up the light goes out. Plainly the two are different things, and the one is the food of the other. So the soul appears to be like light: it is not itself the blood, but it is fed by the moisture of the blood, as light is fed by oil.

Those who supposed the soul to be fire used this argument, that when the soul is present the body is warm, and when it leaves the body turns cold. But fire has no perception, and it can be seen, and it burns when you touch it, while the soul perceives, cannot be seen, and does not burn. From which it is clear that the soul is something like God. And those who suppose it to be wind are misled by this, that we seem to live by drawing breath out of the air. Varro gives this definition:

“The soul is air taken in at the mouth, warmed in the lungs, heated in the heart, and spread out into the body.”

These things are perfectly plainly false. I say that the nature of such matters is not so dark that we cannot at least understand what cannot be true. If someone tells me the sky is made of bronze, or of crystal, or, as Empedocles says, of frozen air, must I agree at once simply because I do not know what the sky is made of? Not knowing the one thing, I do know the other. So the soul is not air taken in at the mouth, because the soul comes to be long before any air can be taken in at the mouth. It is not put into the body after birth, as it appears to some philosophers, but immediately after conception, when the divine necessity has formed the child in the womb. It lives inside its mother in such a way that it grows in size, and delights to kick again and again. In short, if the living young inside dies, there must be a miscarriage. The rest of that definition comes to this, that during those nine months we were in the womb we appear to have been dead. So none of these three opinions is true. All the same, we cannot say that the men who held them were wrong to the point of saying nothing at all, for we do live by blood and heat and breath at once. But since the soul exists in the body by the union of all of these, they failed to say what it is in its own proper sense; for as it cannot be seen, so it cannot be put into words.

Next comes another question, and one that cannot be settled: whether the soul and the mind are the same, or whether there is one faculty by which we live and another by which we perceive and tell things apart. There is no shortage of arguments on either side. Those who say the two are one faculty use this argument: we cannot live without perceiving, or perceive without living, and so what cannot be separated cannot be two different things; whatever it is, it has the office of living and the method of perceiving. That is why two Epicurean poets speak of the mind and the soul without distinguishing them. [f]

But those who say the two are different argue this way. That the mind is one thing and the soul another can be understood from this, that the mind may be put out while the soul is unharmed, which is what usually happens in the case of the insane. Also, that the soul is lulled to sleep by death and the mind by sleep — and lulled in such a way that the mind is not only ignorant of what is happening, or of where it is, but is even deceived by looking at things that are not there. How this happens cannot be exactly perceived; why it happens can be. For we cannot rest at all unless the mind is kept occupied by the likenesses of visions. The mind lies hidden, weighed down with sleep, like a fire lulled under ashes raked over it; stir it a little and it blazes up again and, so to speak, wakes. So it is called away by images until the limbs, drenched with sleep, get their strength back. For while perception is awake the body, though it lies motionless, is not at rest, because perception burns in it and flickers like a flame and keeps every limb bound to itself.

But when the mind is shifted away from its work to the contemplation of images, then at last the whole body is dissolved into rest. And the mind is shifted there out of dim thought, when, under the influence of darkness, it has begun to be alone with itself. While it is intent on the things it is turning over, sleep suddenly creeps up, and the thought itself slips, without our noticing, into the nearest appearances; and so the mind begins to see the very things it had set before its eyes. Then it goes further and finds distractions for itself, so as not to interrupt the body’s most healthy rest. For as the mind is drawn off in the day by true sights, so that it does not sleep, so it is drawn off at night by false ones, so that it is not roused. If it perceived no images at all, it would follow necessarily either that it is awake or that it is asleep in unending death.

So the whole arrangement of dreaming was given by God for the sake of sleeping; and indeed it was given to all animals alike, but to man especially in this way, that when God gave the arrangement on account of rest, he kept in his own hands the power of teaching a man what is coming by means of a dream. For the histories often testify that there have been dreams whose fulfillment came at once and was remarkable, and the answers of our prophets have taken the shape of a dream. That is why dreams are not always true, nor always false — as Virgil testified, who supposed there were two gates for dreams to pass through. The false ones are seen for the sake of sleeping; the true ones are sent by God, so that by this disclosure we may learn what good or evil is coming upon us.

A question may be raised about this as well: whether the soul is produced by the father, or rather by the mother, or in fact by both. But here I claim the matter away from doubt. For none of these three opinions is true, because souls are produced neither from both parents nor from either one. A body can be produced from a body, since something is contributed by both; but a soul cannot be produced from souls, because nothing can leave a thing so slight and so far beyond our grasp. So the manner in which souls are produced belongs entirely to God alone. [l]

As Lucretius says:

For nothing can be born from mortals except what is mortal. And a man does not deserve to be called the father of a soul when he has no sense at all of having passed one on or breathed one out of his own — and when, even if he did have a sense of it, he could not take in with his mind at what moment or in what manner it was done.

From this it is evident that souls are not given by parents, but by one and the same God, the Father of all, who alone has the law and the method of their birth, since he alone produces them. The earthly parent’s part is nothing more than to give out the body’s moisture, in which the material of birth lies, with a feeling of pleasure — or to receive it; and there a man’s power comes to a halt, and he has none beyond that. That is exactly why men wish for sons to be born to them: because they do not bring it about themselves. Everything past that point is God’s work: the conception itself, the shaping of the body, the breathing in of life, the safe delivery, and whatever afterward keeps a person alive. It is his gift that we breathe, that we live, that we have our strength.

For besides our owing it to his generosity that we are sound in body, and that he supplies us with food from many different sources, he also gives man wisdom, which no earthly father can possibly give. That is why it often happens that foolish sons are born from wise parents and wise sons from foolish ones — which some people put down to fate and the stars. But this is not the moment to argue about fate. It is enough to say this much: even if the stars did hold together the working of all things, it is still certain that all things are done by God, who both made the stars themselves and set them in order. So the men who take this power away from God and hand it over to his handiwork have no sense at all.

He willed it, then, to be in our own power whether we use this divine and excellent gift of God or do not use it. For having granted it, he bound man himself by the sworn oath of virtue, by which he might be able to win life. For great is the power of man, great his reason, great the hidden purpose in him; and anyone who does not abandon it, and does not betray his loyalty and his devotion, must be happy — must, in short, to sum the matter up in a few words, of necessity come to resemble God. For anyone who measures a man by his flesh is in error. This poor little body we are dressed in is the container of the man. The man himself can neither be touched nor looked at nor taken hold of, because he lies hidden inside this body, which is what is seen. And if in this life he is more indulgent and more delicate than his nature demands, if he despises virtue and gives himself to chasing the cravings of the flesh, he will fall and be pressed down to the earth. But if, as his duty is, he readily and steadily holds the standing that is right for him and that he was rightly allotted — if he refuses to be enslaved to the earth, which he ought to trample on and master — he will win eternal life.

These things I have written to you, Demetrianus, for the present in a few words, and perhaps more obscurely than I should have, as the pressure of circumstances and of the time required. You ought to be content with them, since you are going to receive more and better, if God favors us. Then I will urge you, with more clearness and more truth, toward learning true philosophy. For I have determined to commit to writing as much as I am able that bears on what makes a life happy — and to write it against the philosophers, since they are dangerous men and carry great weight for the unsettling of the truth. The force of their eloquence is past belief, and their subtlety in argument and debate may easily take anyone in. These men we will refute partly with our own weapons and partly with weapons borrowed from their wrangling with one another, so that it may be evident that they brought error in rather than cleared it away. [r]

Perhaps you will wonder that I dare to take on so great a task. Are we then to let the truth be put out or crushed? For my part, I would more willingly go down even under this load. For if Marcus Tullius, that unmatched example of eloquence itself, was often beaten by men with no learning and no eloquence — men who were nevertheless striving for what was true — why should we despair that truth itself, by its own particular force and clearness, will hold out against a deceitful and quibbling eloquence? They are in the habit of professing themselves the advocates of truth; but who can defend what he has never learned, or make clear to others what he does not know himself? I seem to be promising a great thing; but there is need of heaven’s favor, that the ability and the time may be given us for following out our purpose.

But if life is to be wished for by a wise man, I should certainly wish to live for no other reason than to bring off something worthy of life and useful to my readers — if not for eloquence, since there is only a slight stream of eloquence in me, then at least for living, which is what is especially needed. And when I have accomplished that, I will think that I have lived long enough, and that I have discharged the duty of a man, if my work has freed some people from their errors and set them on the road that leads to heaven.