The Stoics and Socrates :: essays research papers

The Stoics and SocratesThe question of the domain of the soul and its distinction from the body isamong the well-nigh important problems of philosophy, for with it is bound up thedoctrine of a future biography. The soul may be define as the ultimate internalprinciple by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies atomic number 18animated. The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activitiesas well. If there is life after death, the element of our vital activities mustbe capable of an being separate from the body. The belief in an activeprinciple in few sense distinct from the body is inference from the observedfacts of life. The lowest savages incur at the concept of the soul almostwithout reflection, certainly without any tremendous mental effort. The mysteriesof birth and death, the lapse of conscious life during sleep, even the mostcommon operations of imagination and memory, which abstract a man from his embodied presence even while awake all such facts argue the existence ofsomething besides the visible organism. An existence not entirely delineate by thematerial and to a large extent independent of it, jumper lead a life of its own. Inthe psychology of the savage, the soul is often be as actuallymigrating to and fro during dreams and trances, and after death haunting theneighborhood of its body. close always it is figured as something extremelyvolatile, a perfume or a breath.In Greece, the heartland of our ancient philosophers, the first essays ofphilosophy took a imperative and somewhat materialistic direction, inherited fromthe pre-philosophic age, from Homer and the early Greek religion. In Homer,while the distinction of soul and body is recognized, the soul is hardlyconceived as possessing a substantial existence of its own. Severed from thebody, it is a mere shadow, incompetent of energetic life. Other philosophe rsdescribed the souls nature in terms of substance. Anaximander gives it an aired constitution, Heraclitus describes it as a fire. The fundamentalthought is the same. The soul is the nourishing agent which imparts heat, life,sense, and intelligence to all things in their several degrees and kinds. ThePythagoreans taught that the soul is a harmony, its fragrance consisting in thoseperfect mathematical ratios which are the law of the universe and the medical specialty ofthe heavenly spheres. All these early theories were cosmological rather thanpsychological in character. Theology, physics, and mental science were not asyet distinguished.In the "Timaeus" (p.