Tusculan Disputations 1 ¶69 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 1 ¶69

But what I have said as to the heart, the blood, the brain, air, or fire being the soul, are common opinions. The others are only entertained by individuals, and, indeed, there were many among the ancients who held singular opinions on this subject, of whom the latest was Aristoxenus, a man who was both a musician and a philosopher. He maintained a certain straining of the body, like what is called harmony in music, to be the soul, and believed that, from the figure and nature of the whole body, various motions are excited, as sounds are from an instrument. He adhered steadily to his system, and yet he said something, the nature of which, whatever it was, had been detailed and explained a great while before by Plato. Xenocrates denied that the soul had any figure, or anything like a body, but said it was a number, the power of which, as Pythagoras had fancied some ages before, was the greatest in nature. His master, Plato, imagined a threefold soul, a dominant portion of which—that is to say, reason—he had lodged in the head, as in a tower; and the other two parts—namely, anger and desire—he made subservient to this one, and allotted them distinct abodes, placing anger in the breast, and desire under the praecordia. But Dicaearchus, in that discourse of some learned disputants, held at Corinth, which he details to us in three books—in the first book introduces many speakers, and in the other two he introduces a certain Pherecrates, an old man of Phthia, who, as he said, was descended from Deucalion, asserting that there is in fact no such thing at all as a soul, but that it is a name without a meaning, and that it is idle to use the expression “animals,” or “animated beings;” that neither men nor beasts have minds or souls, but that all that power by which we act or perceive is equally infused into every living creature, and is inseparable from the body, for if it were not, it would be nothing; nor is there anything whatever really existing except body, which is a single and simple thing, so fashioned as to live and have its sensations in consequence of the regulations of nature. Aristotle, a man superior to all others both in genius and industry (I always except Plato), after having embraced these four known sorts of principles from which all things deduce their origin, imagines that there is a certain fifth nature from whence comes the soul: for to think, to foresee, to learn, to teach, to invent anything, and many other attributes of the same kind, such as to remember, to love, to hate, to desire, to fear, to be pleased or displeased—these, and others like them, exist, he thinks, in none of those first four kinds; on such account he adds a fifth kind, which has no name, and so by a new name he calls the soul ἐνδελέχεια, as if it were a certain continued and perpetual motion.