MIND AND SOUL soul This opinion, which he attributes to Averroes and Themistius, is, he tells us, ‘widely held in our time and by almost all is conWdently taken to be that of Aristotle’ In fact, he says, it is false, unintelligible, monstrous, and quite foreign to Aristotle To show that the opinion is false, Pomponazzi refers the reader to arguments used by St Thomas Aquinas in his De Unitate Intellectus To show that it is un-Aristotelian he appeals to the teaching of the De Anima that, in order to operate, the intellect always needs a phantasm, which is something material Our intellectual soul is an act of a physical and organic body There may be types of intelligence that not need an organ to operate, but the human intellect is not one of them A body, however, can function as a subject or object Our senses need bodies in both ways: their organs are bodily and their objects are bodily The intellect, however, does not need a body as subject, and it can perform operations (such as reXecting upon itself) which no bodily organ can do: the mind can think of itself, while the eye cannot see itself But this does not mean that the intellect can operate entirely independently from the body Aquinas is again invoked in order to refute another opinion, the Platonic view that while every human has an individual immortal soul, this soul is related to his body only as mover to moved—like an ox to a plough, say Like Aquinas, Pomponazzi appeals to experience: I who am writing these words am beset with many bodily pains, which are the function of the sensitive soul; and the same I who am tortured run over their medical causes in order to remove these pains, which cannot be done save by the intellect But if the essence by which I feel were diVerent from that by which I think, how could it possibly be that I who feel am the same as I who think? (c 6, p 29814) We must conclude that the intellectual soul and the sensitive soul are one and the same in man In this, Pomponazzi is in agreement with St Thomas: but at this point he parts company with him Thomas, he said, believed that this single soul was properly immortal, and only mortal in a manner of speaking (secundum quid) But he, Pomponazzi, will now set out to show that the soul is properly 14 In E Cassirer et al (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) 249