The Soul is all things

[Siddhartha]

Such a being is the soul, which, as is said in [Aristotle’s] The Soul, “in some way is all things.”

– Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate I

 

[4Horsemen]

The soul has been referred to as the"principle of life." It can be understood as the “breath of life;” breathing determines its likelihood of existence. Because of the soul, we live, perceive, and think as living substances. The soul is a substantial form, not accidental according to the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas. When a person comes into being (existence), a new substance comes to be, and when he dies, the substance is no more. The soul is the susbstantial form of the living thing, and our knowledge of it comes due to the analysis of change.

 

[chaunceygardner]

Such a being is the soul, which, as is said in [Aristotle’s] The Soul, “in some way is all things.”

– Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate I

Yes; If the soul is the essence of God within us, and God encompasses the entire universe (universes?) and all that is contained within, then the soul is “in some way all things”.

*“That day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.” *- John 14

 

[Katholish]

Whoa… hold on there. This quote absolutely must be put into context so that you can understand what Aristotle (and Thomas as he is quoting him) is saying. The intellect is a faculty proper to the soul, and when we know something, that form of that something exists in our intellect. It doesn’t have a seperate existance (hence when I think of a horse, there is not an actual horse in my mind), but the idea shares the soul’s existence (the form is an accidental form with the soul-which itself is a substantial form). Because the intellect can potentially know all things, there is a sense in which the soul has the potential to have the accidental form of “all things” (or more precisely, “anything”).

This saying of Aristotle and Thomas in no way supports pantheism (which sounds like the argument of the original poster) nor does it suggest that the soul is the “essence of God in us” which both men would reject in the strongest of terms.

P.S. I am not familiar with the source that this was apparently quoted from “de veritate” but I have read it else where in the Aristotelean/Thomistic corpus with an explanation of what was meant, so I do remember the context.

 

[chaunceygardner]

Whoa… hold on there. This quote absolutely must be put into context so that you can understand what Aristotle (and Thomas as he is quoting him) is saying. The intellect is a faculty proper to the soul, and when we know something, that form of that something exists in our intellect. It doesn’t have a seperate existance (hence when I think of a horse, there is not an actual horse in my mind), but the idea shares the soul’s existence (the form is an accidental form with the soul-which itself is a substantial form). Because the intellect can potentially know all things, there is a sense in which the soul has the potential to have the accidental form of “all things” (or more precisely, “anything”).

This saying of Aristotle and Thomas in no way supports pantheism (which sounds like the argument of the original poster) nor does it suggest that the soul is the “essence of God in us” which both men would reject in the strongest of terms.

P.S. I am not familiar with the source that this was apparently quoted from “de veritate” but I have read it else where in the Aristotelean/Thomistic corpus with an explanation of what was meant, so I do remember the context.

I wasn’t trying to explain the meaning of the OP’s statement and quote, nor connect what I said to the beliefs of Aristotle or Aquinas. Rather I was giving my personal point of view of our souls and my own thumbnail interpretation of how the soul relates to God, and therefore to the entirety of creation.

I will readily admit that it may not agree with the views of either of these learned gentlemen.

 

[masterjedi747]

Whoa… hold on there.

Because the intellect can potentially know all things, there is a sense in which the soul has the potential to have the accidental form of “all things” (or more precisely, “anything”).

This saying of Aristotle and Thomas in no way supports pantheism (which sounds like the argument of the original poster) nor does it suggest that the soul is the “essence of God in us” which both men would reject in the strongest of terms.

…that’s the correct answer, folks. Context, context, context.

 

[Siddhartha]

Whoa… hold on there. This quote absolutely must be put into context so that you can understand what Aristotle (and Thomas as he is quoting him) is saying. The intellect is a faculty proper to the soul, and when we know something, that form of that something exists in our intellect. It doesn’t have a seperate existance (hence when I think of a horse, there is not an actual horse in my mind), but the idea shares the soul’s existence (the form is an accidental form with the soul-which itself is a substantial form). Because the intellect can potentially know all things, there is a sense in which the soul has the potential to have the accidental form of “all things” (or more precisely, “anything”).

This saying of Aristotle and Thomas in no way supports pantheism (which sounds like the argument of the original poster)…

The larger context is from a blog in which the author compares Zen subject-object non-dual language, with similar language from St. Thomas Aquinas. Non-dualism, of course, has nothing to do with pantheism.

First, Uwe’s [Zen-inspired] mention of “I and the object becoming one” reminded me that the union of the subject and object is a fundamental tenet of Thomistotelian epistemology (TE). As St. Thomas notes in De Veritate, citing Aristotle’s De Anima III, 8, the soul is in some sense all things (Lat., hoc autem est anima, quae quodammodo est omnia; Gk., εἴπωμεν πάλιν ὅτι ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα·).[2] In TE, there is a genuine union of the percept and the perceiving organ. For instance, light is the proper object (or, perceptual mode-of-being) for the eye. Sound is the proper perceptual mode-of-being for the ear. Molar texture is the proper object of the skin. And so forth. The union of object and subject, percept and perceiver, is the act of sensible cognition. As St. Thomas says in De Veritate (cited below in note [1]),

“True” expresses the correspondence of being to the knowing power, for all knowing is produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge.