THREE:"Well, one hears some queer things," the novelist said at length. "I've been fascinated with that corner house for years. As I told you before, I built up a romance round it. Some day I mean to take the papers out of my pigeonhole and work it up."
THREE:If there are any who value Aristotle as a champion of spiritualism, they must take him with his encumbrances. If his philosophy proves that one part of the soul is immaterial, it proves equally that the soul, taking it altogether, is perishable. Not only does he reject Platos metempsychosis as inconsistent with physiology, but he declares that affection, memory, and reasoning are functions not of the eternal Nous, but of the whole man, and come to an end with his dissolution. As to the active Nous, he tells us that it cannot think without the assistance of the passive Nous, which is mortal. And there are various passages in the Nicomachean Ethics showing that he had faced this negation of a future life, and was perfectly resigned to its consequences.272 At one period of his life, probably when under the immediate influence of Plato, he had indulged375 in dreams of immortality; but a profounder acquaintance with natural science sufficed to dissipate them. Perhaps a lingering veneration for his teacher made him purposely use ambiguous language in reference to the eternity of that creative reason which he had so closely associated with self-consciousness. It may remind us of Spinozas celebrated proposition, Sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse, words absolutely disconnected with the hope of a continued existence of the individual after death, but apparently intended to enlist some of the sentiment associated with that belief on the side of the writers own philosophy.
THREE:
