Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Let them summon some Eubulus, and Critolaus, and Xenocrates, and — since we're in the neighborhood — Aristotle, Plato's friend. Perhaps they'll be more forcefully driven to strip the soul of its bodily substance, if they take a look at the other side too — and there are plenty on that side claiming the soul for a body. [2] And I don't mean only those who fashion it out of some obvious material thing, the way Hipparchus and Heraclitus make it out of fire, Hippo and Thales out of water, Empedocles and Critias out of blood, Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms even can compress into a body by their own collision), Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance or other (which is a body too, if it takes up room like one) — I bring in the Stoics as well, who, in proclaiming the soul a breath — nearly agreeing with us, since breath and spirit are next-door neighbors to each other — will nonetheless have no trouble persuading you that the soul is a body. [3] Zeno, in fact, defines the soul as 'implanted breath,' and builds the case this way: 'That whose departure causes an animal to die is a body; but the departure of implanted breath causes an animal to die; therefore implanted breath is a body; therefore the soul is a body.' [4] Cleanthes wants it that not only the features of the body but also the marks of the soul reproduce in children the likeness of their parents — the mirror, of course, of character, temperament, and feeling — and that likeness and unlikeness are properties a body can take on; the soul, then, being subject to likeness or unlikeness, is a body. [5] Again: bodily and incorporeal things, they say, don't share sensations with each other; but in fact the soul suffers along with the body — when the body is hurt by blows, wounds, sores, the soul aches right along with it — and the body suffers along with the soul, sickening through the loss of its partner's vigor when the soul is afflicted by worry, anguish, love, and betraying that soul's shame or fear by blushing or going pale. Therefore the soul is a body, on the evidence of this shared traffic in bodily suffering. [6] And Chrysippus lends a hand too, laying it down that bodily things simply cannot be abandoned by incorporeal things, since incorporeal things cannot even make contact with them (hence Lucretius: 'nothing but a body can touch or be touched') — whereas when the body is abandoned by the soul, it is affected by death. Therefore the soul is a body, since nothing but a body could abandon a body.