Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON THE MIND. [1] Accordingly, when we speak of “animus” or “mind” — which among the Greeks is nous — we mean nothing other than a faculty of the soul, inborn, implanted, and native to it, by which it acts, by which it thinks, which it carries with itself and by which, out of itself, it moves itself within itself — so that it seems to be moved by that faculty as by a separate substance, in the way those hold who make “mind” the mover of the universe itself: that god of Socrates, that Only-Begotten of Valentinus sprung from father Depth and mother Silence. [2] How muddled is Anaxagoras’s theory here! For after devising Mind as the origin of all things and hanging the whole spinning universe from its axle, and asserting it to be pure and simple and unmixable — by this very title above all he separates it from any commingling with soul — and yet elsewhere he flatly declares that same Mind to be soul. [3] Aristotle too marked this failing — though I do not know whether he is readier to fill out his own theories than to empty other men’s. In the end, even as he was hedging his own definition of mind, he meanwhile pronounced a second kind of mind, the divine kind, which, in turn hinting that it is impassible, he thereby took away from any partnership with soul. For since it is agreed that soul is subject to whatever it has been allotted to suffer, either it will suffer through mind and along with mind, if it is fused with mind — in which case mind cannot be represented as impassible — or, if soul suffers neither through mind nor with mind, then it is not fused with mind, since with mind it suffers nothing and for mind it is nothing. Further, if soul suffers nothing through mind and with it, then it will not even perceive nor think nor be moved through mind, as they would have it. [4] For Aristotle himself makes sensations passions. And why not? For to perceive is to suffer, since to suffer is to perceive. So too, to think is to perceive, and to be moved is to perceive. Thus every part of it amounts to suffering. Yet we observe that none of this happens to the soul without being credited to mind as well, since it passes through mind and along with mind. [5] So then mind is, against Anaxagoras, commixable, and, against Aristotle, subject to suffering. But if a distinction is granted, so that mind and soul are two things by substance, then to the one will belong all suffering and sensation and thought and act and motion, and to the other, idleness and rest and stupor and no function left at all — and either mind will stand empty or soul will. [6] But if it is agreed that all these things are to be reckoned to both, then the two will be one, and Democritus will carry the point, abolishing the distinction — and it will be asked how the two are one: out of the confusion of two substances, or out of the disposition of a single one. We, for our part, say that mind is thus fused with soul, not as another substance, but as the office of that one substance.