Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The soul, moreover, is singular and simple and wholly its own; it is no more built up from outside elements than it is divisible out of itself, because it cannot be dissolved. For if it were built up and dissolvable, it would no longer be immortal. Therefore, since it is not mortal, it is neither dissolvable nor divisible. For to be divided is to be dissolved, and to be dissolved is to die. [2] Yet it is divided into parts — now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five by Aristotle and into six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight in Chrysippus, even into nine in Apollophanes, and even into twelve according to some of the Stoics, and into more than two according to Posidonius, who, starting from two headings — the governing part, which they call the hegemonikon, and the rational part, which they call the logikon — then cut it into seventeen further; and so one school after another divides the soul into ever more species. [3] But things of this sort should be reckoned not so much parts of the soul as its powers, capacities, and functions, as Aristotle himself judged of some of them. For these are not limbs of the animate substance but faculties — the motive, the active, the cogitative, and whatever else is distinguished in this manner, just as those five well-known senses themselves — sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. And though for all of these fixed dwellings in the body have been assigned individually, that distribution nonetheless does not amount to a sectioning of the soul, since not even the body itself is divided into limbs the way these men would have the soul divided. [4] And yet it is out of a multitude of limbs that one body is made, so that the very division is, rather, a fusing-together. Consider the most astonishing generosity of Archimedes’s device — I mean the water-organ: so many parts, so many pieces, so many joints, so many channels for the voices, so many shortcuts for the sounds, so many minglings of the modes, so many ranks of pipes — and it is all one single mass. So too the breath which pants there out of the water-driven mechanism is not thereby separated into parts merely because it is administered part by part; it is solid in substance, though distributed in operation. [5] This example is not far from the view of Strato and Aenesidemus and Heraclitus; for they too maintain the unity of the soul, which, diffused through the whole body and itself everywhere present, flashes out through the organs of sense in various ways — as breath through the holes of a reed-pipe — not so much cut apart as dispensed. Under what names all these things are to be called, and by what divisions of their own they are to be held apart, and into what regions of the body they are to be assigned — physicians, together with the philosophers, may work that out better than we; a few points will suffice for us.