For it is far from being an immediate truth
that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
you please.
And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is
simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of
parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A,
B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and
C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the
soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is
divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a
perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed
among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be
conceived.
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