The next faculty is memory. This is the same as imagination, except that there is combined with the image a recognition of it as a copy of a past sense-impression. Recollection, again, is higher than memory. Memory images drift purposelessly through the mind. Recollection is the deliberate evoking of memory-images. From recollection we pass to the specifically human faculty of reason. But reason itself has two grades. The lower is called passive reason, the higher active reason. The mind has the power of thought before it actually thinks. This latent capacity is passive reason. The mind is here like a smooth piece of wax which has the power to receive writing, but has not received it. The positive activity of thought itself is active reason. The comparison with wax must not mislead us into supposing that the soul only receives its impressions from sensation. It is pure thought which writes upon the wax. Now the sum of the faculties in general we call the soul. And the soul, we saw, is simply the organization {301} or form, of the body. As form is inseparable from matter, the soul cannot exist without the body. It is the function of the body. It is to the body what sight is to the eye. And in the same sense Aristotle denies the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato that the soul reincarnates itself in new bodies, particularly in the bodies of animals. What is the function of one thing cannot become the function of another. Exactly what the soul is to the body the music of the flute is to the flute itself. It is the form of which the flute is the matter. It is, to speak metaphorically, the soul of the flute. And you might as well talk, says Aristotle, of the art of flute-playing becoming reincarnate in the blacksmith's anvil, as of the soul passing into another body. This would seem also to preclude any doctrine of immortality. For the function perishes with the thing. We shall return to that point in a moment. But we may note, meanwhile, that Aristotle's theory of the soul is not only a great advance upon Plato's, but is a great advance upon popular thinking of the present day. The ordinary view of the soul, which was Plato's view, is that the soul is a sort of thing. No doubt it is non-material and supersensuous. But still it is a thing; it can be put into a body and taken out of it, as wine can be put into or taken out of a bottle. The connection between body and soul is thus purely mechanical. They are attached to each other by no necessary bond, but rather by force. They have, in their own natures, no connexion with each other, and it is difficult to see why the soul ever entered a body, if it is in its nature something quite separate. But Aristotle's view is that the soul, as form of the body, is not separable from it. You cannot have {302} a soul without a body. The connection between them is not mechanical, but organic. The soul is not a thing which comes into the body and goes out of it. It is not a thing at all. It is a function.