19. [Concluding Accounts]
To this I will add the following account of a memorable occurrence. After the above material was written, I prayed to the Lord to be allowed to talk with some disciples of Aristotle, and at the same time with some disciples of Descartes and of Leibniz, so that I could learn their opinions on the interaction between the soul and the body. After my prayer, nine men were present: three Aristotelians, three Cartesians, and three Leibnizians. They stood around me: the ones who revered Aristotle on my left, the adherents of Descartes on my right, and the supporters of Leibniz behind them. Far off at a distance from us and from each other I saw three men who looked as though they were wearing laurel wreaths, and by an inflowing perception realized that they were the eminent philosophers, the founders themselves. Someone was standing behind Leibniz holding the hem of his garment, and I was told that it was Wolff.
When the nine men noticed each other they started by greeting and addressing each other politely. [2] Before long, though, a spirit came up from the nether regions with a torch in his right hand and waved it in front of their faces. At this the sets of three became hostile and glared at each other, overtaken by an urge to argue and debate.
The Aristotelians (who were also Scholastics) went first. They said, “Can’t everyone see that objects flow into the soul through the senses the way people come into a house through its doors, and that the soul has thoughts in response to this inflow? When a young man in love sees his beautiful young bride, is there not a gleam in his eye that carries love for her to his soul? When misers see purses full of coins, surely their senses all catch fire for them, and from their senses they bring this desire into their souls, provoking a craving to take possession of those treasures for themselves. When vain people hear someone paying them compliments, don’t their ears prick up and carry the compliments to their souls? Surely the senses serve as entryways that offer our only access to the soul. In the face of this and countless other examples, how can you come to any other conclusion but that inflow comes from the outside world and is physical?”
[3] While listening to this, the adherents of Descartes were holding their fingers to their foreheads; now they removed them and responded to these statements by saying, “Unfortunately, you are talking in terms of the way things seem. Don’t you realize that our eyes don’t love our young bride on their own? The love comes from our soul. So too, our senses don’t crave the coins in the purses on their own; the craving comes from our soul. Our ears seize on the compliments of flatterers in precisely the same way. Surely it is the faculty of perception that enables us to sense. And perception is a function of the soul, not of a physical organ. Tell us this, if you can: What makes the tongue and lips speak except thought? What makes the hands do work except the will? Our thought and our will are functions of our soul, not our body. What causes our eye to see, our ears to hear, and our other organs to feel things except our soul? These and countless other examples will lead anyone whose wisdom rises above what we sense with our bodies to conclude that there is no inflow of the body into the soul but an inflow of the soul into the body, an inflow that we call ‘occasional’ or ‘spiritual’ inflow.”
[4] When they heard this, the three men who were standing behind the other groups of three, the supporters of Leibniz, spoke up. “We have heard and compared the arguments on each side, and we feel that on many points the second group prevailed, but on many others, the first. So, if you will, let us resolve the dispute.” When they were asked how they would do this, they said, “There is no inflow of the soul into the body or of the body into the soul. Instead there is a total and instantaneous coordination of the two at any given moment, a coordination that our celebrated founder has given the lovely name ‘preestablished harmony.’”
[5] When they had all finished, the spirit reappeared, this time holding the torch with his left hand, and waved it behind their heads, and all their ideas became confused. They started exclaiming in alarm, “Our souls don’t know which way to turn and neither do our bodies, so let’s settle the argument by lot. We’ll accept whichever lot is drawn first.” So they took three slips of paper, wrote physical inflow on one, spiritual inflow on the second, and preestablished harmony on the third, and put them in a hat. They chose someone to do the drawing; the hand went in and pulled out the slip that had “spiritual inflow” written on it. When they looked at it and read it, they all said, “We should accept this because it came out first,” but some said this clearly and easily, while others said it vaguely and hesitantly.
[6] Suddenly an angel stood nearby who said, “Don’t believe that the slip for spiritual inflow came out by accident. This was providential. Since you were caught up in confused ideas, you were not seeing that it was the truth; but the truth itself presented itself as that slip of paper to the chooser’s hand so that you would accept it.”
