Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

174 Aristotle and his school ’ ’ 15 .(1102 b 2–10)The excellence of this part [i.e. the vegetative part] of the soul seems to be commonto all living beings and not peculiar to humans; for it is generally believed thatthis part and this faculty [nutrition] is particularly active in sleep, and that thedifference between a good and a bad person is least evident in sleep (which is whypeople say that for half of their lives, there is no difference between happy peopleand miserable people; this is a reasonable conclusion, for sleep is a kind of inactivityof that [part of the] soul in virtue of which it [the soul] is called good or bad),unless in a certain way, and to a small extent, certain sense-movements penetrateto [the soul during sleep], and in this way the dream images of good people aresuperior to those of common people.The possibility envisaged here towards the end in the clause ‘unless in acertain way ...’ is precisely what Aristotle is exploring in much greaterdetail in his investigations of sleep and dreams in the two works alreadymentioned On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep (see esp. 463 a 21ff.),and in the work On Sleep and Waking which precedes them. 16 Yet, as weshall see later, these treatises make it clear that the connection betweenwhat we perceive in the daytime and what appears to us in sleep is rarelystraightforward or direct (euthuoneiria), and often dreams are confused as aresult of physiological turbulence that disturbs the transmission of sensoryimages in the body (461 a 9ff.). And the tentative way in which, in theEthics passage, the possibility of a connection between waking and sleepinglife is introduced ( ) doesnot suggest that Aristotle attached great relevance to it in the context of hismoral philosophy.2 the context of aristotle’s treatises onsleep and dreamsIn order to appreciate Aristotle’s approach to these issues better, it is importantto consider the context in which his views on dreams are expounded.15 Some MSS read here instead of .16 Although these three treatises are presented in the preface of On Sleep and Waking as parts of onecontinuous investigation and follow on each other in the MS tradition, the precise relationshipbetween them poses considerable problems. See van der Eijk (1994) 62–7.