Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

188 Aristotle and his school9. Foresight is characteristic of people who are prone to anger or to melancholics(464 a 24–7; 464 a 32–b 5).10. Prophetic dreams mostly concern people who are related to the dreamer (464a 27–32).11. Images in moving water are often distorted and difficult to reconstruct (464b 10–12).In his treatment of question (i), Aristotle in turn distinguishes three possibilities:(a) The dream may be a sign (sēmeion) of the event, in that it is causedby the same factor or starting-point which also causes the future eventitself. In order to illustrate this possibility, he refers to the prognosticuse of dreams as signs in medicine, and he uses several empirical dataas evidence (no. 2), to which I shall turn shortly.(b) The dream is a cause (aition), or indeed the cause, of the event, in that itcauses the event to happen. For example, it may happen that we dreamabout an action which we actually perform the following day. Again,empirical evidence of this is produced (no. 3): Aristotle points out thatit often happens that we dream of an action we have performed previously,and this action is the starting-point of the dream. Conversely, heargues, we can also in our actions be motivated by a dream we have hadbefore.(c) The dream coincides (sumptōma) with the event without there beingany real connection between the occurrence of both. Aristotle comparesthis with the general experience many people have that we think of aperson and that a few minutes later this person suddenly turns up (cf.no. 4).In his discussion of question (ii), Aristotle makes a further, fundamentaldistinction between events whose origins lie within the dreamer him/herselfand events whose origins do not lie within the dreamer. A similar distinctionbetween human agency and things happening beyond human controlwas already alluded to in the preface to On Sleep and Waking quoted above.Diseases which may affect the dreamer, and actions the dreamer himselfperforms, obviously belong to the category of things whose origin (archē)iswithin the dreamer; but events that are ‘extravagant in time, place or magnitude’(464 a 1–4) such as things occurring at the ‘Pillars of Heracles’ (462b 24–6) obviously belong to the latter category. Aristotle connects this distinctionwith the results of his earlier distinction between causes, signs andcoincidences: in cases where the origin of the event lies within the dreamer,it can be reasonably assumed that an explanation by reference to ‘cause’ or‘sign’ is plausible, but in the latter (the origin of the event lying outside the