Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

190 Aristotle and his schoolThe rationale for this seems to be as follows. If the gods really grantedknowledge of the future to humans, they would distribute this knowledgeaccording to the extent to which people meet the criterion of ‘being belovedby the gods’, and this means for Aristotle that a person should realise his/hermoral and intellectual virtues to the highest degree and thus approach thedivine level. 29 However, Aristotle argues, we can observe that propheticdreams in reality occur also (or, exclusively) with simple-minded people,who stand on a lower moral level, and even to animals, who do not evenhave reason and thus lack the capacity to realise virtue. Ergo: dreams cannotbe sent by a god. 30Aristotle thus presupposes that people with low moral and intellectualcapacities are particularly susceptible to prophetic dreams. His favouriteexample is the melancholics, whom he mentions twice because of theirremarkable foresight (cf. chapter 5 above). He explains this by reference totheir physiological constitution, which brings about a certain receptivityto a large number and variety of appearances: the chance that they meetwith a phantasm which resembles an actual future state of affairs is, froma statistical point of view, greater than with other people. It is entirelyunclear how Aristotle arrived at this view (there are no antecedents of thischaracteristic of the melancholics in medical literature). 31 It seems, rather,that we have a case of ‘wishful thinking’ on the part of Aristotle here (andperhaps an extrapolation of his own dreaming experiences). Of course, histheory allows for prophecy in sleep to occur with intelligent people as well,but then we are dealing with cases where the origin of the event foreseen inthe dream lies within the dreamer (for example, an action (s)he is going toperform, a physical disturbance which is going to befall him/her and whichannounces itself through another physical manifestation, namely, a dream).But in those cases where the future event foreseen in the dream occurs, forexample, at the other end of the world, this must be a coincidence dueto the multiplicity of images befalling the melancholics in their sleep, heseems to say.The second presupposition underlying Aristotle’s reasoning here is of ateleological kind: if some dreams can be shown not to be of divine origin,then this applies to all dreams. In this way, Aristotle anticipates two possiblecounter-arguments one might raise, namely that it is not necessary that alldreams are god-sent, or that it is not necessary that all dreams are prophetic.This kind of classification of various types of dreams is already found in29 Cf. Eth. Nic. 1179 a 21–30, discussed below in ch. 8.30 For a parallel argument concerning ‘good fortune’ () see ch. 8 below.31 See ch. 5 above.