talks of them conveying light round the body, elsewhere he will talk of them being filled with
Book VII 333 displays the solidity of earth, it still has in it too a certain amount of air, which is contained in the lungs and also distributed from the heart through the veins which they call arteries; and of fire it not only has the quality of heat, centered on the liver, but also that of brightness, which on their showing is strained or clari fied, as it were, and whisked up to the highest area of the brain, as though to the heaven of our body. From here the eyes flash their rays,13 and from the brain's mid-point, from a kind of North Pole,14 other fine tubes lead not only to the eyes but also to the other senses: to ears, to nostrils, to palate for hearing, smelling and tasting. And these people show that the sense of touch, which is spread through the whole body, is likewise governed by the same section of the brain through the marrow of the neck and that contained in the little bones out of which the backbone is stitched together, so that from there tiny rivulets of the finest sort, which activate the sense of touch, may spread out through all the limbs of the body.15
14. The soul therefore receives from these quasi-messengers information about any bodily things that are not hidden from it. So much, however, is it something entirely different itself, that when it wishes to understand either divine things, or God himself, or even quite simply to consider itselfand its own powers and to come by something that is certainly true, it turns away from this light of the eyes, finding it to be not only no help but even something of a hindrance for this task. How then can it be in the same genus, of which the highest species is the light which darts out of the eyes, which only helps it to perceive bodily shapes and colors, while the soul itselfhas countless other things to turn to, totally unlike any kind of body, things it can only observe by intelli gence and reason, to which none of the senses of the flesh aspires?
15, 21. Accordingly the nature of the human soul is not of earth nor of water nor of air nor of any kind of fire; but all the same it administers the coarser mate rial of its body, namely a kind of moist earth which has been given the quality of flesh, by means of the finer kinds of body, that is by means of light and air; without these two, you see, there is neither any sensation in the body, nor any deliberate movement of the body by the soul. Now just as one has first to know
13. For this preferred theory of vision in Augustine's time—at least the theory preferred by him—see Book 1, 1 6,3 1 , note 20. The sense of sight was clearly thought of as functioning by a kind of radar, the rays transmitted from the eyes being as it were sensitized by the object seen, and thus activating the sense. 14. De cujus medio velut centro quodam. Here centrum has its original Greek meaning ofa thorn or prickle, the kind which it was hard for Saul to kick against (Acts 26: 14); in this context more precisely the prick of the compass needle providing the center from which the circle is described. But as Augustine hasjust called the top of the brain the "heaven" of the human body, the North Pole, indicated by the Pole Star, very nicely conveys his meaning. 15. These "rivulets" are the nerves; while here he, and doubtless the medical science of his time, talks of them conveying light round the body, elsewhere he will talk of them being filled with "spirits," in roughly the same sense as we call certain alcoholic beverages "spirits."