“‘Soul,’ quoth Mr. Carew Raleigh, ‘what is that?’ Better it were, said I, that we would be careful how the soul might be saved, than to be curious in finding out the essence.

“And so, keeping silence, Sir Walter requested me that for their instruction, I would answer to the question that before by his brother was proposed unto me.  ‘I have been,’ saith he, ’a scholar sometime in Oxford; I gave answer under a bachelor of arts, and had talk with divers; yet hitherunto in this point (to wit, what the reasonable soul of man is) have I not by any been resolved.  They tell me it is primus motor, the first mover in a man, etc.’  Unto this, after I had replied that howsoever the soul were fons et principium, the fountain, beginning and cause of motion in us, yet the first mover was the brain or heart, I was again urged to show my opinion, and hearing Sir Walter Raleigh tell of his dispute and scholarship some time in Oxford, I cited the general definition of Anima out of Aristotle (De Anima, cap. 2), and thence a subjecto proprio, deduced the special definition of the soul reasonable, that it was Actus Primus corporis organici agentis humanam vitam.

“It was misliked of Sir Walter as obscure and intricate.  And I withal, that though it could not unto him, as being learned, yet it might seem obscure to the most present, and therefore had rather say with divines plainly, that the reasonable soul is a spiritual and immortal substance, breathed into man by God, whereby he lives and moves and understandeth, and so is distinguished from other creatures.  ’Yea, but what is that spiritual and immortal substance breathed into man?’ saith Sir Walter.  The soul, quoth I.  ‘Nay then,’ said he, ’you answer not like a scholar.’  Hereupon I endeavoured to prove that it was scholarlike, nay, in such disputes as this, usual and necessary to run in circulum, partly because definitio rei was primum et immediatum principium, and seeing primo non est Prius, a man must of necessity come backward, and partly because definitio and definitum be naturae reciprocae, the one convertible, answering unto the question made upon the other.  As for example, if one asked:  ‘What is a man?’ you will say:  ‘He is a creature reasonable and mortal’; but if you ask again:  ’What is a creature reasonable and mortal?’ you must of force come backward and answer:  ‘It is a man,’ et sic de caeteris.  ’But we have principles in our mathematics,’ saith Sir Walter, ’as totum est majus qua libet sua parte; and ask me of it, and I can show it in the table, in the window, in a man, the whole being bigger than the parts of it.’

“I replied first that he showed quod est, not quid est, that it was, but not what it was; secondly, that such demonstration was against the nature of a man’s soul, being a spirit; for as a thing, being sensible, was subject to the sense, so man’s soul, being insensible, was to be discerned by the spirit.  Nothing more certain in the world than that there is a God, yet being a spirit, to subject him to the sense otherwise than perfectum.  It is impossible.