Page - 1362 - in The Complete Aristotle

11 So much then for the voluntary movements of animal bodies, and the reasons for them. These bodies, however, display in certain members involuntary movements too, but most often non-voluntary movements. By involuntary I mean motions of the heart and of the privy member; for often upon an image arising and without express mandate of the reason these parts are moved. By non-voluntary I mean sleep and waking and respiration, and other similar organic movements. For neither imagination nor desire is properly mistress of any of these; but since the animal body must undergo natural changes of quality, and when the parts are so altered some must increase and other decrease, the body must straightway be moved and change with the changes that nature makes dependent upon one another. Now the causes of the movements are natural changes of temperature, both those coming from outside the body, and those taking place within it. So the involuntary movements which occur in spite of reason in the aforesaid parts occur when a change of quality supervenes. For conception and imagination, as we said above, produce the conditions necessary to affections, since they bring to bear the images or forms which tend to create these states. And the two parts aforesaid display this motion more conspicuously than the rest, because each is in a sense a separate vital organism, the reason being that each contains vital moisture. In the case of the heart the cause is plain, for the heart is the seat of the senses, while an indication that the generative organ too is vital is that there flows from it the seminal potency, itself a kind of organism. Again, it is a reasonable arrangement that the movements arise in the centre upon movements in the parts, and in the parts upon movements in the centre, and so reach one another. Conceive A to be the centre or starting point. The movements then arrive at the centre from each letter in the diagram we have drawn, and flow back again from the centre which is moved and changes, (for the centre is potentially multiple) the movement of B goes to B, that of C to C, the movement of both to both; but from B to C the movements flow by dint of going from B to A as to a centre, and then from A to C as from a centre. Moreover a movement contrary to reason sometimes does and sometimes does not arise in the organs on the occasion of the same thoughts; the reason is that sometimes the matter which is passive to the impressions is there in sufficient quantity and of the right quality and sometimes not. And so we have finished our account of the reasons for the parts of each kind of animal, of the soul, and furthere of sense-perception, of sleep, of memory, and of movement in general; it remains to speak of animal generation. 1362