Both Plato and Aristotle believed in a tripartite human soul Was that just a coincidence, just a symptom of the attraction that the number three has for the human mind? or is the classification in the one case more similar to the other than might first appear? In Plato's view, the soul contains an appetite, a spirit, and an intellect. These correspond to the classes in an idealized city, where the appetite corresponds to the ordinary working stiffs, the spirit corresponds to the warriors (sometimes called "guardians"), and the intellect to the philosopher kings (sometimes also, confusingly, called "guardians"). In the world of fantasy, the three levels correspond to Dorothy's friends: where the appetite might be represented by the sentimental tin man, the guardian spirit by the lion, and the intellect by the scarecrow. What about Aristotle? He wrote of the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the (uniquely) human soul. The vegetative functions o...
