ABSTRACT
The scholars of late medieval Europe, who saw the incarnate soul in Aristotelian terms and the soul after death in Christian terms, believed that humans alone possessed the mental and spiritual power to act wisely and well. Aristotle remarked on the mental life of animals in several works. In De anima and the Parva Naturalia he examined the abilities that distinguish living things from the rest of terrestrial nature. He separated these abilities into three groups, based on the apparent differences between plants, animals, and humans. In De juventute et senectute, Aristotle called the power the common sense. Some animals also share with humans an ability to be guided by, and to manipulate, images of sensed objects, an ability Aristotle named phantasia, or imagination. The power of memory, although associated with imagination and common sense, warranted its own treatise in the Parva naturalia.
