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He's got his young wife, he's thinking about biology, and he goes down to the shore, and he picks up some snails, and he picks up some fish from the local fish market, and he begins to dissect them, and he writes the results down, and that's when biology is born, in those few years.

What Aristotle meant by soul, he meant the moving principle of life. And there's nothing vitalist about it, there is nothing metaphysical about it. It's hard to get a grip on what he meant, but it's a resolutely empirical kind of concept. What he meant was something like this, he says all living things have a soul, and when they die, the soul disappears. So none of that nonsense about the immortality of the soul. Plato thought souls were immortal, many people, popular belief had that the souls were immortal, but Aristotle is clearly using soul in a very special, and technical, and new sense. It's the moving principle of life.

What he's getting at is that the soul is not matter itself, it's the way that matter is organized. It's the relationship between the parts. It's the system. And, in fact, many Aristotelian scholars reaching for metaphors to explain what Aristotle is getting at, they use words like "system", and "cybernetic", and so on, depending on exactly when they were writing. You know, when cybernetics was cybernetics, well, they used that. And I think that's basically right.