The Impression
Before you agree to anything
Something appears to you. That much is not up to you, and it has already happened by the time you have a view about it. Zeno said the appearing leaves an imprint, and borrowed the word from a seal in wax. Then his school spent a generation arguing about how literally he meant it, because on one reading a soul cannot hold two things at once.
The definition
A presentation (or mental impression) is an imprint on the soul: the name having been appropriately borrowed from the imprint made by the seal upon the wax.
Cleanthes read that straight: the soul is wax and the impression is a stamp, with hollows and reliefs. Chrysippus said it cannot be meant that way, and gave a reason you can watch fail.
Two souls, the same impressions
Send each impression to both. They arrive in the same order, with the same force, and land in the same place. All that differs is what a soul is taken to be.
The wax
Cleanthes, taking Zeno literally
An impression is a stamp: hollows and reliefs pressed into the soul.
nothing sent yet
Each new seal wants the same ground. What was there is flattened to take it.
The tension
Chrysippus, in the second book of On the Soul
An impression is an alteration: a change in the tension of the breath that the soul is.
nothing sent yet
Each impression sets up its own tension. They occupy the same body and stay distinct.
Send a second impression to see what Chrysippus objected to.
What he put in its place
the former is the act of imprinting something on the soul, that is a process of change, as is set forth by Chrysippus in the second book of his treatise Of the Soul
The wax
Read the definition strictly and this follows. Wax takes a shape by giving up the shape it had, so the newest impression is always the clearest and the older ones are going, and two impressions that disagree cannot both be held, because there is only one surface and they both want it.
The tension
The soul is pneuma, a body under tension, and a body under tension can carry many alterations at once the way a struck string carries more than one mode. Nothing is flattened, nothing has to give up its place, and two impressions that disagree can both be held, which is the precondition of noticing that they disagree at all.
The wax and the tension are drawn here, and drawing them means choosing how they fail and hold. The failure shown is the one Chrysippus names, that many seals cannot share a spot, and no other. Yonge renders the same definition this way: Perception, again, is an impression produced on the mind, its name being appropriately borrowed from impressions on wax made by a seal. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Life of Zeno, tr. C. D. Yonge, 1853
And then, assent
Everything on this page happened without your agreement. The tower looked round whether you liked it or not, and the tension changed before you had a view about it. Only now does the one act that is yours become possible: to assent, or to withhold. That is the next gesture, and Zeno taught it with his hand.
Take a side
Is the tension a real answer, or the same picture with a softer word?
Opening the board…