Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 45 — Of common conceptions, against the Stoics

Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 45 — Of common conceptions, against the Stoics, Plutarch; served verbatim

DIADUMENUS. But by what cause moved, or for the adorning of what other suppositions, they frame in a manner innumerable differences and forms of bodies in the soul, there is none can say, unless it be that they remove, or rather wholly abdicate and destroy, the common and usual notions, to introduce other foreign and strange ones. For it is very absurd that, making all virtues and vices—and with them all arts, memories, fancies, passions, impulses, and assents—to be bodies, they should affirm that they neither lie nor subsist in any subject, leaving them for a place one only hole, like a prick in the heart, where they crowd the principal part of the soul, enclosed with so many bodies, that a very great number of them lie hid even from those who think they can spare and distinguish them one from another. Nay, that they should not only make them bodies, but also rational creatures, and even a swarm of such creatures, not friendly or gentle, but a multitude maliciously rebellious and revengeful, and should so make of each one of us a park or menagerie or Trojan horse, or whatever else we may call their fancies,—this is the very height of contempt and rebellion against evidence and custom. But they say, that not only the virtues and vices, not only the passions, as anger, envy, grief, and maliciousness, not only comprehensions, fancies, and ignorances, not only arts, as shoemaking and working in brass, are animals; but besides these, also they make even the operations bodies and animals, saying that walking is an animal, as also dancing, supposing, saluting, and railing. The consequence of this is that laughing and weeping are also animals; and if so, then also are coughing, sneezing, groaning, spitting, blowing the nose, and other such like things sufficiently known. Neither have they any cause to take it ill that they are by reason, proceeding leisurely, reduced to this, if they shall call to mind how Chrysippus, in his First Book of Natural Questions, argues thus: Is not night a body? And are not then the evening, dawning, and midnight bodies? Or is not a day a body? Is not then the first day of the month a body? And the tenth, the fifteenth, and the thirtieth, are they not bodies? Is not a month a body? Summer, autumn, and the year, are they not bodies?

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Chrysippus — a candidate entry

Of common conceptions, against the Stoics, Plutarch — translated by Samuel White (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)