Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 53 — Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch; served verbatim But we must again resume our proper discourse. Isis is indeed that property of Nature which is feminine and receptive of all production; in which sense she was called the nurse and the all-receiver by Plato, and the Goddess with ten thousand names by the common sort, because being transmuted by reason she receives all manner of shapes and guises. But she hath a natural love to the prime and principal of all beings (which is the good principle), and eagerly affects it and pursues after it; and she shuns and repels her part of the evil one. And although she be indeed both the receptacle and matter of either nature, yet she always of herself inclines to the better of them, and readily gives way to it to generate upon her and to sow its effluxes and resemblances into her; and she rejoices and is very glad when she is impregnated and filled with productions. For generation is the production of an image of the real substance upon matter, and what is generated is an imitation of what is in truth.
The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.
Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch — translated by William Baxter (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)