Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.3 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.3 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

WHETHER THE WORLD BE AN ANIMAL. Democritus, Epicurus, and those philosophers who introduced atoms and a vacuum, affirm that the world is not an animal, nor governed by any wise Providence, but that it is managed by a nature which is void of reason. All the other philosophers affirm that the world is informed with a soul, and governed by reason and Providence. Aristotle is excepted, who is somewhat different ; he is of opinion, that the whole world is not acted by a soul in every part of it, nor hath it any sensitive, rational, or intellectual faculties, nor is it guided by reason and Providence in every part of it ; of all which the heavenly bodies are made partakers, for the circumambient spheres are animated and are living beings ; but those things which are about the earth are void of those endowments ; and though those terrestrial bodies are of an orderly disposition, yet that is casual and not primogenial.

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

Epicurus — a candidate entry

Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch — translated by John Dowel (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)