Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.6 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.6 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

FROM WHAT ELEMENT GOD DID BEGIN TO RAISE THE FABRIC OF THE WORLD. The natural philosophers pronounce that the forming of this world took its original from the earth, it being its centre, for the centre is the principal part of the globe. Pythagoras, from the fire and the fifth element. Empedocles determines, that the first and principal element separated from the rest was the ether, then fire, after that the earth, which earth being strongly compacted by the force of a violent revolution, water springs from it, the exhalations of which water produce the air ; the heaven took its origin from the ether, and fire gave a being to the sun ; those things that belong to the earth are condensed from the remainders. Plato, that the visible world was framed after the exemplar of the intellectual world ; the sQul of the visible world was first produced, then the corporeal figure, first that which came from fire and earth, afterwards that which came from air and water. Pythagoras, that the world was formed of five solid figures which are called mathematical ; the earth was produced by the cube, the fire by tbe pyramid, the air by the octahedron, the water by the icosahedron, and the globe of the universe bythe dodecahedron. In all these Plato hath the same sentiments with Pythagoras.

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

Plato — a life Pythagoras — a life

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)