Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.12 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.12 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IMAGINATION {(paVTaGlo), IMAGINABLE (()p«>Trt(7T0r), FANCY {(paVtaaTlx6v)f AND PHANTOM {(fdvTaafia) ? Chrysippus affirms, these four are different one from another. Imagination (he says) is that passion raised in the soul which discovers itself and that which was the efficient of it ; for example, after the eye hath looked upon a thing that is white, the sight of which produce th in the mind a certain impression, this gives us reason to conclude that the object of this impression is white, which aifecteth us. So is it with touching and smelling. Phantasy or imagination is denominated from qpca^N which denotes light ; for as light discovers itself and all other things which it illuminates, so this imagination discovers itself and that which is the cause of it. The imaginable is the efficient cause of imagination ; as any thing that is white, or any thing that is cold, or every thing that may make an impression upon the imagination. Fancy is a vain impulse upon the mind of man, proceeding from nothing which is really imaginable ; this is experienced in those that whirl about their idle hands and fight with shadows ; for to the imagination there is always some real imaginable thing presented, which is the efficient cause of it ; but to the fancy nothing. A phantom is that to which we are led by such a fanciful and vain attraction ; this is to be seen in melancholy and distracted persons. Of this sort was Orestes in the tragedy, pronouncing these words : Mother, these maids with horror me affriglit ; Oh hurl tliem not, I pray, into my sight ! They're smeared with blood, and cruel, dragon-Iikei Skipping about with deadly fury strike. These rave as frantic persons, they see nothing, and yet imagine they see. Thence Electra thus returns to him : O wretched man, securely sleep in bed ; Nothing thou seest, thy fancy's vainly led.* After the same manner Theoclymenus in Homer.

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

Homer — 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)