Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.14 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.14 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

OF THOSE IMAGES WHICH ARE PRESENTED TO OUR EYES IN MIRRORS. E.MPEDOCLES says tliat these images are caused by certain effluvias Avhich, meeting together and insisting upon the superficies of the mirror, are perfected by that fiery quality emitted by the said mirror, which transmutes withal the air that surrounds it. Democritus and Epicurus, that the specular appearances are formed by the subsistence of the images which flow from our eyes ; these fall upon the mir ror and remain, Avhile the light rebounds to the eye. The followers of Pythagoras explain it by the reflection of the sight; for our sight being extended (as it were) to the brass, and meeting with the smooth dense surface thereof it is struck back, and caused to return upon itself: the same appears in the hand, when it is stretched out and then brought back again to the shoulder. Any one may apply these instances to explain the manner of seeing.

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 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)