Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.19 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.19 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

OF THE VOICE. Plato thus defines a voice, — that it is a breath drawn by the mind through the mouth, and a blow given to the air and through the ear, brain, and blood transmitted to the soul. Voice is abusively attributed to irrational and inanimate beings ; thus we improperly call the neighing of horses or any other sound by the name of voice. But properly a voice (cfwr/^) is an articulate sound, which illustrates (cpmiX^t) the understanding of man. Epicurus says that it is an efflux emitted from things that are vocal, or that give sounds or great noises ; this is broken into those fragments which are after the same configuration. Like figures arc round figures with round, and irregular and triangular with those of the same nature. These falling upon the ears produce the sense of hearing. This is seen in leaking vessels, and in fullers when they fan or blow their cloths. Democritus, that the air is broken into bodies of similar configuration, and these are rolled up and down with the fragments of the voice ; as it is proverbially said, One daw lights with another, or, God always brings like to like. Thus we see upon the shore, that stones like to one another are found in the same place, in one place the long-shaped, in another the round arc seen. So in sieves, things that are of the same form meet together, but those that are different are divided ; as pulse and beans falling from the same sieve are separated one from another. To this it may be objected : How can some fragments of au* fill a theatre in which there is an infinite company of persons ? The Stoics, that the air is not composed of small fragments, but is a continued body and nowhere admits a vacuum ; and being struck with the breath, it is infinitely moved in waves and in right circles, until it fill that air which invests it ; as we see in a fish-pool which we smite by a falling stone cast upon it ; yet the air is moved spherically, the water orbicu. larly. Anaxagoras says a voice is then formed, when upon a solid air the breath is incident, which being repercussed is carried to the ears ; after the same manner the echo is produced.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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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)