Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.20 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.20 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

WHETHER THE VOICE IS INCORPOREAL. WHAT 18 IT THAT GIVES THE ECHO ? Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle say that the voice is incorporeal ; for it is not the air that makes the voice, but the figure which compasseth the air and its superficies, having received a stroke, give the voice. But every superficies of itself is incorporeal. True it is that it moveth with the body, but of itself it hath no body ; as we perceive in a staff that is bended, the matter only admits of an inflection, while the superficies doth not. According to the Stoics, a voice is corporeal, since every thing that is an agent or operates is a body ; a voice acts and operates, for we hear it and are sensible of it ; for it falls and makes an impression on the ear, as a seal of a ring gives its similitude upon the wax. Moreover, every thing that creates a delight or molestation is a body ; harmonious music afi'ects with delight, but discord is tiresome. And every thing that is moved is a body ; and the voice moves, and having its illapse upon smooth places is reflected, as when a ball is cast against a wall it rebounds. A voice spoken in the Egyptian pyramids is so broken, that it gives four or five echoes.

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)