Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.21 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.21 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

BY "WHAT MEANS THE SOUL IS SKN-ir.LK. AND WflAT IS THE PUINCIPAL AND COMMANDING rAllT OF IT. The Stoics say that the highest part of the soul is the commanding part of it : this is the cause of sense, imagination, consents, and desires ; and this we call the rational part. From this prhicipal and commander there arc produced seven parts of the soul, which are spread through the body, as the seven arms in a polypus. Of these seven parts, five are assigned to the senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Sight is a spirit which is extended from the commanding part to the eyes ; hearing is that spirit which from the principal reacheth to the ears ; smelling a spirit drawn from the principal to the nostrils ; tasting a spirit extended from the principal to the tongue ; touching is a spirit which from the principal is drawn to the extremity of those bodies which are obnoxious to a sensible touch. Of the rest, the one called the spermatical is a spirit which reacheth from the principal to the generating vessels ; the other, which is the vocal and tinnuHl the voice, is a spirit extrnch d from tlio principal to the throat, tongue, and other pro[)cr organs of speaking. And this principal part itself hath that place in our spherical head which God hath m the world.

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)