Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.8 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 4.8 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

OF THE SENSES, AND OP THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE OBJECTS OF THE SENSES. The Stoics give this definition of sense : Sense is the apprehension or comprehension of an object by means of an organ. There are several ways of expressing what sense is ; it is either a habit, a faculty, an operation, or an imagination which apprehends by means of an organ of sen«:e, — and also the eighth principal thing, from whence the senses are derived. The instruments of sense are intelligent spirits, which from the said commanding part reach unto all the organs of the body. Epicurus, that sense is a faculty, and that which is perceived by the sense is the product of it ; so that sense hath a double acceptation, — sense which is the faculty, and the thing received by the sense, which is the effect. Plato, that sense is that commerce which the soul and body have with those things that are exterior to them ; the power of which is from the soul, the organ by which is from the body ; but both of them apprehend exterior objects by means of the imagination. Leucippus and Democritus, that sense and intelligence arise from external images ; so neither of them can operate without the assistance of an image falling upon us.

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

Democritus — a candidate entry

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)