Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.20 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.20 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

HOW MANY SPECIES OP ANI^IA-LS THERE ARE, AND WHETHER ALL ANIMALS HAVE THE ENDOWMENTS OF SENSE AND REASON. There is a certain treatise of Aristotle, in which animals are distributed into four kinds, terrestrial, aqueous, fowl, and heavenly ; and he calls the stars and the world also animals, yea, and God himself he defines to be an animal endowed with reason and immortal. Democritus and Epicurus esteem all animals rational which have their residence in the heavens. Anaxagoras says that animals have only that reason which is operative, but not that which is passive, which is justly styled the interpreter of the mind, and is like the mind itself. Pythagoras and Plato, that the souls of all those who are styled brutes are rational ; but by the evil constitution of their bodies, and because they have a want of a discoursive faculty, they do not act rationally. This is manifested in apes and dogs, which have voice but not speech. Diogenes, that this sort of animals are partakers of intelligence and air, but by reason of the density in some parts of them, and by the superfluity of moisture in others, they enjoy neither understinding nor sense ; but they are affected as madmen are, the commanding rational part being defectuous and impeached.

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

← Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.19 contents Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 5.21 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Aristotle — a life Epicurus — a candidate entry Plato — 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)