There is a certain force,[209:2] less primary than Being but more
primary than the Soul, which draws its existence from Being and
completes the Soul as the Sun completes the eyes. Of Souls some are
rational and immortal, some irrational and mortal. The former are
derived from the first Gods, the latter from the secondary.
First, we must consider what soul is. It is, then, that by which the
animate differs from the inanimate. The difference lies in motion,
sensation, imagination, intelligence. Soul, therefore, when irrational,
is the life of sense and imagination; when rational, it is the life
which controls sense and imagination and uses reason.
The irrational soul depends on the affections of the body; it feels
desire and anger irrationally. The rational soul both, with the help of
reason, despises the body, and, fighting against the irrational soul,
produces either virtue or vice, according as it is victorious or
defeated.
It must be immortal, both because it knows the gods (and nothing mortal
knows[210:1] what is immortal), it looks down upon human affairs as
though it stood outside them, and, like an unbodied thing, it is
affected in the opposite way to the body. For while the body is young
and fine, the soul blunders, but as the body grows old it attains its
highest power. Again, every good soul uses mind; but no body can produce
mind: for how should that which is without mind produce mind? Again,
while Soul uses the body as an instrument, it is not in it; just as the
engineer is not in his engines (although many engines move without being
touched by any one). And if the Soul is often made to err by the body,
that is not surprising. For the arts cannot perform their work when
their instruments are spoilt.
IX. _On Providence, Fate, and Fortune._
This is enough to show the Providence of the Gods. For whence comes the
ordering of the world, if there is no ordering power? And whence comes
the fact that all things are for a purpose: e. g. irrational soul that
there may be sensation, and rational that the earth may be set in order?
But one can deduce the same result from the evidences of Providence in
nature: e. g. the eyes have been made transparent with a view to seeing;
the nostrils are above the mouth to distinguish bad-smelling foods; the
front teeth are sharp to cut food, the back teeth broad to grind it. And
we find every part of every object arranged on a similar principle. It
is impossible that there should be so much providence in the last
details, and none in the first principles. Then the arts of prophecy and
of healing, which are part of the Cosmos, come of the good providence of
the Gods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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