If one, moreover, denies that body feel, And holds that soul, through all the body mixed, Takes on this motion which we title "sense," He battles in vain indubitable facts: For who'll explain what body's feeling is, Except by what the public fact itself Has given and taught us?"But when soul is parted, Body's without all sense." True!--loses what Was even in its life-time not its own; And much beside it loses, when soul's driven Forth from that life-time. Or, to say that eyes Themselves can see no thing, but through the same The mind looks forth, as out of opened doors, Is--a hard saying; since the feel in eyes Says the reverse. For this itself draws on And forces into the pupils of our eyes Our consciousness. And note the case when often We lack the power to see refulgent things, Because our eyes are hampered by their light-- With a mere doorway this would happen not; For, since it is our very selves that see, No open portals undertake the toil. Besides, if eyes of ours but act as doors, Methinks that, were our sight removed, the mind Ought then still better to behold a thing-- When even the door-posts have been cleared away. Herein in these affairs nowise take up What honoured sage, Democritus, lays down-- That proposition, that primordials Of body and mind, each super-posed on each, Vary alternately and interweave The fabric of our members. For not only Are the soul-elements smaller far than those Which this our body and inward parts compose, But also are they in their number less, And scattered sparsely through our frame. And thus This canst thou guarantee: soul's primal germs Maintain between them intervals as large At least as are the smallest bodies, which, When thrown against us, in our body rouse Sense-bearing motions. Hence it comes that we Sometimes don't feel alighting on our frames The clinging dust, or chalk that settles soft; Nor mists of night, nor spider's gossamer We feel against us, when, upon our road, Its net entangles us, nor on our head The dropping of its withered garmentings; Nor bird-feathers, nor vegetable down, Flying about, so light they barely fall; Nor feel the steps of every crawling thing, Nor each of all those footprints on our skin Of midges and the like. To that degree Must many primal germs be stirred in us Ere once the seeds of soul that through our frame Are intermingled 'gin to feel that those Primordials of the body have been strook, And ere, in pounding with such gaps between, They clash, combine and leap apart in turn.