Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"Plutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"
Plutarch
Classical literature; Essays; Ethics; Philosophy
4. Zeuxippus then said: And do you not think then they take the right
course to begin at the body, where they observe pleasure to have its
first rise, and thence to pass to the mind as the more stable and sure
part, there to complete and crown the whole?
They do, by Jove, I said; and if, after removing thither, they have
indeed found something more consummate than before, they take a course
too as well agreeing with nature as becoming men adorned with both
contemplative and civil knowledge. But if after all this you still
hear them cry out, and protest that the mind of man can receive no
satisfaction or tranquillity from any thing under Heaven but the
pleasures of the body either in possession or expectance, and that
these are its proper and only good, can you forbear thinking they make
use of the soul but as a funnel for the body, while they mellow their
pleasure by shifting it from one vessel to another, as they rack wine
out of an old and leaky vessel into a new one and there let it grow
old, and then imagine they have performed some extraordinary and very
fine thing? True indeed, time may both keep and recover wine that hath
thus been drawn off; but the mind, receiving but the remembrance only
of past pleasure, like a kind of scent, retains that and no more. For
as soon as it hath given one hiss in the body, it immediately expires,
and that little of it that stays behind in the memory is but flat and
like a queasy fume; as if a man should lay up and treasure in his
fancy what he either ate or drank yesterday, that he may have recourse
to that when he wants fresh fare. See now how much more temperate the
Cyrenaics are, who, though they have drunk out of the same bottle with
Epicurus, yet will not allow men so much as to practise their amours by
candle-light, but only under the covert of the dark, for fear seeing
should fasten too quick an impression of the images of such actions
upon the fancy and thereby too frequently inflame the desire. But these
gentlemen account it the highest accomplishment of a philosopher to
have a clear and retentive memory of all the various figures, passions,
and touches of past pleasure. We will not now say, they present us with
nothing worthy the name of philosophy, while they leave the refuse of
pleasure in their wise man’s mind, as if it could be a lodging for
bodies; but that it is impossible such things as these should make a
man live pleasurably, I think is abundantly manifest from hence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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