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
26. And these are the powers and virtues of the soul of the universe.
And when they once enter into the organs of corruptible bodies, being
themselves incorruptible, there the form of the binary and boundless
principle shows itself most briskly, while that of the unmixed and
purer principle lies as it were dormant in obscurity. And thus
it happens, that a man shall rarely observe any human passion or
motion of the understanding, void of reason, where there shall not
something appear either of desire or emulation, joy or grief. Several
philosophers therefore will have the passions to be so many sorts of
reasonings, seeing that desire, grief, and anger are all the effects
of judgment. Others allege the virtues themselves to be derived from
passions; fortitude depending on fear, temperance on voluptuousness,
and justice on love of gain. Now the soul being both speculative and
practical, contemplating as well generals as particulars, and seeming
to comprehend the one by the assistance of the intellect and the
other by the aid of sense, common reason, which encounters the Same
in the Other and the Other in the Same, endeavors by certain limits
and distinctions to separate one from many and the divisible from the
indivisible; but she cannot accomplish her design nor be purely in one
or the other, in regard the principles are so oddly interwoven and
intermixed and confusedly huddled together.
For this reason did God constitute a receptacle for the Same and the
Other, out of the indivisible and divisible substance, to the end there
might be order in variety. Now this was generation. For without this
the Same could have no variety, and therefore no motion or generation;
and the Other could have no order, and therefore no consistence or
generation. For should we grant the Same to be different from the
Other, and the Other to be the Same with itself, such a commixture
would produce nothing generative, but would want a third something,
like matter, to receive both and be disposed of by both. And this is
that matter which God first composed, when he bounded the movable
nature of bodies by the steadfastness of things intelligible.
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