Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 5 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"Plutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 5 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"
Plutarch
Classical literature; Essays; Ethics; Philosophy
3. Besides, no privation is capable of more and less. Neither can
any man say, that one among those that cannot see is more blind than
another, or that one among those that cannot speak is more silent than
another, or that any thing is more dead than another among those things
that never had life. But in cold things there is more and less, and
excess and diminution to several degrees; in a word, there is both
intensity and remission as well as in hot things; because the matter
suffers in some things more violently, in others more languidly, and
therefore some things are hotter, some things colder than others,
according to the nature of the matter. For there is no mixture of habit
with privation. Neither does any power admit of privation opposite to
it, nor associate with it in the same subject, but it withstands it
altogether. Hot things allow themselves to be mixed with cold things
to a certain degree, as black with white, heavy with light, and sour
with sweet,—this community and harmony of colors, sounds, medicaments,
and sauces generating several tastes and pleasures grateful to the
senses. But the opposition of privation and habit is an antipathy never
to be reconciled; the being of the one enforcing the destruction of
the other. Which destruction, if it fall out seasonably, according to
the opposition of contrary powers, the arts make great use of, but
chiefly Nature, not only in her other creations, but especially in the
alterations of the air, and in all other things of which the Deity
being the adorner and dispenser obtains the attribute of harmonical and
musical. Not that those attributes are given him for the disposal of
deep and shrill, black and white, so as to make them agree together;
but for his governing in the world the sympathies and antipathies of
cold and heat in such a manner that they may unite and separate again,
and for reducing both to a decent order, by taking that which we called
“the over-much” from both.
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