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
sorts of qualities, like a mixture of new wine fermenting, and who
confess that all their rules are lost and their faculty of judging
quite gone, if they admit any sensible object that is pure and simple,
and do not make each one thing to be many?
6. See now to this purpose, what discourse and debate Epicurus makes
Polyaenus to have with him in his Banquet concerning the heat of wine.
For when he asked, “Do you, Epicurus, say, that wine does not heat?”
some one answered, “It is not universally to be affirmed that wine
heats.” And a little after: “For wine seems not to be universally a
heater; but such a quantity may be said to heat such a person.” And
again subjoining the cause, to wit, the compressions and disseminations
of the atoms, and having alleged their commixtures and conjunctions
with others when the wine comes to be mingled in the body, he adds this
conclusion: “It is not universally to be said that wine is endued with
a faculty of heating; but that such a quantity may heat such a nature
and one so disposed, while such a quantity to such a nature is cooling.
For in such a mass there are such natures and complexions of which cold
might be composed, and which, joined with others in proper measure,
would yield a refrigerative virtue. Wherefore some are deceived, who
say that wine is universally a heater; and others, who say that it is
universally a cooler.” He then who says that most men are deceived
and err, in holding that which is hot to be heating and that which is
cold to be cooling, is himself in an error, unless he should believe
that his assertion leads to the doctrine that one thing is not more of
one nature than another. He farther adds afterwards, that oftentimes
wine entering into a body brings with it thither neither a calefying
nor refrigerating virtue, but, the mass of the body being agitated and
disturbed, and a transposition made of the parts, the heat-effecting
atoms being assembled together do by their multitude cause a heat and
inflammation in the body, and sometimes on the contrary disassembling
themselves cause a refrigeration.
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