Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/45

Rh testimony of Menander the poet, who in one place writeth thus, by way of exclamation:

The same Chrysippus also going on still: It being so (quoth he) that a reasonable creature is by nature born and given to use reason in all things, and to be governed thereby: yet notwithstanding we reject and cast it behind us, being overruled by another more violent motion that carrieth us away. In which words, what doth he else but confess even that which happeneth upon the dissension between affection and reason?

For it were a mere ridiculous mockery indeed, as Plato saith, to affirm that a man were better and worse than himself: or that he were able now to master himself, and anon ready to be mastered by himself, and how were it possible that the same man should be better and worse than himself, and at once both master and servant, unless every one were naturally in some sort double, and had in him somewhat better and somewhat worse?

And verily by that means, he that hath the worse part obedient to the better, hath power over himself, yea, and is better than himself: whereas he that suffereth the brutish and unreasonable part of his soul to command and go before, so as the better and more noble part doth follow, and is serviceable unto it, he no doubt is worse than himself: he is (I say) incontinent or rather impotent, and hath no power over himself, but disposed contrary to nature. For according to the course and ordinance of nature, meet and fit it is that reason, being divine and heavenly, should command and rule that which is sensual and void of reason: which as it doth arise and spring out of the very body, so it resembleth it, as participating the properties and passions thereof, yea, and naturally is full of them, as being deeply concorporate and throughly mixed therewith: As it may appear by all the motions which it hath, tending to no other things but those that be material and corporal, as receiving their augmentations and diminutions from thence (or to say more properly), being stretched out and let slack more or less, according to the mutations of the body. Which is the cause