Complete Works (270 page)

Acid and salty phlegm is the source of all those diseases that come about by passage of fluids. These disorders have been given all sorts of different names, in view of the fact that the bodily regions into which the fluids flow are quite diverse.

(c) All inflammations in the body (so called from their being burned or [c] “set aflame”) are caused by bile. When bile finds a vent to the outside, it boils over and sends up all sorts of tumors, but when it is shut up inside, it creates many inflammatory diseases. The worst occurs when the bile gets mixed with clean blood and disrupts the disposition of the blood’s fibers, which are interspersed throughout the blood. These fibers act to preserve a balance of thinness and thickness, i.e., to prevent both the blood from getting so liquid, due to the body’s heat, that it oozes out from the body’s pores, and, on the other hand, its getting so dense that it is sluggish and hardly able to circulate within the veins. The fibers, then, by virtue [d] of their natural composition, preserve the appropriate state between these conditions. And even after death, when the blood cools down, if the fibers are [extracted from the blood and] collected, the residue will still be completely runny, while if they are left in the blood, they, along with the surrounding cold, congeal it in no time. Given, then, that the fibers have this effect upon the blood, though the bile—which originated as primitive blood and then from flesh was dissolved into blood again—is hot and liquid at first as a little of it invades the blood, it congeals under the effect [e] of the fibers, and as it congeals and is forced to extinguish its heat it causes internal cold and shivering. But as more of it flows in, it overpowers the fibers with its own heat. It boils over and shakes them up into utter confusion. And if it proves capable of sustaining its power to the end, it penetrates to the marrow and burns it up, thereby loosening the cables that hold the soul there, like a ship, and setting the soul free. But when there is rather little of it and the body resists its dissolution, the bile is itself overpowered and is expelled either by way of the body as a whole or else it is compressed through the veins into the lower or upper belly, and is expelled from the body like an exile from a city in civil strife, so
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bringing on diarrhea, dysentery and every disease of that kind. Bodies afflicted mostly by an excess of fire will generate continuous states of heat and fevers; those suffering from an excess of air produce fevers that recur every day; while those that have an excess of water have fevers that recur only every other day, given that water is more sluggish than air or fire. Bodies afflicted by an excess of earth, the most sluggish of the four, are purged within a fourfold cycle of time and produce fevers that occur every fourth day, fevers that are hard to get over.

The foregoing described how diseases of the body happen to come about. [b] The diseases of the soul that result from a bodily condition come about in the following way. It must be granted, surely, that mindlessness is the disease of the soul, and of mindlessness there are two kinds. One is madness, and the other is ignorance. And so if a man suffers from a condition that brings on either one or the other, that condition must be declared a disease.

We must lay it down that the diseases that pose the gravest dangers for the soul are excessive pleasures and pains. When a man enjoys himself too much or, in the opposite case, when he suffers great pain, and he [c] exerts himself to seize the one and avoid the other in inopportune ways, he lacks the ability to see or hear anything right. He goes raving mad and is at that moment least capable of rational thought. And if the seed of a man’s marrow grows to overflowing abundance like a tree that bears an inordinately plentiful quantity of fruit, he is in for a long series of bursts of pain, or of pleasures, in the area of his desires and their fruition. These severe pleasures and pains drive him mad for the greater part of his life, [d] and though his body has made his soul diseased and witless, people will think of him not as sick, but as willfully evil. But the truth about sexual overindulgence is that it is a disease of the soul caused primarily by the condition of a single stuff which, due to the porousness of the bones, flows within the body and renders it moist. And indeed, just about every type of succumbing to pleasure is talked about as something reproachable, as though the evils are willfully done. But it is not right to reproach people [e] for them, for no one is willfully evil. A man becomes evil, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing. No one who incurs these pernicious conditions would will to have them.

And as for pains, once again it is the body that causes the soul so much trouble, and in the same ways. When any of a man’s acid and briny phlegms or any bitter and bilious humors wander up and down his body
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without finding a vent to the outside and remain pent up inside, they mix the vapor that they give off with the motion of the soul and so are confounded with it. So they produce all sorts of diseases of the soul, some more intense and some more frequent than others. And as they move to the three regions of the soul, each of them produces a multitude of varieties of bad temper and melancholy in the region it attacks, as well as of recklessness and cowardice, not to mention forgetfulness and stupidity. Furthermore, [b] when men whose constitutions are bad in this way have bad forms of government where bad civic speeches are given, both in public and in private and where, besides, no studies that could remedy this situation are at all pursued by people from their youth on up, that is how all of us who are bad come to be that way—the products of two causes both entirely beyond our control. It is the begetters far more than the begotten, and the nurturers far more than the nurtured, that bear the blame for all this. Even so, one should make every possible effort to flee from badness, whether with the help of one’s upbringing, or the pursuits or studies one undertakes, and to seize its opposite. But that is the subject for another speech.

[c] The counterpart to the subject just dealt with, i.e., how to treat our bodies and states of mind and preserve them whole, is one that it is now fitting and right to give its turn. After all, good things have more of a claim to be the subject of our speech than bad things. Now all that is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is not ill-proportioned. Hence we must take it that if a living thing is to be in good condition, it will be well-proportioned. We can perceive the less important proportions and do some figuring about them, but the more important proportions, which are of [d] the greatest consequence, we are unable to figure out. In determining health and disease or virtue and vice no proportion or lack of it is more important than that between soul and body—yet we do not think about any of them nor do we realize that when a vigorous and excellent soul is carried about by a too frail and puny frame, or when the two are combined in the opposite way, the living thing as a whole lacks beauty, because it is lacking in the most important of proportions. That living thing, however, which finds itself in the opposite condition is, for those who are able to observe it, the most beautiful, the most desirable of all things to behold. Imagine a body which lacks proportion because its legs are too long or [e] something else is too big. It is not only ugly but also causes itself no end of troubles. As its parts try to cooperate to get its tasks done it frequently tires itself out or gets convulsive, or, because it lurches this way and that, it keeps falling down. That’s how we ought to think of that combination of soul and body which we call the living thing. When within it there is a soul more powerful than the body and this soul gets excited, it churns
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the whole being and fills it from inside with diseases, and when it concentrates on one or another course of study or inquiry, it wears the body out. And again, when the soul engages in public or private teaching sessions or verbal battles, the disputes and contentions that then occur cause the soul to fire the body up and rock it back and forth, so inducing discharges which trick most so-called doctors into making misguided diagnoses. But when, on the other hand, a large body, too much for its soul, is joined with a puny and feeble mind, then, given that human beings have two [b] sets of natural desires—desires of the body for food and desires of the most divine part of us for wisdom—the motions of the stronger part will predominate, and amplify their own interest. They render the functions of the soul dull, stupid and forgetful, thereby bringing on the gravest disease of all: ignorance.

From both of these conditions there is in fact one way to preserve oneself, and that is not to exercise the soul without exercising the body, nor the body without the soul, so that each may be balanced by the other and so be sound. The mathematician, then, or the ardent devotee of any other [c] intellectual discipline should also provide exercise for his body by taking part in gymnastics, while one who takes care to develop his body should in his turn practice the exercises of the soul by applying himself to the arts and to every pursuit of wisdom, if he is to truly deserve the joint epithets of “fine and good.” And the various bodily parts should also be looked after in this same way, in imitation of the structure of the universe. [d] For since the body is heated and cooled inside by things that enter it and is dried and moistened by things outside of it and made to undergo the consequent changes by both of these motions, it will happen that when a man subjects his body to these motions when it has been in a state of rest, the body is overcome and brought to ruin. But if he models himself after what we have called the foster-mother and nurse of the universe and persistently refuses to allow his body any degree of rest but exercises and continually agitates it through its whole extent, he will keep in a state of [e] natural equilibrium the internal and the external motions. And if the agitation is a measured one, he will succeed in bringing order and regularity to those disturbances and those elemental parts that wander all over the body according to their affinities in the way described in the account we gave earlier about the universe. He will not allow one hostile element to position itself next to another and so breed wars and diseases in the body.
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Instead, he will have one friendly element placed by another, and so bring about health.

Now the best of the motions is one that occurs within oneself and is caused by oneself. This is the motion that bears the greatest kinship to understanding and to the motion of the universe. Motion that is caused by the agency of something else is less good. Worst of all is the motion that moves, part by part, a passive body in a state of rest, and does so by means of other things. That, then, is why the motion induced by physical exercise is the best of those that purify and restore the body. Second is that induced by the rocking motion of sea travel or travel in any other [b] kind of conveyance that doesn’t tire one out. The third type of motion is useful in an occasional instance of dire need; barring that, however, no man in his right mind should tolerate it. This is medical purging by means of drugs. We should avoid aggravating with drugs diseases that aren’t particularly dangerous. Every disease has a certain makeup that in a way resembles the natural makeup of living things. In fact, the constitution of such beings goes through an ordered series of stages throughout their life. This is true of the species as a whole, and also of its individual members, [c] each of which is born with its allotted span of life, barring unavoidable accidents. This is because its triangles are so made up, right from the beginning, as to have the capacity to hold up for a limited time beyond which life cannot be prolonged any further. Now diseases have a similar makeup, so that when you try to wipe them out with drugs before they have run their due course, the mild diseases are liable to get severe, and the occasional ones frequent. That is why you need to cater to all such diseases by taking care of yourself to the extent you are free and have the [d] time to do that. What you should not do is aggravate a stubborn irritation with drugs.

Let these remarks suffice, then, on the subject of the living thing as a whole and its bodily parts, and how a man should both lead and be led by himself in order to have the best prospects for leading a rational life. Indeed, we must give an even higher priority to doing our utmost to make sure that the part that is to do the leading is as superbly and perfectly as [e] possible fitted for that task. Now a thoroughgoing discussion of these matters would in and of itself be a considerable task, but if we treat it as a side issue, in line with what we have said before, it may not be out of turn to conclude our discourse with the following observations.

There are, as we have said many times now, three distinct types of soul that reside within us, each with its own motions. So now too, we must say in the same vein, as briefly as we can, that any type which is idle and keeps its motions inactive cannot but become very weak, while one that
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keeps exercising becomes very strong. And so we must keep watch to make sure that their motions remain proportionate to each other.

Now we ought to think of the most sovereign part of our soul as god’s gift to us, given to be our guiding spirit. This, of course, is the type of soul that, as we maintain, resides in the top part of our bodies. It raises us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven, as though we are plants grown not from the earth but from heaven. In saying this, we speak absolutely correctly. For it is from heaven, the place from which our souls were originally born, that the divine part suspends our head, i.e., our root, and so keeps our whole body erect. So if a man has [b] become absorbed in his appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts are bound to become merely mortal. And so far as it is at all possible for a man to become thoroughly mortal, he cannot help but fully succeed in this, seeing that he has cultivated his mortality all along. On the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his [c] thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp. And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this: constantly caring for his divine part as he does, keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him, he must indeed be supremely happy. Now there is but one way to care for anything, and that is to provide for it the nourishment and the motions that are proper to it. And the motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These, [d] surely, are the ones which each of us should follow. We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth,
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by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and so bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition. And when this conformity is complete, we shall have achieved our goal: that most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods, both now and forevermore.