AUTOBULUS.
1 But who ever, my dear Soclarus, maintained that, while rationality exists in the universe, there is nothing irrational ? For there is a plentiful abundance of the irrational in all things that are not endowed with a soul; we need no other sort of counterpart for the rational: everything that is soulless, since it has no reason or intelligence, is by definition in opposition to that which, together with a soul, possesses also reason and understanding. Yet suppose someone were to maintain that nature must not be left maimed, but that that part of nature which, is endowed with a soul should have its irrational as well as its rational aspect, someone else is bound to maintain that nature endowed with a soul must have both an imaginative and an unimaginative part, and both a sentient part and an insentient. They want nature, they say, to have these counteractive and contraposed positives and negatives of the same kind counterbalanced, as it were. But if it is ridiculous to require an antithesis of sentient and insentient within the class of living things, or an antithesis of imaginative and unimaginative, seeing that it is the nature of every creature with a soul to be sentient and imaginative from the hour of its birth, so he, also, is unreasonable who demands a division of the living into a rational and an irrational part - and that, too, when he is arguing with men who believe that nothing is endowed with sensation which does not also partake of intelligence and that there is no living thing which does not naturally possess both opinion and reason, just as it has sensation and appetite. For nature, which, they 2 rightly say, does everything with some purpose and to some end, did not create the sentient creature merely to be sentient when something happens to it. No, for there are in the world many things friendly to it, many also hostile; and it could not survive for a moment if it had not learned to give the one sort a wide berth while freely mixing with the other. It is, to be sure, sensation that enables each creature to recognize both kinds; but the acts of seizing or pursuing that ensue upon the perception of what is beneficial, as well as the eluding or fleeing of what is destructive or painful, could by no means occur in creatures naturally incapable of some sort of reasoning and judging, remembering and attending. Those beings, then, which you deprive of all expectation, memory, design, or preparation, and of all hopes, fears, desires, or griefs - they will have no use for eyes or ears either, even though they have them. Indeed, it would be better to be rid of all sensation and imagination that has nothing to make use of it, rather than to know toil and distress and pain while not possessing any means of averting them.AUTOBULUS.
But let us grant that sensation needs no help of intelligence to perform its own function; nevertheless, when the perception that has caused an animal to distinguish between what is friendly and what is hostile is gone, what is it that from this time on remembers the distinction, fears the painful, and wants the beneficial ? And, if what it wants is not there, what is there in animals that devises means of acquiring it and providing lairs and hiding-places - both traps for prey and places of refuge from attackers ? And yet those very authors 5 rasp our ears by repeatedly defining in their Introductions 6 purpose as an indication of intent to complete, design as an impulse before an impulse, preparation as an act before an act, and memory as an apprehension of a proposition in the past tense of which the present tense has been apprehended by perception. 7 For there is not one of these terms that does not belong to logic; and the acts are all present in all animals as, of course, are cognitions which, while inactive, they call notions, but when they are once put into action, concepts. And though they admit that emotions one and all are false judgements and seeming truths, 8 it is extraordinary that they obviously fail to note many things that animals do and many of their movements that show anger or fear or, so help me, envy or jealousy. They themselves punish dogs and horses that make mistakes, not idly but to discipline them; they are creating in them through pain a feeling of sorrow, which we call repentance.De sollertia animalium. Plutarch. Harold Cherniss (Translator), William C. Helmbold (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1957.
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