Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  Our makers fitted the mouth out with teeth, a tongue and lips in their [e] current arrangement, to accommodate both what is necessary and what is best: they designed the mouth as the entry passage for what is necessary, and as the exit for what is best: for all that comes in and provides nourishment for the body is necessary, while that stream of speech that flows out through the mouth, that instrument of intelligence, is the fairest and best of all streams.

  Moreover, the head couldn’t be left to consist of nothing but bare bone, in view of the extremes of seasonal heat and cold. On the other hand, any mass of flesh with which it might be veiled couldn’t be allowed to make [76] it dull and insensitive, either. And so, an outer layer, disproportionately large (the thing we now call “skin”), was separated off from the flesh [of the upper body] that wasn’t drying out completely. The moisture in the area of the brain enabled this layer to draw together toward itself and grow so as to envelop the head all around. Coming up under the sutures, this moisture watered it, and closed it together upon the crown, drawing it together in a knot, as it were. The sutures varied considerably, owing to the effect of the revolutions [in the head]39 and of the nourishment taken: the greater the conflict among these revolutions, the more numerous the [b] sutures—the lesser the conflict, the less numerous they were.

  Now the divine part [the brain] began to puncture this whole area of skin all around with its fire. Once the skin was pierced and the moisture had exuded outward through it, all that was purely wet and hot went away. The part that was compounded of the same stuff that the skin was made up of, caught up by this motion, was stretched to a great length outside this skin, no thicker than the punctured hole [through which it passed]. However, it moved slowly, and so the surrounding air pushed it [c] back inside to curl underneath the skin and take root there. This is the process by which hair has come to grow on the skin. Hair is something fibrous, made of the same stuff as the skin, though harder and more dense due to the felting effect of the cooling process: once a hair separates off from skin, it is cooled and so gets felted together.

  With this stuff, then, our maker made our heads bushy, availing himself of the causal factors just described. His intention was that this, not bare flesh, ought to provide a protective covering for the part of the head that [d] holds the brain: it was light, and just right for providing shade in summer, and shelter in winter, without obstructing or interfering with the head’s sensitivity in any way.

  Sinew, skin and bone were interwoven at the ends of our fingers and toes. The mixture of these three was dried out, resulting in the formation of a single stuff, a piece of hard skin, the same in every case. Now these were merely auxiliary causes in its formation—the preeminent cause of its production was the purpose that took account of future generations: our creators understood that one day women and the whole realm of wild [e] beasts would one day come to be from men, and in particular they knew that many of these offspring would need the use of nails and claws or hoofs for many purposes.40 This is why they took care to include nails formed in a rudimentary way in their design for humankind, right at the start. This was their reason, then, and these the professed aims that guided them in making skin, hair and nails grow at the extremities of our limbs.

  So all the parts, all the limbs of the mortal living thing came to constitute a natural whole. Of necessity, however, it came about that he lived his life [77] surrounded by fire and air, which caused him to waste away and be depleted, and so to perish. The gods, therefore, devised something to protect him. They made another mixture and caused another nature to grow, one congenial to our human nature though endowed with other features and other sensations, so as to be a different living thing. These are now cultivated trees, plants and seeds, taught by the art of agriculture to be domesticated for our use. But at first the only kinds there were were [b] wild ones, older than our cultivated kinds. We may call these plants “living things” on the ground that anything that partakes of life has an incontestable right to be called a “living thing.”41 And in fact, what we are talking about now partakes of the third type of soul, the type that our account has situated between the midriff and the navel. This type is totally devoid of opinion, reasoning or understanding, though it does share in sensation, pleasant and painful, and desires. For throughout its existence it is completely passive, and its formation has not entrusted it with a natural ability to discern and reflect upon any of its own characteristics, by revolving within and about itself, repelling movement from without and exercising [c] its own inherent movement. Hence it is alive, to be sure, and unmistakably a living thing, but it stays put, standing fixed and rooted, since it lacks self-motion.

  All these varieties were planted by our masters, to whom we are subject, to nourish us. Having done that, they proceeded to cut channels throughout our bodies, like water pipes in a garden, so that our bodies could be irrigated, as it were, by an oncoming stream. First, they cut two blood [d] veins, channels hidden underneath the skin where the flesh joins it, to go down either side of the back—the body is a twofold thing, with a right and a left side. They situated these veins alongside the spine, and between them they placed the life-giving marrow as well, to give it its best chance to flourish, and to allow the bloodstream, which courses downhill, to flow readily from this region and uniformly irrigate the other parts of the body. [e] They next split these veins in the region of the head, and wove them through one another, crossing them in opposite directions. They diverted the veins from the right toward the left side of the body, and those from the left toward the right, so that they, together with the skin, would act as a bond to keep the head fastened to the body, seeing that there were no sinews attached to the crown to enclose the head all around. They did this especially to make sure that the stimulations received by the senses, coming from either side of the body, might register clearly upon the body as a whole.

  From here the gods proceeded to fashion the irrigation system in the [78] following way. We’ll come to see it more easily if we can first agree on this point: whatever is made up of smaller parts holds in larger parts, while what consists of larger parts is incapable of holding in smaller parts. Of all the elemental kinds, fire is made up of the smallest parts, and that is the reason it can pass through water, earth and air, and any of their compounds. Nothing can hold it in. Now we must apply the same point [b] to our belly. When food and drink descend into it, it holds them in, but it cannot hold in air and fire, consisting as they do of smaller parts than it does. And so the god availed himself of fire and air to conduct moisture from the belly to the [two] veins. He wove together an interlaced structure of air and fire, something like a fish trap. At its entrance it had a pair of funnels, one of which in turn he subdivided into two. And from the funnels he stretched reeds, as it were, all around throughout the structure, right [c] to its extremities. All the interior parts of this network he made of fire; the funnels and the shell he made of air.

  He took this structure and set it around the living thing which he had fashioned, in the following way. The funnel part he inserted into the mouth, and, consisting as it did of two funnels, he let one of them descend into the lungs down the windpipe, and the other alongside the windpipe into the belly. He made a split in the first one and assigned each of its parts a common outlet by way of the nostrils, so that when the one part fails to [d] provide passage by way of the mouth, all of its currents also might be replenished from that one. The shell, the other part of the trap, he made to grow around the hollow part of the body, and he made this whole thing now flow together onto the funnels [compressing them]—gently, because they are made of air—now, when the funnels flow back [expanding again], he made the interlaced structure sink into and through the body—a relatively porous thing—and pass outside again.42 The interior rays of fire [inside the shell], bound from side to side, he made to follow the air as it passed in both directions. This process was to go on non-stop for as long [e] as the mortal living thing holds together; and this, of cours
e, is the phenomenon to which the name-giver (so we claim) assigned the names of inhalation and exhalation. This entire pattern of action and reaction, irrigating and cooling our bodies, supports their nutrition and life. For whenever the internal fire, united with the breath that passes in or out, follows it along, it surges up and down continually and makes its way through and into the belly, where it gets hold of the food and drink. These it dissolves or [79] breaks up into tiny parts, which it then takes through the outbound passages along which it is advancing, and transfers them into the [two] veins, as water from a spring is transferred into water pipes. And so it causes the currents of the veins to flow through the body as through a conduit.

  Let us, however, take another look at what happens in respiration. What explains its having the character that it now actually has? It is this. Since [b] there is no void into which anything that is moving could enter, and since the air we breathe out does move out, away from us, it clearly follows that this air doesn’t move into a void, but pushes the air next to it out of its place. As this air is pushed out, it drives out the air next to it, and so on, and so inevitably the air, displaced all around, enters the place from which the original air was breathed out and refills that place, following hard on the breath. This all takes place at once, like the rotation of a wheel, [c] because there is no such thing as a void. Consequently even as the breath is being discharged, the area of the chest and the lungs fills up again with the air that surrounds the body, air that goes through the cycle of displacement and penetrates the porous flesh. And again, when the air is turned back and passes outward through the body, it comes round to push respiration inward by way of the mouth and the nostrils.

  How did these processes get started? The explanation, we must suppose, is this: in the case of every living thing, its inner parts that are close to [d] the blood and the veins are its hottest parts—an inner spring of fire inside it, as it were. This, of course, is what we’ve been comparing to the interlaced structure of a fish trap; it is entirely woven of fire, we said, and extended throughout its middle, while the rest of it, the external parts, are woven of air. Now it is beyond dispute that what is hot has a natural tendency to move outward into its own proper region, toward that which is akin to it. In this case there are two passages out, one out through [the pores of] the body, and the other out through the mouth and nose. So whenever [e] hot air rushes out the one passage, it pushes air around into the other, and the air so pushed around gets hot as it encounters the fire, while the air that passes out is cooled down. Now as the temperature changes and the air that enters by way of one or the other of the passages gets hotter, the hotter air is more inclined to return by way of the passage it entered, since it moves toward what is like itself, and so it pushes air around to and through the other passage. This air is affected the same way, and produces the same effect every time; and so, due to both these principles it produces an oscillation back and forth, thereby providing for inhalation and exhalation to occur.

  In this connection we should pursue along these lines an inquiry into [80] the causes of the phenomena associated with medical cupping, and of swallowing, as well as of the motion of all projectiles that are dispatched into the air and along the ground. We should also investigate all sounds, whether fast or slow—sounds that appear to us as high pitched or low. Sometimes, when the motion they produce in us as they move towards us lacks conformity, these sounds are inharmonious; at other times, when the motion does have conformity, the sounds are harmonious. [What happens in the latter case is this.] The slower sounds catch up with the motions [b] of the earlier and quicker sounds as these are already dying away and have come to a point of conformity with the motions produced by the slower sounds that travel later. In catching up with them, the slower sounds do not upset them, even though they introduce another motion. On the contrary, they graft onto the quicker movement, now dying away, the beginning of a slower one that conforms to it, and so they produce a single effect, a mixture of high and low. Hence the pleasure they bring to fools and the delight they afford—by their expression of divine harmony in mortal movement—to the wise.

  [c] And what is more, every kind of water current, even the descent of a thunderbolt as well as that marvellous “attraction” exercised by amber and by the lodestone, in all these cases there is no such thing as a force of attraction. As any careful investigator will discover, there is no void; these things push themselves around into each other; all things move by exchanging places, each to its own place, whether in the process of combination or of dissolution. He will discover that these “works of wizardry” are due to the interactive relationships among these phenomena.

  [d] The phenomenon of respiration, which provided the occasion for this account, is a case in point. The above are the principles and causes to which it owes its existence, as we have said before. The fire cuts up the food [in our bellies] and as it follows the breath it oscillates inside us. As the oscillation goes on, the fire pumps the cut-up bits of food from the belly and packs them into the veins. This is the mechanism by which the streams of nourishment continue to flow throughout the bodies of all living things. The bits of food, freshly cut up and derived from things like [e] themselves—from fruits or from vegetables which the god had caused to grow for this very purpose, to serve us as food—come to have a variety of colors as a result of being mixed together, but a reddish color pervading them predominates, a character that is the product of the cutting and staining action of fire upon moisture. This is why the color of the liquid that flows in our bodies looks the way we’ve described; this liquid we call blood, which feeds our flesh and indeed our whole bodies. From this source [81] the various parts of our bodies are watered and so replenish the supports of the depleted areas. Now both processes, the replenishment and the depletion, follow the manner of the movement of anything within the universe at large: everything moves toward that which is of its own kind. In this case, our external environment continually wastes us away and distributes our bulk by dispatching each [elemental] kind toward its own sort. The ingredients in our blood, then, having been chopped up inside us and encompassed by the individual living thing as by the frame of the [b] universe, of necessity imitate the universe’s motion. And so, as each of the fragmented parts inside moves toward its own kind, it replenishes once again the area just then depleted. In every case, whenever there is more leaving a body than flowing in [to replenish it], it diminishes; whenever less, the body grows. So while a living thing’s constitution is still young, and its elemental triangles are “fresh from the slips,” as it were, the triangles are firmly locked together, even though the frame of its entire mass is pliable, seeing that it has just lately been formed from marrow [c] and nourished with milk. Now when the triangles that constitute the young living thing’s food and drink enter its body from the outside and are enveloped within it, the body’s own new triangles cut and prevail over these others, which are older and weaker than they are. The living thing is thus nourished by an abundance of like parts, and so made to grow big. But when the roots of the triangles are slackened as a result of numerous conflicts they have waged against numerous adversaries over a long period of time, they are no longer able to cut up the entering food-triangles into [d] conformity with themselves. They are themselves handily destroyed by the invaders from outside. Every living thing, then, goes into decline when it loses this battle, and it suffers what we call “old age.” Eventually the interlocking bonds of the triangles around the marrow can no longer hold on, and come apart under stress, and when this happens they let the bonds of the soul go. The soul is then released in a natural way, and finds it pleasant to take its flight. All that is unnatural, we recall, is painful while [e] all that occurs naturally is pleasant. This is true of death as well: a death that is due to disease or injury is painful and forced, while a death that comes naturally, when the aging process has run its course, is of all deaths the least distressing—a pleasant, not a painful death.

  How disease
s originate is, I take it, obvious to all. Given that there are [82] four kinds of stuff out of which the body has been constructed—earth, fire, water and air—it may happen that some of these unnaturally increase themselves at the expense of the others. Or they may switch regions, each leaving its own and moving into another’s region. Or again, since there is in fact more than one variety of fire and the other stuffs, it may happen that a given bodily part accommodates a particular variety that is not appropriate for it. When these things happen, they bring on conflicts and diseases. For when any of these unnatural occurrences and changes take [b] place, bodily parts that used to be cold become hot, or those that are dry go on to become moist, and so with light and heavy, too. They undergo all sorts of changes in all sorts of ways. Indeed, it is our view that only when that which arrives at or leaves a particular bodily part is the same as that part, consistent, uniform and in proper proportion with it, will the body be allowed to remain stable, sound and healthy. On the other hand, anything that causes offense by passing beyond these bounds as it arrives or departs will bring on a multiplicity of altered states, and an infinity of diseases and degenerations.