Platonicae quaestiones

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals, Vol. V. Goodwin, William W., editor; Brown, R., translator. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company; Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1874.

HOW COMES IT TO PASS THAT IN PHAEDRUS IT IS SAID, THAT THE NATURE OF A WING, BY WHICH ANY THING THAT IS HEAVY IS CARRIED UPWARDS, PARTICIPATES MOST OF THE BODY OF GOD?[*](See Phaedrus, p. 246 D.)

Is it because the discourse is of love, and love is of beauty inherent in a body? Now beauty, by similitude to things divine, moves and reminds the soul. Or it may be (without too much curiosity) he may be understood in plain meaning, to wit, that the several faculties of the soul being employed about bodies, the power of reasoning and understanding partakes most about divine and heavenly things; which he did not impertinently call a wing, it raising the soul from mean and mortal things to things above.

IN WHAT SENSE DOES PLATO SAY, THAT THE ANTIPERISTASIS (OR REACTION) OF MOTION—BY REASON THERE IS NO VACUUM—IS THE CAUSE OF THE EFFECTS IN PHYSICIANS’ CUPPING-GLASSES, IN SWALLOWING, IN THROWING OF WEIGHTS, IN THE RUNNING OF WATER, IN THUNDER, IN THE ATTRACTION OF THE LOADSTONE, AND IN THE HARMONY OF SOUNDS?[*](See Timaeus, pp. 79-81.)

For it seems unreasonable to ascribe the reason of such different effects to the selfsame cause.

How respiration is made by the reaction of the air,

he has sufficiently shown. But the rest, he says, seem to be done miraculously, but really the bodies thrust each other aside and change places with one another; while he has left for us to determine how each is particularly done.

As to cupping-glasses, the case is thus: the air next to the flesh being comprehended and inflamed by the heat, and being made more rare than the pores of the brass, does not go into a vacuum (for there is no such thing), but into the air that is without the cupping-glass, and has an impulse upon it. This air drives that before it; and each, as it gives way, strives to succeed into the place which was vacuated by the cession of the first. And so the air approaching the flesh comprehended by the cupping-glass, and exciting it, draws the humors into the cupping-glass.