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YEAR 1782
ON PLATO’S MAN
Plato recognized three faculties in man: one intellectual, whose seat was in the head; another sensitive, which had its dwelling in the heart and the viscera surrounding it; and the last appetitive, which resides in the groin and the intestines,
He added that wisdom, moral goodness, consisted in giving each of these faculties no other place in our conduct than the one that fell to it by nature; that is to say, a man is neither good nor wise whose reason does not govern his affections and whose affections do not govern his appetites.
He then described corporeal man in detail and demonstrated in every part of his structure an evident design, an end, a destination.
See, he said, how soft the human brain is. This is because it is a resting place where notions of things must, as it were, come and sit down as on a cushion.
The lungs are neighbors to the heart so as to receive its overflow when it is swollen with anger or some other violent passion. On these dangerous occasions they receive the neck of the heart within them. Their softness makes them suited to this, their dryness prepares them for it, and their natural coolness, which tempers its excessive ardor, makes them beneficial to their neighbor.
The spleen is a neighbor to the liver so as to relieve it by frequently drawing off its excess moisture, and, when the time comes, to pour these humors back into it, purer and healthier. Within its bounds, the belly offers an open space where the bowels can turn and turn again at ease. By their knots and their membrane, the bowels establish a dividing wall between liquid and solid food. These would putrefy if mixed; they travel and remain apart, and during their stay they let everything they contain that is useful and necessary for nourishing the body that has received them be pressed out of them.
The feet, the hands, etc., are accessories in the human body, instruments rather than parts. The hair, the eyebrows, etc., are lesser accessories still, furnishings of convenience, so to speak, a wise luxury of nature.
It is through the veins that life circulates. Those that serve generation begin in the head, pass through the loins, and end in the groin.
It is in the liver that the reservoir of blood lies. There the nourishing juices pressed from food are brought together; they are worked upon and transformed in the liver, become blood, and are distributed through an infinity of channels throughout the body.
It is the balance of the dry, the moist, the cold, and the hot that makes health, goodness, and beauty in man. If any one of these qualities predominates, man is vitiated, corrupted, deformed, altered, and dies.
Man is healthy as long as reason governs; he is ill as soon as it yields to either of the two animal parts.
Man’s head is the whole man. It is there that our principal senses have their unchanging place in the empire of reason. The eye is bright; its object is light. Hearing is hollow; its medium is air. Taste is soft, blunt; it must act upon moist things. Touch is solid; it is made for what is hard, for what is body.
And smell, destined to judge corrupted bodies (for every kind of odor is caused by some alteration in the odorous body; in its native integrity no body gives off an odor) Smell has two vents, the two nostrils, one of which breathes out what the other has drawn in. Admirable constitution of this sense, without which it could not have acted without harming us! For at every experiment it made to discover a danger, it would have done harm, if the corrupted particles it introduces into us had had no outlet by which to leave us as quickly as they had entered us, etc.
In 1782.