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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 56

Chapter 56 · Touch

On touch.²⁰⁴⁶

1.1 · The body between flesh and object

⟨Didymus.⟩

Aristotle. We perceive by touch through the body between the flesh and what is touched. Such a body is ⟨either⟩ air or water, or something common to both.²⁰⁴⁷

1.2 · Why the medium goes unnoticed

In taste and touch this goes unnoticed because the process does not occur over a long distance, as it does in the case of things seen, heard, and smelled.²⁰⁴⁸

1.3 · The first mover of bodily action

As for the capacity for movement from place to place, which we called the impulsive capacity, its first mover is unmoved, both in us and in the other animals.²⁰⁴⁹

2046.The heading is transmitted in the margin of F and in the text of P, and also occurs in the Laurentian collection. Unlike the preceding three chapter headings, it is not described here as an editorial restoration. The chapter contains one excerpt, whose final sentence turns from contact perception to the origin of bodily movement.

2047.The supplied attribution identifies Didymus, Physics fragment 17, Diels p. 456. The printed tou haptou, what is touched, is Diels’s correction of the manuscript wording. Meineke supplied ē ton before air; either conveys the conjunction, while the Greek article needs no separate English word. The final alternative is left as something common to both, without specifying its composition.

2048.The intervening medium or its action is understood as what goes unnoticed. The explanation contrasts the short distance involved in touch and taste with the greater separation possible in the other three senses; it does not deny a medium in the former two.

2049.Hormētikon denotes the capacity for impulse or impetus to action. The phrase which we called points back to a discussion outside this short excerpt. The statement concerns the source of animal locomotion; it is not expanded into a claim about a cosmic first mover. This completes chapter 56 at printed p. 496 line 23.