על החלומות, ספר א י׳On Dreams, Book I 10
א׳
1[52] The information that Terah left the land of Chaldaea and migrated to Haran, taking with him his son Abraham and his kindred, is given us not with the object that we may learn as from a writer of history, that certain people became emigrants, leaving the land of their ancestors, and making a foreign land their home and country, but that a lesson well suited to man and of great service to human life may not be neglected.
ב׳
2[53] What is this lesson? The Chaldaeans are astronomers, while the citizens of Haran busy themselves with the place of the senses. Accordingly Holy Writ addresses to the explorer of the facts of nature certain questions—“Why do you carry on investigations about the sun, as to whether it is a foot indiameter, whether it is larger than the whole earth, whether it is many times its size ? And about the illuminations of the moon, whether it has a borrowed light, or whether it employs one entirely its own? And why do you search into the nature of the other heavenly bodies, or into their revolutions or the ways in which they affect each other and affect earthly things?
ג׳
3[54] And why, treading as you do on earth, do you leap over the clouds? And why do you say that you are able to lay hold of what is in the upper air, when you are rooted to the ground? Why do you venture to determine the indeterminate? And why are you so busy with what you ought to leave alone, the things above? And why do you extend even to the heavens your learned ingenuity? Why do you take up astronomy and pay such full and minute attention to the higher regions? Mark, my friend, not what is above and beyond your reach but what is close to yourself, or rather make yourself the object of your impartial scrutiny.
ד׳
4[55] What form, then, will your scrutiny take? Go in spirit to Haran, ‘excavated’ land, the openings and cavities of the body, and hold an inspection of eyes, ears, nostrils, and the other organs of sense, and engage in a course of philosophy most vital and most fitting to a human being. Try to find out what sight is, what hearing is, what taste, smell, touch are: in a word what sense-perception is. Next, ask what it is to see and how you see, what it is to hear and how you hear, what it is to smell or taste or handle, and how each function is habitually performed.
ה׳
5[56] But before you have made a thorough investigation into your own tenement, is it not an excess of madness to examine that of the universe? And there is a weightier charge which I do not as yet lay upon you, namely to see your own soul and the mind of which you think so proudly: I say ‘see,’ for to comprehend it you will never be able.
ו׳
6[57] Go to! Mount to heaven and brag of what you see there, you who have not yet attained to the knowledge of that of which the poet speaks in the line
ז׳
7All that existeth of good and of ill in the halls of thy homestead.” But bring the explorer down from heaven and away from these researches draw the “Know thyself,” and then lavish the same careful toil on this too, in order that you may enjoy the happiness proper to man.
ח׳
8[58] This character Hebrews call “Terah,” Greeks “Socrates.” For they say that “Know thyself” was likewise the theme of life-long pondering to Socrates, and that his philosophy was concerned exclusively with his own self. Socrates, however, was a human being, while Terah was self-knowledge itself, a way of thinking set before us as a tree of great luxuriance, to the end that lovers of virtue might find it easy, as they pluck the fruit of moral knowledge, to take their fill of nourishment saving and most sweet.
ט׳
9[59] Such do we find those to be whose part it is to explore good sense: but more perfect than theirs is the nature with which those are endowed who train themselves to engage in the contest for it. These, when they have thoroughly learned in all its details the whole study of the sense-perceptions, claim it as their prerogative to advance to some other greater object of contemplation, leaving behind them those lurking-places of sense-perception, to which the name of Haran is given.
י׳
10[60] Among these is Abraham who gained much progress and improvement towards the acquisition of the highest knowledge: for when most he knew himself, then most did he despair of himself, in order that he might attain to an exact knowledge of Him Who in reality IS. And this is nature’s law: he who has thoroughly comprehended himself, thoroughly despairs of himself self, having as a step to this ascertained the nothingness in all respects of created being. And the man who has despaired of himself is beginning to know Him that IS.