על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר א ס״אOn the Special Laws, Book I 61
א׳
1[333] The banishment is extended to a fourth and a fifth class also. Both these seek the same goal but have different plans for attaining it. Both classes are votaries of the pestilent vice of self-assertion, but have treated the soul, which is a whole consisting of two parts, the rational and irrational, as if it were a property shared by two persons, and have partitioned it out between them. One class has taken as its portion the rational part, that is the mind, the other has taken the irrational, which is subdivided into the senses.
ב׳
2[334] The champions of mind ascribe to it the leadership and sovereignty of human affairs, and aver that it is competent to preserve the past by means of memory, to gain a firm apprehension of the present, and to envisage and calculate the future by prognostication of what may be expected.
ג׳
3[335] It is mind, they say, which sowed and planted the deep and fertile soil in the uplands and lowlands and so greatly enriched human life by the invention of agriculture. It is mind which constructed a ship, and by devices admirable beyond description turned what was naturally dry land into a waterway, opened up in the sea routes whose many branches serve as highways to the havens and roadsteads of the different states, and made the inhabitants of the mainland and those of the islands known to each other, who would never have met if a vessel had not been built. It is mind which discovered the mechanical and the finer arts, as they are called, which devised,
ד׳
4[336] fostered and brought to their consummation letters and numbers and music and the whole range of school studies. Mind too was the parent of philosophy, the greatest of blessings, and employed each part of it to benefit human life, the logical to produce absolute exactitude of language, the ethical for the amelioration of character, the physical to give knowledge of heaven and the universe. And besides these they collect and accumulate in honour of mind a vast number of tributes to the same effect as those already mentioned, with which we have no occasion to trouble ourselves now.