מי יורש קנייני אלוה נ׳Who is the Heir of Divine Things 50
א׳
1[243] Moses also brings before us a thought of profound truth in teaching us that justice and every virtue love the soul, while injustice and every vice love the body; that what is friendly to the one is utterly hostile to the other—a lesson given in this passage as elsewhere. For in a figure he pictures the enemies of the soul as birds, eager to intertwine and ingraft themselves in bodies and to glut themselves with flesh, and it is to restrain the onsets and inroads of such that the man of worth is said to sit down in their company (Gen. 15:11), like a chairman or president of a council.
ב׳
2[244] History tells us how when discord reigned at home through civil faction, or hostile bands were at variance, such a one would summon a council of all concerned and investigate the points of difference, that if possible he might by his powers of persuasion make an end of the external war or put down the civil commotion. In the one case he would scatter abroad the foes who rushed in irreconcilable hatred like a storm cloud, in the other he would restore the old feeling of intimate kinship—each a useful work.
ג׳
3[245] Now the list of deadly and irreconcilable enemies of the soul comprises its follies, its acts of cowardice and injustice and all the other irrational lusts so constantly born of over-abundant appetite, which prance and struggle against the yoke and hinder the straight onward course of the understanding, and often rend and overthrow its whole frame.
ד׳
4[246] But with those who might be allies the causes of offence are such as we find in the wranglings of the sophists on questions of dogma. In so far as their minds are fixed on one end to discover the facts of nature, they may be said to be friends, but in that they do not agree in their solutions of particular problems they may be said to be engaged in civil strife. Thus those who declare the universe to be uncreated are at strife with those who maintain its creation; those who say that it will be destroyed with those who declare that though by nature destructible it will never be destroyed, being held together by a bond of superior strength, namely the will of its Maker; those who maintain that nothing is, but all things become, with those who hold the opposite opinion; those who argue at length that man is the measure of all things with those who make havoc of the judgement-faculty of both sense and mind; and, to put it generally, those who maintain that everything is beyond our apprehension with those who assert that a great number of things are cognizable.
ה׳
5[247] And indeed sun and moon and the whole heaven, also earth and air and water and practically all that they produce, have been the cause of strife and contention to the inquirers when they probe into their essential natures and qualities, their changes and phases, the processes by which they come into being and finally cease to be. For as to the magnitude and movement of the heavenly bodies with all their absorbing research they come to different and conflicting opinions, until the man-midwife who is also the judge takes his seat in their midst and observes the brood of each disputant’s soul, throws away all that is not worth rearing, but saves what is worth saving and approves it for such careful treatment as is required.
ו׳
6[248] The history of philosophy is full of discordance, because truth flees from the credulous mind which deals in conjecture. It is her nature to elude discovery and pursuit, and it is this which in my opinion produces these scientific quarrellings.
