Plato agreed with physiologists in making the seat of the senses to be the liver and neighbourhood of the heart, but he differed from Aristotle in believing the brain to be continuous with the spinal chord, and to be the source of the intellectual faculties. He held the brain, in fact, to be the seat if not the source of the higher faculties, while he assigned the appetites and coarser passions to the viscera. Hippocrates[1], who lived some years before him, assigns to the brain the guardianship of the mind, and makes it to be not only the first percipient of all the changes of the seasons, but also the source and seat of all the more deadly and complicated maladies.
Note 3, p. 126. It may be questioned, &c.] The argument, in these passages, is to account for the changes which are constantly going on in bodies, and for which that age could assign no adequate cause; but still it was perceived that tangible and sapid qualities (hot and cold, wet and dry, acid, saline, astringent, and others) must be the agents principally concerned in their production. Thus, although neither light nor darkness, sound nor odour, can act upon bodies, yet something present with them may, and this seems to point, suggestively, to those imponderable and invisible forces (heat, magnetism, electricity, &c.), for which, as yet, even "no plausible theory has been adopted."
Note 4, p. 126. But all bodies are not impressionable, &c.] These passages are very obscure; but their purport
- ↑ Epistola, T. iii. 824; T. i. 614.
