On the Natural Faculties.

On the Natural Faculties.
By Galen
Translated by: A.J. Brock
Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press 1916


Digital Hippocrates Collection Table of Contents



ON THE NATURAL FACULTIES Book I
   PART 1
   PART 2
   PART 3
   PART 4
   PART 5
   PART 6
   PART 7
   PART 8
   PART 9
   PART 10
   PART 11
   PART 12
   PART 13
   PART 14
   PART 15
   PART 16
   PART 17

BOOK TWO
   PART 1
   PART 2
   PART 3
   PART 4
   PART 5
   PART 6
   PART 7
   PART 8
   PART 9

BOOK THREE
   PART 1
   PART 2
   PART 3
   PART 4
   PART 5
   PART 6
   PART 7
   PART 8
   PART 9
   PART 10
   PART 11
   PART 12
   PART 13
   PART 14
   PART 15


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ON THE NATURAL FACULTIES Book I

PART 12

 [p. 47]what is foreign. Further, she skilfully moulds everything during the stage of genesis; and she also provides for the creatures after birth, employing here other faculties again, namely, one of affection and forethought for offspring, and one of sociability and friendship for kindred. According to the other school, none of these things exist in the natures [of living things], nor is there in the soul any original innate idea, whether of agreement or difference, of separation or synthesis, of justice or injustice, of the beautiful or ugly; all such things, they say, arise in us from sensation and through sensation, and animals are steered by certain images and memories.

Some of these people have even expressly declared that the soul possesses no reasoning faculty, but that we are led like cattle by the impression of our senses, and are unable to refuse or dissent from anything. In their view, obviously, courage, wisdom, temperance, and self-control are all mere nonsense, we do not love either each other or our offspring, nor do the gods care anything for us. This school also despises dreams, birds, omens, and the whole of astrology, subjects with which we have dealt at greater length in another work,
A lost work.
in which we discuss the views of Asclepiades the physician.
For Asclepiades v. p. 49, note 5.
Those who wish to do so may familiarize themselves with these arguments, and they may also consider at this point which of the two roads lying before us is the better one to take. Hippocrates took the first-mentioned. According to this teaching, substance is one and is subject to alteration; there is a consensus in the move-