Date: 360 B.C.
"For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself."
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: 360-355 B.C.
"Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend men and not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labour, and not after their bodies: and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man b...
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: 360-355 B.C.
"Let us call it the gift of the Muses' mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring."
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: 360-355 B.C.
"When a man has in his mind a good thick slab of wax, smooth and kneaded to the right consistency, and the impressions that come through the senses are stamped on these tables of the 'heart'--Homer's word hints at the mind's likeness to wax--then the imprints are clear and deep enough to last a l...
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: 355-347 B.C.
"Would you have us raise a laugh by express statutes directing the pregnant mother to take constitutionals, to mold her infant, when she has borne it, like so much wax while it is still plastic, and to keep it swaddled for its first two years? "
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: w. 350 B.C.
The soul "is substance in the sense which corresponds to the definitive formula of a thing's essence."
preview | full record— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Date: w. 350 B.C.
"Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice, it being only by a metaphor that we speak of the voice of a flute or the lyre or generally of what (being without soul) possesses the power of producing a succession of notes which differ i...
preview | full record— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Date: w. 350 B.C.
"It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things."
preview | full record— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Date: w. 350 B.C.
"The process [of thinking] is like that in which the air modifies the pupil in this or that way and the pupil transmits the modification to some third thing (and similarly in hearing), while the ultimate point of arrival is one, a single mean, with different manners of being."
preview | full record— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Date: w. 350 B.C.
"This is what led Democritus to say that soul is a sort of fire or hot substance; his 'forms' or atoms are infinite in number; those which are spherical he calls fire and soul, and compares them to the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows."
preview | full record— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)