"—while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies." Dryden.
Which Milton (Par. L. vii. 502) has paraphrased:
"There wanted yet the master-work, the end
Of all yet done; a creature, who not prone
And 'brute as other creatures, but endued
With sanctity of reason, might erect
His stature, and upright with front serene
Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with heaven."
"Nonne vides hominum ut celsos ad sidera vultus
Sustulerit Deus, et sublimia fluxerit ora,
Cùm pecudes, voluerumque genus, formasque ferarum,
Segnem atque obscoenam passim stravisset in alvum."
"See'st thou not how the Deity has rais'd
The countenance of man erect to heav'n,
Gazing sublime, while prone to earth he bent
Th' inferior tribes, reptiles, and pasturing herds,
And beasts of prey, to appetite enslav'd"
"When Nature," says Cicero, de Legg. i. 9, "had made other animals abject, and consigned them to the pastures, she made man alone upright, and raised him to the contemplation of heaven, as of his birthplace and former abode;" a passage which Dryden seems to have had in his mind when he translated the lines of Ovid cited above. Let us add Juvenal, xv, 146.
"Sensum à coelesti demissum traximus arce,
Cujus egent prona et terram spectantia."
"To us is reason giv'n, of heav'nly birth,
Denied to beasts, that prone regard the earth."
[6] All our power is situate in the mind and in the body—Sed omnis nostra vis in animo et corpore sita. All our power is placed, or consists, in our mind and our body. The particle sed, which is merely a connective, answering to the Greek dé, and which would be useless in an English translation, I have omitted.
[7] Of the mind we—employ the government—Animi imperio—utimur. "What the Deity is in the universe, the mind is in man; what matter is to the universe, the body is to us; let the worse, therefore, serve the better."—Sen. Epist. lxv. Dux et imperator vitae mortalium animus est, the mind is the guide and ruler of the life of mortals. —Jug. c. 1. "An animal consists of mind and body, of which the one is formed by nature to rule, and the other to obey."—Aristot. Polit. i. 5. Muretus and Graswinckel will supply abundance of similar passages.
[8] Of the mind we rather employ the government; of the body, the service—Animi imperio, corporis servitio, magis utimur. The word magis is not to be regarded as useless. "It signifies," says Cortius, "that the mind rules, and the body obeys, in general, and with greater reason." At certain times the body may seem to have the mastery, as when we are under the irresistible influence of hunger or thirst.