Commentary on the First and Second Chapters of the Thirtieth Book of the Natural History of Gaius Plinius Secundus

which sometimes follow sensitive apprehension, then they receive temporal good and evil under the reason of convenience and inconvenience. They are also called animal affections or passions, when they follow rational apprehension, then they look upon good and evil under the reason of virtue and vice, and of praise and blame. They are called rational or voluntary, which follow an apprehension subject to the mind, looking upon good and evil under the reason of the just and unjust, the true and the false. The subject of the soul, however, is the appetitive force of the soul itself, which is divided into the concupiscible and the irascible. Furthermore, when passions follow a sensual (as I might say) apprehension, they have a regitive force. Furthermore, the imaginative virtue, with a double power, transforms in diverse ways toward the diversity of passions, and (to use a word passed over by philosophers, though not indeed a Latin one) alters the body: the body, I say, its own, by sensible transmutation, either outward or inward, producing and impressing diverse qualities upon the members. Thus in joy spirits are excelled: in fear, however, they are withdrawn: in shame, they are moved: thus one dies from excessive joy: in a comparable manner from too profuse sadness, provided that these perturbations are vehement and intense. For these not only transform one's own body, but sometimes another's, by way of imitation, namely by a certain virtue which the similarity of a thing has to transform the thing which a vehement imagination moves, as in stupor, and the freezing of teeth and their gnashing, or the attrition of iron against iron which generates stupor in the teeth: as yawning promotes yawning. For imagination of this kind has not a little effect. Likewise, perturbations or passions, which follow the Phantasy, can vehemently transcend not only one's own but also another's body, and so change it that wonderful impressions can be produced in the elements, and likewise in extrinsic things, and thus certain diseases can be curable without the aid of medicine. There is certainly in man