Philonis Judaei Opera Omnia (Vol. 7)

their own division: as the rational into the mind and into the spoken word; the sensible, however, into four senses: for the fifth, touch, is common to those four. Of these, two, by which we see and hear, are philosophers, so that through them a good life is acquired in us; the others are non-philosophers, smell and taste, they are servile, made for living alone: for smell through olfaction contains more things receiving it and continuous breathing as the continuous food of the living; and taste helps through food and drink. Thus, smell and taste sustain this mortal body, but sight and hearing provide utility to the immortal mind.

These divisions of our members according to body and soul were cut by the Creator. It must be known, however, that the parts of the world are also bipartate and constituted against each other: earth into mountainous and level ground; water into sweet and salt: sweet, for example, that which springs and rivers provide, but salt, that of the sea: just as also the air into winter and summer, likewise into spring and autumn. Hence Heraclitus wrote books on nature, having borrowed opinions from our theologian about contraries, with immense and laborious arguments added.

§. 6. He adumbrates the fifth and periodic nature, from which the elders say the heaven is perfected. For the four elements are mixtures rather than elements; by which he subdivides what is already divided into that (or from that) out of which they are mixed. Just as the earth concludes in itself also of the elements, the watery, the airy, and the fiery, to be called not so much according to apprehension as vision. And water is not so clear and pure, but that it has a participation of wind or earth: thus also in the others there is a tempering