[119]
58. "There is a like error in regard to dreams.
How far-fetched is the argument in their defence!
'Our souls' (according to the view of your school)
' are divine and are derived from an external source;
the universe is filled with a multitude of harmonious
souls; therefore, because of its divinity and its
contact with other souls, the human soul during sleep
foresees what is to come.' But Zeno thinks that sleep
is nothing more than a contraction—a slipping and
a collapse, as it were—of the human soul. Then
Pythagoras and Plato, who are most respectable
authorities, bid us, if we would have trustworthy
dreams, to prepare for sleep by following a prescribed course in conduct and in eating. The Pythagoreans make a point of prohibiting the use of
beans, as if thereby the soul and not the belly was
filled with wind! Somehow or other no statement
is too absurd for some philosophers to make.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
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