Plutarch, De amore prolis
Goodwin, Ed.

APPEALS to foreign judicatures first came in request among the Grecians out of their distrust of one another's justice, they deeming it as requisite to fetch justice from abroad, as any other necessary commodity which was not of their own growth. And is it not even so that philosophers, by reason of dissensions amongst themselves, have in the decision of some questions appealed to the nature of irrational beings, as to a strange city, and have submitted the final determination of such questions to the affections or to the dispositions of brutes, as being unbiassed and not corrupted by bribes? Or else this is the general complaint of human frailty, that while we differ about the most necessary and the greatest things, we consult horses, dogs, and birds, how we should marry, beget children, and bring them up; and, as if the evidence of Nature in ourselves were not to be trusted, we appeal to the dispositions and affections of brute beasts, and testify against the manifold transgressions of our own lives, intimating how at the very first and in the first things we are confounded and disturbed. For Nature conserves the propriety in them pure, unmixed, and simple; but in men, the mixture of ascititious opinions and judgments (as oil is served by the druggists) alters the properties, and does not preserve what is their peculiar. Nor need we wonder if irrational animals [p. 190] follow Nature more than rational; for plants do it more than animals, for they have neither imagination nor passion for what is not according to Nature, but are bound in chains, and ever go that one way that Nature leads them. Brutes do little regard gentleness, wit, or liberty; they have indeed the use of irrational incitements and appetites, which put them upon wandering and running about,—but seldom far, for they seem to lie at the anchor of Nature, who guides them in the right way (as it were) by bit and bridle. But reason, the lord and master in man, finds sometimes one turning, sometimes another; but in all its wanderings leaves no mark or footstep of Nature.