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including
embryos—the same faculty being present also in the fully-developed organism
(this is more reasonable than to assume a different nutritive faculty in the
latter).
[12]
The excellence of this faculty
therefore appears to be common to all animate things and not peculiar to man; for it is
believed that this faculty or part of the soul is most active during sleep, but when they
are asleep you cannot tell a good man from a bad one (whence the saying that for
half their lives there is no difference between the happy and the miserable).
[13]
This is a natural result of the fact that sleep is a
cessation of the soul from the functions on which its goodness or badness
depends—except that in some small degree certain of the sense-impressions may
reach into soul during sleep, and consequently the dreams of the good are better than
those of ordinary men.
[14]
We need not however pursue this
subject further, but may omit from consideration the nutritive part of the soul, since it
exhibits no specifically human excellence.
[15]
But there also appears to be another element in the soul, which, though irrational, yet
in a manner participates in rational principle. In self-restrained and unrestrained1 people we approve
their principle, or the rational part of their souls, because it urges them in the right
way and exhorts them to the best course; but their nature seems also to contain another
element beside that of rational principle, which combats and resists that principle.
[16]
Exactly the same thing may take place in the soul as
occurs with the body in a case of paralysis: when the patient wills to move his limbs to
the right
1 For these terms see Bk. 7 init.