Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON THE HEGEMONIKON. [1] First of all: is there some highest grade in the soul, vital and rational — what they call the hegemonikon, that is, the ruling part? For if this is denied, the whole standing of the soul is put in peril. In short, those who deny a ruling part have already, before that, judged the soul itself to be nothing. [2] Some, like Dicaearchus of Messene, and among the physicians Andreas and Asclepiades, have thus done away with a ruling part, by wanting the senses to reside in the mind itself, to which they then claim the primacy belongs. Asclepiades even rides on this argument: that most animals, once the parts of the body in which the ruling part is supposed chiefly to reside have been removed, nonetheless go on living to some degree and perceiving all the same — as flies and wasps and locusts, if you cut off their heads; as goats and tortoises and eels, if you tear out their hearts. Therefore, he says, there is no ruling part — since, had there been one, the vigor of the soul would not have survived the loss of its seat. [3] But against Dicaearchus stand more philosophers — Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle — and against Andreas and Asclepiades stand physicians too — Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself — and now, outnumbering them all, the Christians, who are led by God on both counts: that there is a ruling part in the soul, and that it is consecrated to a fixed seat in the body. [4] For if we read that God is the searcher and scrutinizer of the heart, if his prophet too is proved by disclosing the heart’s hidden things, if God himself, in reviewing the heart, gets ahead of the people — “Why do you think evil things in your hearts?” — and if David likewise says, “Fashion in me a pure heart, O God,” and Paul teaches that faith unto righteousness resides in the heart, and John says that each man is reproved by his own heart, and if, finally, whoever has looked at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart — then both points are made clear at once: that there is a ruling part in the soul, upon which the divine attention converges — that is, the rational and vital power (for what thinks is alive) — and that it is kept in that treasury of the body to which God looks. [5] So that you should not suppose this ruling part to be stirred from outside, as Heraclitus holds, nor blown through the whole body, as Moschion holds, nor shut up in the head, as Plato holds, nor rather presiding at the crown, as Xenocrates holds, nor bedded in the brain, as Hippocrates holds — nor even, as Herophilus holds, around the base of the brain, nor, as Strato and Erasistratus hold, in the little membranes, nor, as Strato the Physicist holds, in the space between the eyebrows, nor, as Epicurus holds, throughout the whole breastplate of the chest — but rather where the Egyptians reported it to be, and those who were reckoned commentators on divine matters, as also that verse of Orpheus, or of Empedocles: “For in man, blood around the heart is thought.” [6] Protagoras too holds this view, and Apollodorus and Chrysippus as well — so that even Asclepiades, blunted by these authorities, may go looking for his goats bleating without a heart and drive off his flies buzzing without a head, and let everyone now know that it is rather those who would model the constitution of the human soul on the condition of beasts who are living without heart and without brain.