MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IITH AND 12TH CENTURIES 85 



The treatise On the Nature of Man by Nemesius, Bishop of 

 Emesa, probably written toward the end of the fourth century 

 A. D., was strongly influenced by the medical theories of Galen. 

 Nemesius presents man as a conjunction of natures or functions, 

 ranging from the inanimate and the irrational to the rational, 

 combining the visible and the invisible, and giving evidence 

 both of the elements of which he is composed and of the con- 

 junctive union in man and in the universe, in both the lesser 

 and the greater world, from which the Creator can be inferred. 

 Man shares properties with inanimate things, life with animate 

 beings, and knowledge with rational beings. He shares with 

 inanimate things body and the conjunction of the four elements; 

 he shares with plants the nutritive and generative powers; with 

 irrational animals he shares, in addition to these powers, volun- 

 tary motion, appetite and anger, and the sensitive and respira- 

 tory powers; with intellectual natures he shares rationality, 

 applying reason, understanding, and judgment, and following 

 virtues. He is midway between intellectual and sensible 

 essences, conjoined by body and corporeal powers with other 

 animals and with inanimate things and by reason with incor- 

 poreal substances. The Creator conjoined step by step the 

 diverse natures in order to make the universe one and of one 

 kind, and this is the best proof that there is one creator of all 

 existences.^' God adapted and conjoined all things to all things 

 harmoniously, and united into one, through the creation of 

 man, invisible and visible things.^^ Nemesius finds the Mosaic 

 account of creation bears out this analysis, and he organizes 

 his treatment of the nature of man in accordance with it, 

 presenting in turn the soul, the union of soul and body, and the 

 faculties of man, ranging from imagination and sense through 

 intellect, memory, thought, expression, passion, nutrition, pulse, 

 respiration, voluntary action, free-will, and providence. 



The body is presented as a conjunction of elements in humors, 



^^ Nemesii, Premnon Physicon a N. Alfano Achiepiscopo Salerni in Latinum trans- 

 latus, I, 8-11, ed. C. Burkhard (Leipzig, 1917), pp. 6-7. 

 '' Ibid., I, 23, pp. 9-10. 



