Clement of Alexandria: STROMATA (MISCELLANIES), Part VI, Complete

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

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Page 32

For Plato calls plants animals, as partaking of the third species of life alone, that of appetency. [3707] But Aristotle, while he thinks that plants are possessed of a life of vegetation and nutrition, does not consider it proper to call them animals; for that alone, which possesses the other life--that of sensation--he considers warrantable to be called an animal. The Stoics do not call the power of vegetation, life.

Now, on the man who proposes the question denying that plants are animals, we shall show that he affirms what contradicts himself. For, having defined the animal by the fact of its nourishment and growth, but having asserted that a plant is not an animal, it appears that he says nothing else than that what is nourished and grows is both an animal and not an animal.

Let him, then, say what he wants to learn. Is it whether what is in the womb grows and is nourished, or is it whether it possesses any sensation or movement by impulse? For, according to Plato, the plant is animate, and an animal; but, according to Aristotle, not an animal, for it wants sensation, but is animate. Therefore, according to him, an animal is an animate sentient being. But according to the Stoics, a plant is neither animate nor an animal; for an animal is an animate being. If, then, an animal is animate, and life is sentient nature, it is plain that what is animate is sentient. If, then, he who has put the question, being again interrogated if he still calls the animal in the foetal state an animal on account of its being nourished and growing, he has got his answer.

[3707] Epithumetikou, which accords with what Plato says in the Timaeus. Lowth, however, reads phutikou.

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