SOUL AND MIND rust Vice is the characteristic disease of the soul: but it does not destroy the soul If the soul’s own disease cannot kill it, then it cannot be killed by bodily disease and must be immortal (609d) But what is immortal cannot be an uneasily composite entity like the threefold soul Such a soul is like a statue in the sea covered with barnacles The element of the soul that loves wisdom and has a passion for the divine must be stripped of extraneous elements if we are to see it in all its loveliness Whether the soul seen in its true nature would prove manifold or simple is left an open question (611b V., 612a3) In the Timaeus, however, the tripartite soul reappears, and its parts are given corporeal locations Reason sits in the head, the other two parts are placed in the body, with the neck as an isthmus to keep the divine and the mortal elements of the soul apart from each other Temper is located around the heart, and appetite in the belly, with the midriV separating the two like the partition between the men’s and women’s quarters in a house The heart is the guardroom from which commands can be transmitted around the body, via the circulating blood, when reason for some purpose or other orders combat stations The lowest part of the soul is kept under control by the liver, which is particularly susceptible to the inXuence of mind The coiling of the bowels has the function of preventing appetites from becoming insatiable (69c–73b) Plato on Sense-Perception While the Timaeus, like the earlier books of the Republic, anatomizes the soul on the basis of desire rather than cognition, the dialogue does deal at some length with the mechanisms of perception The status of sense-perception also attracted Plato’s attention in the Theaetetus in the course of the discussion of Protagoras’ thesis that whatever seems to a particular person is true for that person Behind Protagoras Plato detects Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal Xux If everything in the world is in constant change, then the colours we see and the qualities we detect with our other senses cannot be stable, objective realities Rather, each of them is a meeting between one of our senses and some appropriate transitory item in the universal maelstrom When the eye, for instance, comes into contact with a suitable visible 240