First of all, whether there is in the soul some supreme grade of life and wisdom, which they call hēgemonikon, that is, the ruling part; for if it is denied, the whole state of the soul is endangered. Indeed, those who deny the ruling part have first held the soul itself to be nothing. One Dicaearchus of Messene, and among the physicians Andreas and Asclepiades, did away with the ruling part by holding that the senses, for which a ruling part is claimed, are in the mind itself. Asclepiades also rides about on this argument: that many animals, when those parts of the body in which the ruling part is thought chiefly to reside are removed, both go on living for some time and still have some sense—like flies, wasps, and locusts, if you cut off their heads; like goats, tortoises, and eels, if you take out their hearts—so that there is no ruling part, since if there were, the vigor of the soul would not persist once it had been lost along with its seat. But more of the philosophers are against Dicaearchus—Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle—and more of the physicians against Andreas and Asclepiades—Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself; and now more than all of them the Christians, who are taught by God on both points: that there is a ruling part in the soul, and that it is enshrined in a definite recess of the body. For if we read that God is the searcher and discerner of the heart; if His prophet too is proved by laying bare the secrets of the heart; if the Lord Himself anticipates the thoughts of the heart in the people: “Why do you think evil in your hearts?”;⁠a if David too says, “Create a clean heart in me, God,” and Paul says that one believes with the heart for righteousness, and John says that each is condemned by his own heart; if, finally, “whoever looks at a woman to lust has already committed adultery in his heart”—then both points shine out at once: that there is a ruling part in the soul, to which the divine intent is directed, that is, the power of wisdom and of life (for what has wisdom is alive); and that it is kept in that treasury of the body to which God looks. So you are not to think that this ruling part is moved from outside, as Heraclitus holds; nor wafted through the whole body, as Moschion; nor shut up in the head, as Plato; nor presiding rather at the crown, as Xenocrates; nor lying in the brain, as Hippocrates; nor about the base of the brain, as Herophilus; nor in its membranes, as Strato and Erasistratus; nor in the middle between the eyebrows, as Strato the physicist; nor in the whole breastplate of the chest, as Epicurus; but [in the heart], as the Egyptians too have reported, and those who were held to be interpreters of divine writings, as in that verse of Orpheus or Empedocles: “For the blood around the heart is the thought of man.” Protagoras too, and Apollodorus and Chrysippus, think so; so that, beaten back by these as well, Asclepiades may go look for his goats bleating without hearts and chase his flies buzzing about without heads, and all may now know that it is rather they who live without heart and brain who have prejudged the arrangement of the human soul from the condition of beasts.