Book 7
3
These are instances of Bestiality. Other unnatural propensities are due to disease, and sometimes to insanity, as in the case of the madman that offered up his mother to the gods and partook of the sacrifice, or the one that ate his fellow slave’s liver. Other morbid propensities are acquired by habit, for instance, plucking out the hair, biting the nails, eating cinders and earth, and also sexual perversion. These practices result in some cases from natural disposition, and in others from habit, as with those who have been abused from childhood.
4
When nature is responsible, no one would describe such persons as showing Unrestraint, any more than one would apply that term to women because they are passive and not active in sexual intercourse; nor should we class as Unrestraint a morbid state brought about by habitual indulgence.
5
Now these various morbid dispositions in themselves do not fall within the limits of Vice, nor yet does Bestiality; and to conquer or yield to them does not constitute UnrestraintWe must understand does not constitute restraint or unrestraint unless we amend and to fail to conquer, or to be conquered by, them does not constitute unrestraint. in the strict sense, but only the state so called by analogy; just as a man who cannot control his anger must be described as unrestrained in that passion, not unrestrained.
5
(Indeed folly, cowardice, profligacy, and ill-temper, whenever they run to excess, are either bestial or morbid conditions.
6
One so constituted by nature as to be frightened by everything, even the sound of a mouse, shows the cowardice of a lower animal; the man who was afraid of a weasel was a case of disease. So with folly: people irrational by nature and living solely by sensation, like certain remote tribes of barbarians, belong to the bestial class; those who lose their reason owing to some disease, such as epilepsy, or through insanity, to the morbid.)
