Apologetic, Empiricism, and Sceptical Strategies in Simone Luzzatto

posed by different and divergent pieces; in various occasions each one of them shows itself with a different appearance. Therefore, describing the nature and condition of a single man is very hard and difficult, and even more so is the will to refer his actions and ideas to a single norm. This explains why so many authors can be found [37v] who have written on the nature of horses, dogs and falcons, and who have devised with such an exactitude their customs and conditions, while very few have wanted to deal with men, and even so only in passing. The one who talked about them better was Theophrastus, Aristotle ’ s disciple,who reserved the enterprise for the last years of his life as he was already eighty years old, and compiled a historical treatise about it with observations on the characters of the human soul; a fragment of his work made it all the way down to us, the rest was destroyed by the inclemency of times. ⁷ ¹