Episode 042 - The Mind Works Through the Senses; Both Mind and Spirit Are Mortal
Date: 10/31/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1735-episode-forty-two-the-mind-works-through-the-senses-it-is-a-relatively-small-par/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 42 covers lines 358–444 of Book Three. The reading opens with Lucretius’s rejection of Democritus’s claim that the mind merely looks through the eyes “as through doors laid open” — the eyes are active sense organs, not passive apertures, and the mind would not see more clearly if the eyes were removed. Elaine connects this to modern neuroscience: there is a critical developmental window for visual cortex formation that depends on sensory input, and animals deprived of sight during that period cannot regain functional vision even after the physical organ is restored. The group explores how Lucretius’s catalogue of unfelt sensations — dust, spider webs, thistle-down, gnats — maps onto the uneven distribution of peripheral nerve endings across the body, a parallel Elaine finds remarkable given how far ancient observation traveled toward the right conclusion.
The episode then turns to the mind’s sovereign power over the soul: even with limbs amputated, a person lives as long as the mind is intact — a distinction Charles likens to ancient beliefs locating the soul in the chest. The eye-surgery analogy (cutting around the pupil leaves vision intact; damaging the center destroys it) prompts Cassius to recall his own LASIK surgery, where lifting the corneal flap caused total blackness despite staring into bright light. The climactic moment comes when Lucretius addresses Memmius directly and declares both mind and soul mortal, using the vessel analogy: if the body cannot contain the soul after death, how could something as tenuous as air? The group notes this is the philosophical payoff Lucretius has been building toward — no afterlife, no Tartarus, no divine reward — with implications they agree remain as profound today as in antiquity.
A wide-ranging final discussion explores Lucretius’s account of dreams as caused by images of altars streaming through the air, raising the deeper question of how memory and imagination fit into a philosophy where all mental content appears to originate in external image-streams. Cassius cites an exchange between Cicero and Cassius Longinus (the Epicurean) in which the images hypothesis is discussed half-mockingly, and references DeWitt’s suggestion that the Epicurean mind functions as a “super-sensory organism” capable of receiving images directly. Charles raises Epicurus’s statement — preserved via Plutarch and discussed in Diogenes of Oenoanda — that dream-visions are true in the sense that they cause real motion, and notes Epicurus’s separate insistence that dreams carry no prophetic meaning. The episode closes with reflections on perceptual accuracy — including Cassius’s account of mistaking a large piece of driftwood for a beached shark — reinforcing the Epicurean distinction between the reliability of sensation itself and the errors of rapid inference.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 42 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’s poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who’s not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode One for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In today’s episode we’ll cover roughly lines 358 through 444 from the Latin text, and we’ll discuss how the mind works through the senses, how the mind is a relatively small part of the body, and how the mind has more power than the spirit — but that both the mind and spirit are mortal. Now let’s join the discussion with Elaine reading today’s text.
Elaine: (reads lines 358–444)
To say likewise that the eyes can see nothing of themselves, but the mind looks through them as through doors laid open, this is ridiculous when sense itself tells them the contrary, and sets it full in their view, especially when we are unable to look upon objects that dazzle the eyes, because our sight is confounded by too great a luster. This could not be if they were mere doors, nor are open doors that we look through capable of pain.
Besides, if our eyes were no more than doors, the mind would see clearer when the eyes were pulled out, and the whole frame taken away.
In this case, it is vain to take shelter under the sacred opinion of Democritus, who says that as many parts as there are of the body, so many parts too of the soul are answerable and contained in them. For since the principles of the soul are not only much smaller than those of which the body and its parts consist, but are fewer in number, and are spread thinly in distant spaces all over the limbs, you may affirm so far that the principles of the soul take up only so many different spaces and intervals, as may be sufficient for those little seeds that are in us to incite those motions that produce sensation.
That this sense does not affect every minute part of the body is plain, for we seldom feel the dust that sticks upon us, nor the particles of chalk that drop upon our limbs, nor do we perceive the dew by night, or the fine threads of the spider meeting us when we are entangled by the subtle net as we pass along, nor the decaying web lighting upon our heads, nor are we sensible of the soft feathers of birds, nor of the flying down of thistles, which from their natural levity are scarce able to descend upon us, nor do we feel the motion of every creeping insect, nor the little traces of the feet which gnats and such animals make upon us, so that the many seeds which are diffused over all the limbs must be first put into motion before the principles of the soul are agitated and made capable to feel, and before its seeds, by striking upon each other, through so many distant spaces, can meet, unite, and part again, and be so variously moved as to produce sense and perception in us.
But the mind it is that keeps up the defenses of life and has a more sovereign power to preserve our beings than all the faculties of the soul. For without the mind, the least part of the soul cannot secure its resonance in the body for a moment, but follows it readily as a close companion, and vanishes into air along with it, and leaves the cold limbs in the frozen arms of death. But the man whose mind is whole and entire remains alive, though he be mangled and all his limbs lopped off. Yet his trunk, though his soul be so far gone, and his member separated from him, still lives and breathes the vital air.
The trunk, if not spoiled of the whole, yet of a great part of the soul, still continues alive and holds fast as being. So if you tear the eye all round, if the pupil remains safe, the power of sight continues entire, so long as you do no injury to the apple, but cut the white all around and leave that hole, this may be done without any danger or loss to the sight. But if ever so little of the middle of the eye be pricked through, though the ball otherwise looks bright and sound, the light instantly dies away and darkness follows. This is the case of the mind and soul, and by such bonds are they always held together.
And now for your sake, my Memmius, and to let you know that the mind and soul are born in us and die with us, I will go on to write lines worthy of thy genius, in which I have been long preparing, and have at last by sweet labor happily perfected. Observe only that you apply both names indifferently, or, more plainly, when I offered to say the soul is mortal, you are to understand I mean the mind likewise, since they are both so united together that in this respect they make but one and the same thing.
First, then, since I have proved that the soul consists of very minute seeds, it is formed of principles much less than clear water, or mist, or smoke, because it is more apt to move, and is set a-going by a much lighter stroke, for it is moved by the very images of mist and smoke, as when by sleep overcome, in dreams we see the lofty altars exhale of vapor, and send up smoke into the air, the images of these things no doubt produce these phantasms in us.
And since you see, when the vessel is broken to pieces, the water breaks loose and flows away in a stream, and since mist and smoke vanish into air, conclude the soul likewise to be poured out, and that its principles much sooner perish, and its seeds are more easily dissolved, when it is separated and retires from all the limbs. For since the body, which is, as it were, a vessel to it, when it is bruised to pieces by an outward force, or rarefied by the blood being drawn out of the veins, cannot keep it in, how can you suppose it can be contained by subtle air? How can that, which is more rare than this body of ours, preserve it entire?
Cassius: Elaine, thanks for reading all that. Maybe we should give Elaine a break and let Martin and Charles have first commentary. You guys have comments so far?
Elaine: Not directly — let me go back to the first paragraph.
Cassius: Martin, are you with us?
Martin: Yes, yes. I’m listening. I’m thinking about what to say — there’s a lot to take in.
Elaine: Well, he starts with something very catchy about how we would see more clearly if the eyes were pulled out and the whole frame taken away — but we know that’s not true. What’s the point of that? I think it’s because of where it’s placed, where he goes on to talk about the soul. It’s hard for me to separate my modern understanding from this, because the eyes are sense organs — they’re not just doors. We need our brains. We need our sensory cortex. If we block an infant’s sight from birth — like in animal experiments — there’s a critical developmental window for the visual cortex in the brain, which I’m thinking he would call part of the mind. If you miss that window, even if you remove the blindfold afterward, there’s no vision — the visual cortex didn’t develop. It depended on the sense organs to go through that critical period of development. You’ve got to have both parts: the mind and the sense organ. The eyes aren’t just a hole the mind sees through — the sense organs are actively participating in the ability to see. I don’t think he’s gone that far, but what he said is close enough to how we’re thinking about it now. It’s really interesting to see him trying to sort these things out.
Charles: It’s almost like he’s calling out people who discredit sensory perception, making a kind of buffed-up analogy — almost sarcasm. Yeah, the eyes are not just inert things; they’re not inactive — they’re actually what we would call sense organs.
Cassius: I always add here that he clearly is calling out somebody. I was just recently editing our podcast from last week, and what I’m reminded of right now — now that I’ve finally absorbed some of it — is something Elaine said last week when we were discussing the issue of free will, and how the religious view that there is some kind of autonomous entity within your body that inhabits it from the outside is not the Epicurean perspective. And so maybe that’s what he’s talking about here when he says the mind looks through the eyes as through doors laid open — maybe he’s emphasizing the incorrect view, saying the mind is not some autonomous force locked within the body that somehow looks out through the body to experience reality. He’s saying something very different from that.
Martin: Yeah, coming back to the experiment Elaine described — if these animals who have been blinded during the critical stage later have the blindfold removed, could they at least develop a reaction to bright and dark?
Elaine: I’d have to go back and look at the experiments, but I’m pretty sure that if you totally miss that period of visual cortex development, they’re actually blind. And I could understand that they cannot make sense of the images received — so they can’t distinguish things — but they should at least be able to react to bright and dark.
Well, the visual cortex is necessary for that also. You have pupillary reactions to light peripherally, but depending on how bad the cortical blindness is, you may be able to have some experience of seeing things. The brain — the visual cortex — is still necessary even to have the experience of light and dark. Some experiments suggest that some people who are totally blind might perceive light in a non-visual way, so they’re not experiencing it anything like the way we think of it. You need both your cortex and your peripheral sense organ to have all the parts of vision — it just depends on how badly things are disrupted.
Martin: That’s easy to imagine. If you mix up the pixels of an image, you can no longer see it, and if the cortex isn’t developed, you can understand that it cannot put things together to make a meaningful image.
Elaine: So I think what you’re talking about is closer to the case for people who have hearing loss from birth and then get a cochlear implant — they have trouble, sound is very messy, it’s hard to pick things out. I believe you can deprive animals of vision from the very beginning such that it’s not clear whether they can perceive anything visually, even if you restore their sight. It would probably depend on the animal, since even in utero there’s some perception of light depending on gestational length. But if you remove the visual cortex, you’re not going to be able to perceive light and dark. The experience of seeing definitely requires the brain, not just the eye.
Cassius: I know we try to put that in context. I think Elaine was suggesting earlier that we could look into the next paragraph about Democritus. All of his observations about our tactile senses are so interesting — this is one of those times where I feel like he would have been super excited to see the research now available about different parts of the peripheral nervous system: light touch, pressure, two-point discrimination. He’s noticing the phenomena that that research explains — why we can feel certain amounts of touch and not others. But it does really sound like what he’s describing as the soul, we would now call the peripheral nervous system.
Does anybody have a comment on where the argument is going in that next section? It’s really focused, as Elaine’s talking about, on what we might call the nervous system.
Charles: I also think he’s really just listing examples of why he thinks the particles of the soul are fewer and farther between than other types of particles in the body. What’s the implication of that? I don’t have an exact answer, but after he lists all the examples in the second paragraph, the last sentence is a pretty interesting conclusion. I’ll just repeat it: “so that the many seeds which are diffused over all the limbs must be first put into motion before the principles of the soul are agitated and made capable to feel.” My interpretation was that the principles of matter being able to collide and interact with each other preceded something more sophisticated like a soul, or the mind, and a nervous system.
Cassius: I’m thinking Elaine is going to say something to that.
Elaine: Where he talks about the soul being spread out, he is using observations about what we can feel with our tactile sense — and what we can’t — to conclude that these particles have to be spread out. Today we would say the peripheral nerve endings are spread out and they’re denser in some parts of the body than others. I don’t see that he noticed that. The general direction that his observations are leading him toward is almost right, but it’s just that they’re not particles. He was really pretty brilliant to be able to notice all of this, even though he didn’t get it exactly right — that’s just amazing.
I guess you’re all trying to figure out where he’s going with it, but I’m just super impressed with the level of observation he’s made about so many parts of nature in such detail, and that he’s trying to make all these things fit together.
Cassius: It’s definitely a multi-track conversation we have going on here through a lot of these podcasts. There are valid observations to be made on several levels of things, and we don’t always hit every level like we probably could or should. We just hit the ones that seem most impactful to us at the moment. But there are definitely different levels of analysis here.
And before we go on, what Charles said a minute ago has been running in my mind — the particles must first be put into motion before the principles of the soul are agitated. That reminds me that there are several sections in later aspects of Lucretius. I’m remembering an exchange between Cicero and Cassius Longinus where Cicero was almost joking with Cassius about the images — Cicero was calling them “specters.” But there’s apparently this line of thought within some of this material that a lot of our thoughts arise because images come through the air and strike us, and Cicero was saying, “Well, you thought of me because my image floated to your mind” — something like that — in a kind of joking or sarcastic way. And Cassius responded that, well, you may think that’s ridiculous, but he could hit him with a bunch of Stoic absurdities that would be much more ridiculous than that. Unfortunately they don’t continue the conversation much further, but as we go forward, the idea that images are constantly flying through the air, and that our minds at times have their attention called to particular images, and that leads us to particular thoughts and particular emotions — I have no real way to analyze it other than that it’s there in the material and interesting to think about whether it has any validity. They were clearly thinking about all sorts of aspects of it.
Charles: This is way off topic — consider this more thinking out loud — but I wonder if the images have some sort of similarities with George Berkeley’s immaterialism. I have no real knowledge of Berkeley or his system, and there would be some very obvious upfront contradictions, but I wonder if that’s worth looking into. I’ll look into that after I read the relevant sources.
Cassius: You’ve also reminded me, Charles, that back when Lucretius first introduced the idea of the swerve and free will — if I’m remembering correctly — there’s a discussion of how racehorses strain at the starting gate, and how thought arises in the mind wishing to jump forward, but it takes some time for the motion of the particles from the mind to get to the legs. I think there’s an aspect of that as well here: the particles of sense are going through the body and just don’t all instantly occur as a sort of divine event. There’s a chain of events of particles moving to create the result. Okay, that was inarticulately expressed, so let’s move to something we can be more articulate about.
The next section is talking about the mind as a more sovereign power to preserve our beings than all the faculties of the soul. Now you get to the difference between anima and animus, and we have a distinction here that’s difficult to really understand. Anybody want to try to tackle what he’s trying to say when he emphasizes the power of the mind over this other faculty?
Martin: Not quite that, but I want to know what experiments were done to draw conclusions about cutting into eyes.
Cassius: You know, I always think about this — I had LASIK eye surgery. I don’t know if any of you have had LASIK, but I remember it was amazing to me that when I was under the laser — when they first peel back the flap of part of your eye — it just went totally black. Even though I knew I was staring into this light, it went totally black, which I still don’t particularly understand. But I relate that experience to what he’s saying here about how it can go black, which is not intuitive to me at all. It would seem like you’d experience just a white-light fog, but in my case when they lifted the LASIK flap, it just went black.
Elaine: Well, this is just more that makes me think of the peripheral and sensory nervous system. The mind — the brain — coordinates everything. It has the sovereign power to preserve our beings, and without the brain, the peripheral nervous system can’t manage it. He’s not saying that exactly, but it’s similar: what he’s calling the soul can’t hold together without the mind. And as long as you’ve got your mind intact, even if you don’t have your arms and legs, you’re obviously still alive — you still have your heart and your lungs, which he’s calling the trunk.
Charles: I won’t quite say it’s off topic, but it’s just another thought: this is definitely the second, maybe even the third time he’s brought up how limbs being cut off don’t completely dissipate the soul — it doesn’t leak out of the body. But he does mention that part of it is gone when you do that, because whatever particles were in those arms and legs wouldn’t be there anymore. And I wonder if that is supported in his view by the fact that a lot of cultures located the soul in the chest. If the soul is tied to the chest, then if you only have a torso and head, you’d be fine.
Elaine: Yes — because it’s particulate in his mind, you would have parts of it missing if you cut off parts of the body. But you have enough left in your trunk to say you still have some soul in there.
Cassius: Martin, if you don’t have anything to add there, that’s going to take us to the final section for today, where he addresses Memmius and states his conclusion explicitly: that the mind and soul are born in us and die with us. That’s probably where he’s been leading with a lot of this. Martin, do you want to say something first?
Martin: I need to think about what to say. The interesting part for me is that I would also rather consider that mind and soul are one and the same thing, because they’re so united together. It’s somehow artificial to really split them. Even if they are two things that can be talked about separately, they’re so connected that one can’t exist without the other, and so you might as well call them united.
Elaine: And again that goes with the idea of the nervous system — what would a brain in a vat be able to do? Nothing. You’ve got to have both the peripheral and the central nervous system to be alive in any meaningful sense.
Cassius: What do you think about this part where he says “in dreams we see the lofty altars exhale of vapor, and send up smoke into the air — the images of these things no doubt produce these phantasms in us”?
Martin: Yes, yes — that’s interesting. That’s one of many references to how we are affected by images coming through the air.
Cassius: We probably won’t — and should not — go off today into a long discussion of images of the gods and things like that, but we’re going to get a lot more of this. He is not thinking that dreams are based on memory and imagination, but that they’re clearly produced by images streaming from outside.
Elaine: Yes, absolutely — there’s a lot there connecting to modern understanding of dreams. But I will be interested to get to the part where he talks about memories and imagining about the future. How would those mental images be different from dreams? I’ll bookmark that in my mind. Does he get to that — do you remember how that’s handled?
Cassius: Absolutely, Elaine — that’s a very good comment. In my recollection of reading Lucretius in the past, there is discussion of how memories of good things in the past help us enjoy the present. But there’s not a lot of specific discussion about memory physiologically — how things that were in the past work, or how we can imagine things in the future and have a visual idea of them.
In fact, it’s really striking that there seems to be a lot more discussion of images continuously floating through the air, continuously striking us, continuously inspiring our thoughts — than there is about storing things in some part of the brain and calling them up in the future. There’s much more discussion of the image-stream. And it may be that that’s because of the parts that are preserved — because images for Lucretius seem to have been something almost like touching and feeling and seeing. The process of seeing a tree, for him, seems to involve atoms from the tree traveling through the air and striking our eyes and coming into our minds in that way.
Elaine: He didn’t have access to research about light. And I’m not so sure I understand how light is fundamentally different from that, frankly — there is a particle that travels from the tree to our eyes. But for him it sounded like the tree itself was sending the image.
Charles: Yes — there is a passage by Epicurus near the end of the available material that I’ve looked at before in connection with images and their relation to dreams. There’s not a lot — only a sentence from Plutarch, and then we just have what’s in Lucretius Book Four. But it says here that “the visions of the insane and those in dreams are true, for they cause movement, and that which does not exist cannot cause movement.” So that’s probably what we’re trying to grasp at: the concepts he worked with. He didn’t think there was movement unless it had been produced by something from the outside.
Cassius: Which is not how we think things are happening now — like in our imagination, when we imagine the future that’s never happened —
Elaine: No. And I know I don’t mean that he has eliminated the possibility of movement within the brain, but clearly there’s a lot of it going on that’s caused by movement from the outside. He might go in that direction, but you’re right — he hasn’t said it one hundred percent. He seems to lean that way.
Martin: It sounds paradoxical just by saying it out loud, but I wonder if an Epicurean who is blind would be able to receive these images in the same way.
Cassius: Which images are you talking about, Martin — like the altars? That gets to the images of the gods. And I think clearly there are passages which seem to imply that the images of the gods do not come through the eyes. There are passages DeWitt points to suggesting that the mind is some kind of super-sensory organism — or let’s put it this way — that the mind can somehow directly receive images. Now that relates to those who focus on anticipations as being images. There’s a section in the Letter to Herodotus where Epicurus is talking about “present impressions of the mind” — that phrase is out there. Does that mean the mind receiving a present impression of a stimulus that’s come from outside, or does it mean the mind having a present impression of its own stimulus from its own memory, or both, or neither?
Elaine: It could be either way. I don’t think we should pin him to one or the other. I do remember that section in the Letter to Herodotus, and I think I also remember a section just after that where impressions are either understood by the mind by thinking about them — like the impression the influx of images leaves — or constantly seeing that image over and over again until it becomes embedded in memory.
Cassius: Related to that, Charles, is the section in Velleius about the gods, where the gods are interpreted as analogous to a motion picture film — where the images are constantly streaming. And overlaying that is the issue that when Velleius talks about how we perceive the images of the gods, he uses a word that implies the images are moving from us to the gods, as opposed to from the gods to us — and that’s one of the things I’ve seen the commentators discuss. So this motion of atoms in the form of images is a major component of what they’re thinking about, and it’s very difficult to grasp without more material, but it’s clearly there.
Charles: Yes — doesn’t part of the wall inscription by Diogenes of Oenoanda discuss this? And I have a section of Epicurus — a letter he wrote to his mother — that talks about dreams.
Cassius: Yes, I think so — there are dreams mentioned there, but I can’t quote the detail or remember what it said.
Martin: Yeah, I can’t quote it, but the main thing he mentions is that dreams have no meaning for the future — because apparently there’s a misinterpretation that we can tell the future from dreams, and Epicurus says no, that is not the case.
Cassius: Right. So he’s got a theory that provides a mechanism — a framework — that would explain how people can have inaccurate feelings of experiencing interactions with the gods. Because these images are clearly being discussed, and when he talks about the accuracy of vision and how vision can be distorted — through distance, through fog, or through water where the oar looks bent — you’ve got this phenomenon of images coming to you in an inaccurate way. So just because you receive an image of a god does not mean that image has been accurately received.
Elaine: Right. And you have to put all your senses together — you don’t just go by one sense; you go by repeated observations, putting your vision and your hearing and everything together.
Cassius: I like that section a lot, and Diogenes deals with the “is that a cow or a horse over yonder?” — same issue. And even though Epicurus is reputed to have said all sensations are true, this gets to the issue of the multiple meanings of truth: we may receive the sensation honestly but not accurately as to all the facts. In that example of seeing a four-legged animal in the distance, our minds aren’t lying to us, and neither are our sensations — we see that animal over there. But it’s at such a distance that we can’t accurately distinguish it in the sense of coming to a proper and solid conclusion, and that’s when it gets lost in translation. We can see it, but we’re leaping to conclusions so quickly that we don’t realize where we’ve gone astray from our bare perceptions.
I had the experience once of walking with a friend along the beach, and we saw this thing at the edge of the water in the distance, and we both thought it was a shark — a shark that had washed up on the beach. As we got closer, we saw it was just a large piece of driftwood. I would have felt really stupid if it hadn’t been for the fact that my friend thought the same thing — we both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time. But what was hitting our eyes, the actual image, wasn’t wrong. It was that we both leapt to this conclusion that we were seeing something that wasn’t there — we filled in things that weren’t right.
Elaine: So this very last part is super exciting, because now he’s set up his system where the soul is seeds distributed in the body, and the body is kind of like a vessel — when the body is really coming apart, it can’t keep these soul particles in. So if the body can’t keep them in, how could air — which is more subtle than the tissues of the body — preserve them? Which would mean your soul isn’t leaving your body on death as an intact thing. And that’s where he’s going: the impossibility of the soul being a thing after the body dies.
Cassius: And that’s the payoff — the conclusion that has incredibly profound implications for how we live our lives. The soul does not survive after death. It does not go to Tartarus to be punished. It does not go to heaven to be rewarded. Our life is over at that point. And that conclusion is one that we can still come to, even though the details of how he was thinking about this are not exactly right. So this is pretty cool.
Okay, well, let’s begin to draw today’s episode to a conclusion. As usual we first go to Martin.
Martin: Yeah, again I’m incredibly slow in coming up with a thought and formulating it.
Cassius: Well, that’s the beauty of editing — you take as long as you like. Or we can just move to another person. Take your time if you would like.
Martin: I think better to move it. I don’t really feel something’s coming that soon.
Cassius: Charles?
Charles: Usually I’d have some closing thoughts if I had read the section ahead of time, which I didn’t do this time. So I got nothing.
Cassius: All right, we’ll cover it next week. If something comes to your mind in the meantime — Elaine?
Elaine: My overall feeling about this passage is just fascination with the way Epicurus’s mind worked, and his wide variety of thinking, of observing nature, trying to figure out why it was happening. It’s kind of exciting to read things produced by that kind of mind — even where it didn’t go right, it’s still really neat.
Cassius: Yep. It’s really enjoyable on many levels, and profitable on many levels. Okay, well, we’ll call this to a conclusion at this point today. We’ll come back next week. Thanks everybody again for your participation, and we’ll do it again next week.
All: Okay. Yeah, thanks.