12. The five senses are related to the five elements and the five solids.
13. We must not forget Homer, and his five-fold division of the universe. But, going back: Four dimensions (point, line, plane, solid) are all very well. But animate being requires a fifth.
14. The true derivation is not 2 + 3 = 5 but 1 + 4 i.e., unity (which is itself really a square) plus the first square.
15. There are five modes of being (see the Sophist, and Philebus of Plato). Some early inquirer saw this, and set up two E’s.
16. I ask the initiated whether five has not a special virtue in their mysteries. (‘Yes,’ from Nicander, ‘but it is a secret.’) Well I must wait till I become a priest myself.
17. Ammonius, though in sympathy with Mathematics, deprecates too much exactness. There is much to be said for the number seven. But the ‘E’ is really something different from all the suggestions. The God greets his visitors with ‘Know Thyself.’ They answer, Thou Art.
18. We ‘are’ not at all, but always change from state to state, and so (says Heraclitus) does all Nature.
19. In true being is no past, present, or future; our common speech confesses to our not being.
20. But God IS, and is rightly addressed as ‘Thou Art’ or ‘Thou Art One’.
21. The identification of Apollo with the sun is a beautiful attempt to grasp the spiritual through the sensible. Not so the stories of his change into fire, and the like, which are better ascribed to some daemon than to the God. ‘Know Thyself’ calls us back from these lofty speculations: ‘Man, know thy nature and its limitations!’