XIII. Here, I think, I paused, and after an interval I went on: ‘What has happened to us, Eustrophus? We have almost forgotten Homer,[[66]] as if he had not been the first to divide the universe into five parts, assigning the three in the middle to the three Gods, while he left common and unapportioned the two extremes, Olympus and earth, one the limit of what is below, the other of what is above. “We must cry back”, as Euripides says.[[67]] Now those who exalt the number four as the basis of the |D| genesis of every body, make out a fairly good case. For every solid body possesses length, breadth, and depth; but length presupposes a point as an unit; the line is called length without breadth, and is length; the movement of a line in breadth produces a plane surface, and that is three; add depth, and we get to a solid with four factors. Any one can see that the number four carries Nature up to this point, that is, to the formation of a complete body, which may be touched, weighed, or struck; there it has left her, wanting in what is greatest. |E| For that which has no soul is, in plain terms, orphaned and incomplete and fit for nothing, unless it be employed by soul. But the movement or disposition which sets soul therein—a change introducing a fifth factor—restores to Nature her completeness, its rational basis is as much more commanding than that of the Tetrad as the animal is above the inanimate. Further, the symmetry and potency of the whole five prevails, so as not to allow the animate to form classes without limit, but gives five types for all living things. There are Gods, we know, and |F| daemons, and heroes, and after these, fourth in all, the race of men: fifth, and last, the irrational order of brutes. Again, if you make a natural division of the soul itself, the first and least distinct principle is that of growth; second is that of sense, then comes appetite, then the spirited part; when it has reached the power of reasoning and perfected its nature, it stays at rest in the fifth stage as its upper limit.
XIV. ‘Now as this number five has powers so many and so great, its origin is also noble: not the process already described, out of the numbers two and three, but that given by the combination of the first principle of number with the first square. The first principle is unity, the first square is four; from these |391| as from idea and limited substance, comes five. Or, if it be really correct, as some hold, to reckon unity as a square, being a power of itself and working out to itself, then the Pempad is formed out of the first two squares, and so has not missed noble birth and that the highest.
XV. ‘My most important point’, I went on, ‘may, I fear, bear hardly on Plato, just as he said that Anaxagoras “was hardly used by the name Selene”, when he had wished to appropriate the theory of her illumination, really a very old one. Are not |B| these Plato’s words, in the Cratylus?‘[[68]] ‘They certainly are,’ said Eustrophus, ‘but I fail to see the resemblance.’ ‘Very well then; you know, I suppose, that in the “Sophist”[[69]] he proves that the supreme principles are five: being, identity, difference, and after these, as fourth and fifth, movement and position. But in the Philebus[[70]] he divides on a different plan. He distinguishes the unlimited and the limited, from whose combination comes the origin of all being. The cause of combination he takes to be a fourth. The fifth, whereby things so mingled are again parted and distinguished, he has left to us to guess. I |C| conjecture that those on the one list are figures of those on the other; to being corresponds that which becomes, to motion the unlimited; to position the limited, to identity the combining principle, to difference that which distinguishes. But if the two sets are different, yet, on one view as on the other, there would be five classes, and five modes of difference. Some early inquirer, it will surely be said, saw into this before Plato, and consecrated two “E’s” to the God, as a manifestation and symbol of the number of all things. But further, having perceived that the good also takes shape under five heads, firstly |D| moderation, secondly symmetry, thirdly mind, fourthly the sciences and arts and true opinions which relate to soul, fifthly every pleasure which is pure and unmingled with what causes pain, he there leaves off, merely suggesting the Orphic verse,
In the sixth order let the strain be stayed!
XVI. ‘Having said so much’, I went on, ‘to you all, I will sing one short stave to Nicander and “his cunning men”.[[71]]
‘On the sixth day of the new moon, when the Pythia is introduced into the Prytaneum by one person, the first of your three castings of lot is a single one, namely the five: the three |E| against the two.’ ‘It is so,’ said Nicander, ‘but the reason may not be disclosed to others.’ ‘Then,’ I answered with a smile, ‘until such time as we become priests, and the God allows us to know the truth, this much and no more shall be added to what we have to say about the Pempad.’ Such, so far as I remember, was the end of our account of the arithmetical or mathematical reasons for extolling the letter ‘E’.
XVII. Ammonius, as one who himself gave Mathematics no mean place in Philosophy, was pleased at the course the conversation was taking, and said: ‘It is not worth our while to answer our young friends with too absolute accuracy on these points; I will only observe that any one of the numbers will provide not a few points for those who choose to sing its praises. |F| Why speak about the others? Apollo’s holy “Seven” will take up all one day before we have exhausted its powers. Are we then to show the Seven Wise Men at odds with common usage, and “the time which runs”[[72]], and to suppose that they ousted the “Seven” from its pre-eminence before the God, and consecrated the “Five” as perhaps more appropriate?
‘My own view is that the letter signifies neither number, nor |392| order, nor conjunction, nor any other omitted part of speech; it is a complete and self-operating mode of addressing the God; the word once spoken brings the speaker into apprehension of his power. The God, as it were, addresses each of us, as he enters, with his “Know Thyself”, which is at least as good as “Hail”. We answer the God back with “EI” (Thou Art), rendering to him the designation which is true and has no lie in it, and alone belongs to him, and to no other, that of BEING.
XVIII. ‘For we have, really, no part in real being; all mortal nature is in a middle state between becoming and perishing, and presents but an appearance, a faint unstable image, of itself. If you strain the intellect, and wish to grasp this, it |B| is as with water; compress it too much and force it violently into one space as it tries to flow through, and you destroy the enveloping substance; even so when the reason tries to follow out too closely the clear truth about each particular thing in a world of phase and change, it is foiled, and rests either on the becoming of that thing or on its perishing; it cannot apprehend anything which abides or really is. “It is impossible to go into the same river twice”, said Heraclitus;[[73]] no more can you grasp mortal being twice, so as to hold it. So sharp and so swift is change; it scatters and brings together again, nay not again, no nor afterwards; even while it is being formed it fails, |C| it approaches, and it is gone. Hence becoming never ends in being, for the process never leaves off, or is stayed. From seed it produces, in its constant changes, an embryo, then an infant, then a child; in due order a boy, a young man; then a man, an elderly man, an old man; it undoes the former becomings and the age which has been, to make those which come after. Yet we fear (how absurdly!) a single death, we who have died so many deaths, and yet are dying. For it is not only that, as Heraclitus[[74]] would say, “death of fire is birth of air”, and “death of air is birth of water”; the thing is much clearer in |D| our own selves. The man in his strength is destroyed when the old man comes into being, the young man was destroyed for the man in his strength to be, so the boy for the young man, the babe for the boy. He of yesterday has died into him of to-day; he of to-day is dying into him of to-morrow. No one abides, no one is; we that come into being are many, while matter is driven around, and then glides away, about some one appearance and a common mould. Else how is it, if we remain the same, that the things in which we find pleasure now are different from those of a former time; that we love, hate, admire, and censure |E| different things; that our words are different and our feelings; that our look, our bodily form, our intellect are not the same now as then? If a man does not change, these various conditions are unnatural; if he does change, he is not the same man. But if he is not the same man, he is not at all; his so-called being is simply change and new birth of man out of man. In our ignorance of what being is, sense falsely tells us that what appears is.
XIX. ‘What then really is? That which is eternal, was never brought into being, is never destroyed, to which no time ever brings change. Time is a thing which moves and takes the fashion of moving matter, which ever flows or is a sort of leaky vessel which holds destruction and becoming. Of time we use the words “afterwards”, “before”, “shall be”, and |F| “has been”, each on its face an avowal of not being. For, in this question of being, to say of a thing which has not yet come into being, or which has already ceased from being, that “it is”, is silly and absurd. When we strain to the uttermost our apprehension of time, and say “it is at hand”, “it is here”, or “now”, a rational development of the argument brings it all to nothing. “Now” is squeezed out into the future or into the past, as though we should try to see a point, which of necessity passes away to right or left. But if the case be the |393| same with Nature, which is measured, as with time which measures, nothing in it abides or really is. All things are coming into being, or being destroyed, even while we measure them by time. Hence it is not permissible, even in speaking of that which is, to say that “it was”, or “it shall be”; these all are inclinations, transitions, passages, for of permanent being there is none in Nature.