"The impluvium," said Dionysius, "is that part of the palace where the light of heaven falls. But the palace, Augustus, I take to be the sublime theme; my poor mind is only its beggarly porter and ostiarius. Suppose, then, there were only two beings in all the universe, one more excellent than the other, which of them would have preceded the other?"
No one replied.
"If the inferior be the senior," pursued the Greek, "by so much as the superior afterward came to excel him, by so much that superior must have obtained his perfections from nothing whatever, from blank nonentity; because the inferior, by the very supposition, (ex hypothesi,) had them not to bestow."
"The superior being," answered Augustus, "must therefore be the elder."
"You speak justly, Augustus," said the Athenian. "Therefore the less perfect could never exist, if the more perfect had not first existed. The existence, then, of imperfect beings proves the prior existence of one all-perfect being, self-dependent, from whom the endowments of the others must unquestionably have been derived."
"Cannot things grow?" asked Labio.
"Growth is feeding," answered Dion; "growth is accretion, assimilation, condensation in one form of many scattered elements. Growth is possible, first, if we have a seed, that is, an organism capable, when fed, of filling out proportions defined beforehand; and, secondly, if we have the food by which it is sustained. But who defines the proportions? Who ordained the form? Who formed the seed? Who supplies the air, the light, the food? Would a seed grow of its own energy if not sown in fostering earth, or placed in fostering air and light—in short, if not fed by the proper natural juices? Would it grow if starved of air, earth, light—thrown back upon its sole self? Is not growth necessarily stimulated from without?"
"Growth is a complicated and manifold operation," said Augustus, "implying evidently a whole world previously set systematically in motion."
"Whence, Labio," asked the Athenian, "comes your seed that will grow?"
"From a plant," replied Labio.