This exposition we applauded; and Tyndares, saying he envied him,
desired Autobulus to engage Florus and confute his discourse. That he
refused to do, but produced another opinion of his own. Geometry, said
he, considers nothing else but the accidents and properties of the
extremities of bodies; neither did God make the world any other way than
by terminating matter, which was infinite before. Not that matter was
actually without limits as to either magnitude or multitude; but the
ancients used to call that infinite which by reason of its confusion
and disorder is undetermined and unconfined. Now the terms of everything
that is formed or figured are the form and figure of that thing, and
without which the thing would be formless and unfigured. Now numbers and
proportions being applied to matter, it is circumscribed and as it were
bound up by lines, and through lines by surfaces and solids; and so were
settled the first types and differences of bodies, as foundations from
which to create the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. For
it was impossible that, out of an unsteady and confused matter, the
equality of the sides, the likeness of the angles, and the exact
proportion of octahedrons, icosahedrons, pyramids, and cubes should be
deduced, unless by some power that terminated and shaped every particle
of matter. Therefore, terms being fixed to that which was undetermined
or infinite before, the whole became and still continues agreeable
in all parts, and excellently terminated and mixed; the matter indeed
always affecting an indeterminate state, and flying all geometrical
confinement, but proportion terminating and circumscribing it, and
dividing it into several differences and forms, out of which all things
that arise are generated and subsist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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