1. On waking from the slumber of the body to return to myself, and on turning my attention from exterior things so as to concentrate it on myself, I often observe an alluring beauty, and I become conscious of an innate nobility. Then I live out a higher life, and I experience atonement with the divinity. Fortifying myself within it, I arrive at that actualization which raises me above the intelligible. But if, after this sojourn with the divinity, I descend once more from Intelligence to the exercise of my reasoning powers, I am wont to ask myself how I ever could actually again descend, and how my soul ever could have entered into a body, since, although she actually abides in the body, she still possesses within herself all the perfection I discover in her. HERACLITUS, THE ORIGINATOR OF THESE QUESTIONS, ANSWERS THEM OBSCURELY. Heraclitus, who recommends this research, asserts that "there are necessary changes of contraries into each other;" he speaks of "ascenscions" and of a "descent," says that it is "a rest to change, a fatigue to continue unremittingly in the same kinds of work, and to be overwrought. He thus reduces us to conjectures because he does not explain himself definitely; and he would even force us to ask how he himself came to discover what he propounds. EMPEDOCLES, AS A POET, TELLS OF PYTHAGOREAN MYTHS. Empedocles teaches that "it is a law for souls that have sinned to fall down here below;" and that "he himself, having withdrawn from the divinity, came down to the earth to become the slave of furious discord." It would seem that he limited himself to advancing the ideas that Pythagoras and his followers generally expressed by symbols, both on this and other subjects. Besides Empedocles is obscure because he uses the language of poetry. PLATO SAYS MANY CONTRADICTORY THINGS THAT ARE BEAUTIFUL AND TRUE.