world created, agreeing in proportion, and so amicably corresponding together, that being thus embodied and confined within their proper bounds, it is impossible that any dissolution should happen from their own contending force, unless he that riveted the whole frame should go about again to rend it in pieces;—most apparently teaching us, that God was not the parent and architect of the corporeal substance only, or of the bulk and matter, but of the beauty and symmetry and similitude that adorned and graced the whole. The same we are to believe, he thought, concerning the soul; that there is one which neither was created by God nor is the soul of the world, but a certain self-moving and restless efficacy of a giddy and disorderly agitation and impetuosity, irrational and subject to opinion; while the other is that which God himself, having accoutred and adorned it with suitable numbers and proportions, has made queen regent of the created world, herself the product of creation also. 10. Now that Plato had this belief concerning these things, and did not for contemplation’s sake lay down these suppositions concerning the creation of the world and the soul,—this, among many others, seems to be an evident signification that, as to the soul, he avers it to be both created and not created, but as to the world, he always maintains that it had a beginning and was created, never that it was uncreated and eternal. What necessity therefore of bringing any testimonies out of Timaeus? For the whole treatise, from the beginning to the end, discourses of nothing else but of the creation of the world. As for the rest, we find that Timaeus, in his Atlantic, addressing himself in prayer to the Deity, calls God that being which of old existed in his works, but now was apparent to reason. In his Politicus, his Parmenidean guest acknowledges that the world, which was the handiwork of God, is replenished with several good things, and that, if there be any thing in it which is vicious and offensive, it comes by mixture of its former incongruous and irrational habit. But Socrates, in the Politics, beginning to discourse of number, which some call by the name of wedlock, says: “The created Divinity has a circular period, which is, as it were, enchased and involved in a certain perfect number;” meaning in that place by created Divinity no other than the world itself. * * * * *