21. ... Which, being in themselves permanently the same, afford the form and species; but being subject to corporeal division, they become the matter and subject to receive the other’s impression, the common mixture being completed out of both. Now the indivisible substance, which is always one and the same, is not to be thought to be incapable of division by reason of its smallness, like the most minute of bodies, called atoms. But as it is unmixed, and not to be any way affected, but pure and altogether of one sort, it is said not to consist of parts, but to be indivisible. By means of which purity, when it comes in any manner whatsoever to approach and gently touch compounded divisible and differing substances, all their variety ceases and they crowd together into one habit by sympathy and similitude. If now any one will call that substance which admits corporeal separation matter, as a nature subject to the former and partaking of it, the use of that equivocal term will nothing disadvantage our discourse. But they are under a mistake that believe the corporeal to be blended with the indivisible matter. First, for that Plato does not here make use of any one of its names; whereas in other places he calls it the receptacle and nurse, capable of both receiving and fostering the vast infinity of created beings; not divisible among bodies, but rather the body itself parted and divided into single individuals. Then again, what difference would there be between the creation of the world and that of the soul, if the composition of each proceeded from both matter and the intelligible essence? Certainly Plato, as endeavoring to separate the generation of the body from that of the soul, tells us that the corporeal part was by God seated and deposited within it, and that it was outwardly covered and enveloped by it; and after he had thus wrought the soul to its perfection out of proportion, he then proceeds to this argument concerning matter, of which he had no occasion to make mention before when he was producing the soul, as being that which had not its existence from matter.