XXXIV. ‘I have nothing more probable to offer, at least at the moment;’ I said, ‘yet perhaps it is better to show cause for one’s own view than for that of others. I say then, going back to the beginning, that if we assume two natures, one sensible, liable to changes of becoming and perishing, and to various movements at different times, the other essential, intellectual, always behaving alike under the same conditions, it is strange, friend, that the intellectual should admit of distinction and division within itself, while with regard to that which is bodily, and subject to affections, there should be trouble and [Sidenote: C] dissatisfaction if we refuse to leave it one, self-coherent and self-convergent, but separate and part it. Surely it is rather the permanent and divine which should hold together and shrink, as far as may be, from all dissection and analysis. Yet the force of “the Other” has gripped them, and has worked greater divergences than those of place in things intellectual, I mean those made by Reason and Idea. Hence Plato,[174] opposing those who make out the Whole to be one, tells us of Being, and the [Sidenote: D] Same, and the Different, and, besides all these, of Movement and Rest. Given then these five, it would not be wonderful if these five corporeal elements have been made by Nature copies and images of them severally, none free from admixture or transparent, but each element so far as it could best participate in each principle. Thus the Cube is clearly a body congenial to Rest, because of the stability and firmness of its surfaces. No one can fail to detect the fire-like, active character of the Pyramid in the fineness of its sides and the sharpness of its angles. The nature of the Dodecahedron, which embraces [Sidenote: E] the other figures, might well be taken for an image of Being in relation to all that is corporeal. Of the remaining two, the Eicosahedron is found most to partake of the idea of the Different, the Octahedron of that of the Same. Therefore the latter represented air, which holds all being in one constant form, the former water, which when mixed assumes new qualities the most numerous. If then Nature requires throughout equality before the law, it is probable that worlds have been created neither more nor less in number than the patterns, in order that each pattern in each world may hold that primacy and power which it has had in the composition of the elementary bodies.