XII. ‘However, let us assume, if you choose, that it is [Sidenote: C] contrary to nature that earth-like bodies should have their motions in heaven; and now let us look quietly, with no heroics, at the inference, which is this, not that the moon is not an earth, but that she is an earth not in its natural place. So the fire of Aetna is fire underground, which is contrary to nature, yet is fire; and air enclosed in bladders is light and volatile by nature, but has come perforce into a place unnatural to it. And the soul, the soul itself,’ I went on, ‘has it not been imprisoned in the body contrary to nature, a swift, and, as you hold, a fiery soul in a slow, cold body, the invisible within the sensible? Are we therefore to say that soul in body is nothing, and not rather that Reason, that divine thing, has been made subject to weight and density, that one which ranges all heaven [Sidenote: D] and earth and sea in a moment’s flight has passed into flesh and sinews, marrow and humours, wherein is the origin of countless passions?[324] Your Lord Zeus, is he not, so long as he preserves his own nature, one great continuous fire? Yet we see him brought down, and bent, and fashioned, assuming, and ready to assume, any and every complexion of change. Look well to it, my friend, whether when you shift all things [Sidenote: E] about, and remove each to its “natural” place, you are not devising a system to dissolve the universe and introducing Empedoclean strife, or rather stirring up the old Titans against Nature, in your eagerness to see once more the dreadful disorder and dissonance of the myth? All that is heavy in a place by itself, and all that is light in another, _Where neither sun’s bright face is separate seen, Nor earth’s rough brood, nor ocean any more_, [Sidenote: F] as Empedocles says! Earth had nothing to do with heat, water with wind; nothing heavy was found above, nothing light below; without commixture, without affection were the principles of all things, mere units, each desiring no intercourse with each or partnership, performing their separate scornful motions in mutual flight and aversion, a state of things which must always be, as Plato[325] teaches, where God is absent, the state of bodies deserted by intelligence and soul. So it was until the day when Providence brought Desire into Nature, and [Sidenote: 927] Friendship was engendered there, and Aphrodite, and Eros, as Empedocles tells us and Parmenides too and Hesiod,[326] so that things might change their places, and receive faculties from one another in turn, and, from being bound under stress, and forced, some to be in motion some to rest, might all begin to give in to the Better, instead of the Natural, and shift their places and so produce harmony and communion of the Whole.