Let us, therefore, now return to the words of Plato. In the first place then he says that Ocean and Tethys were the progeny of Heaven and Earth. And here we may observe, that as this whole world is ample and various, as adumbrating the intellectual order of forms, it contains these two extremities in itself, Earth and Heaven; the latter having the relation of a father, but the former of a mother. On this account Plato calls Earth the most ancient of the Gods within the heavens, in order that conformably to this he might say, that Earth is the mother of all that Heaven is the father; at the same time evincing that partial causes are not only subordinate to their progeny, as Poverty, in the Banquet of Plato to Love, but are likewise superior to them, as alone receiving the offspring proceeding from the fathers. These two extremities, therefore, must be conceived in the world, Heaven as the father, and Earth as the mother of her common progeny. For all the rest terminate in these, some giving completion to the celestial number, but others to the wholeness of Earth. After the same manner, likewise, in each of the elements of the world, these two principles, Heaven and Earth, must be admitted, subsisting aerially indeed in air, but aquatically in water, and terrestrially in earth; and according to all the above-mentioned modes; in order that each may be a perfect world, adorned and distributed from analogous[138] principles. For if man is said to be a microcosm, is it not necessary that each of the elements by a much greater priority should contain in itself appropriately all that the world contains totally? Hence, it appears to me that Plato immediately after speaking about Heaven and Earth, delivers the theory of these Gods, beginning from those two divinities; for the other divinities proceed analogous to Heaven and Earth. These two divinities, however, are totally the causes of all the Gods that are now produced. And these divinities that are the progeny of Heaven and Earth, are analogous to the whole of each. These two, likewise, as we have before observed, are in each of the elements, aerially, or aquatically, or terrestrially. For Heaven is in Earth, and Earth in Heaven.[139] And here, indeed, Heaven subsists terrestrially, but there Earth celestially. For Orpheus calls the moon celestial earth.[140] Nor is it proper to wonder that this should be the case. For we may survey the same things every where, according to the analogous, in intelligibles, in intellectuals, in the supermundane order, in the heavens, and in generation, conformably to the proper order of each.