being analogous to different causes. And the more excellent natures indeed are the causes of all that proceeds from secondary principles; but secondary principles are the causes of less numerous and less excellent effects. For with respect to the demiurgus himself, so far as he is _intellectual_, he produces all things intellectual; but so far as he is _being_, he is the father of all bodies and of every thing incorporeal; and so far as he is a God, he also gives subsistence to matter itself. In what is now said, therefore, Plato makes a summary repetition of every thing which the universe derives from the intellectual Gods. And thus much concerning the whole theory. Let us survey, however, more particularly the truth of what is now said. When, therefore, Plato calls the demiurgus, “an eternally reasoning being,” he makes the essence and at the same time the intellection of him through which the world is perpetual, to be eternal. It is requisite, likewise, to observe how he arranges the demiurgus among beings that always exist, assigning to him an eternal order; so that he will not be soul. For in the Laws Plato says that soul is immortal indeed, and indestructible, but is not eternal. Hence, it appears that every one who fancies soul is the demiurgus, is ignorant of the difference between the eternal and the indestructible. But _reasoning_ is significant of distributed or divided fabrication. And the words, “who at a certain time would exist,” do not indicate a temporal beginning, as Atticus imagined they did, but an essence conjoined with time. For Plato says in this dialogue, “that time was generated together with the universe,” and the world is temporal, and time is mundane. For time and the world are consubsistent with each other, and co-produced from the one fabrication of things. And a _temporal ever_, may be said to be _at a certain time_, when compared with that which is eternal, just as that which is _generatively being_, is _non-being_, when compared with that which is _intelligibly being_. Though the world, therefore, exists through the whole of time, yet its being consists in _becoming to be_, and is in a part of time. But this is the ποτε or the _at a certain time_, mentioned by Plato, and is not a simultaneous subsistence in all time, but is always _at a certain time_. For the eternal is always in the whole of eternity; but the temporal in a certain time, is always differently in a different time. Hence, the world, as with reference to an _eternally_ existing God, is very properly called a God, who at _a certain time_ would exist. For the former is sensible with reference to the latter, who is intellectual. That which is sensible, therefore, is _always generated_, but _is_ at a certain time. For it possesses existence partibly, and is perpetually advancing into being from that which always is. For since, as we have before observed, it derives from something else an infinite