ome of them have four feet, and some of them more than
four,--the latter, who are the more senseless, drawing closer to their
native element; the most senseless of all have no limbs and trail their
whole body on the ground. The fourth kind are the inhabitants of the
waters; these are made out of the most senseless and ignorant and impure
of men, whom God placed in the uttermost parts of the world in return
for their utter ignorance, and caused them to respire water instead of
the pure element of air. Such are the laws by which animals pass into
one another.

And so the world received animals, mortal and immortal, and was
fulfilled with them, and became a visible God, comprehending the
visible, made in the image of the Intellectual, being the one perfect
only-begotten heaven.

Section 2.

Nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek philosopher of the
fourth century before Christ is not easily reproduced to modern eyes.
The associations of mythology and poetry have to be added, and the
unconscious influence of science has to be subtracted, before we can
behold the heavens or the earth as they appeared to the Greek. The
philosopher himself was a child and also a man--a child in the range of
his attainments, but also a great intelligence having an insight into
nature, and often anticipations of the truth. He was full of original
thoughts, and yet liable to be imposed upon by the most obvious
fallacies. He occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms
with numbers; his a priori notions were out of all proportion to his
experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens by the
most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which nature worked for
him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried experiments for himself
which would either prove or disprove his theories. His knowledge was
unequal; while in some branches, such as medicine and astronomy, he had
made considerable proficiency, there were others, such as chemistry,
electricity, mechanics, of which the very names were unknown to him.
He was the natural enemy of mythology, and yet mythological ideas still
retained their hold over him. He was endeavouring to form a conception
of principles, but these principles or ideas were regarded by him as
real powers or entities, to which the world had been subjected. He was
always tending to argue from what was near to what was remote, from what
was known to what was unknown, from man to the universe,