parts and indivisible for its minuteness; but what is
incorporeal and intelligible is so, as being simple and sincere, and
void of all firmness and difference. Besides, it were folly to think to
judge of incorporeal things by corporeal. The present, or now, is said
to be without parts and indivisible, since it is everywhere and no part
of the world is void of it. But all affections and actions, and all
corruptions and generations in the world, are contained by this same
now. But the mind is judge only of what is intelligible, as the sight is
of light, by reason of its simplicity and similitude. But bodies, having
several differences and diversities, are comprehended, some by one
judicatory function, others by another, as by several organs. Yet they
do not well who despise the discriminative faculty in us; for being
great, it comprehends all sensibles, and attains to things divine. The
chief thing he himself teaches in his Banquet, where he shows us how we
should use amatorious matters, turning our minds from sensible goods to
things discernible only by the mind, that we ought not to be enslaved
by the beauty of any body, study, or learning, but laying aside
such weakness, should turn to the vast ocean of beauty. (See Plato's
"Symposium," p. 210 D.)

QUESTION IV. WHAT IS THE REASON THAT, THOUGH PLATO ALWAYS SAYS THAT THE
SOUL IS ANCIENTER THAN THE BODY, AND THAT IT IS THE CAUSE AND PRINCIPLE
OF ITS RISE, YET HE LIKEWISE SAYS, THAT NEITHER COULD THE SOUL EXIST
WITHOUT THE BODY, NOR THE REASON WITHOUT THE SOUL, BUT THE SOUL IN THE
BODY AND THE REASON IN THE SOUL? FOR 80 THE BODY WILL SEEM TO BE AND NOT
TO BE, BECAUSE IT BOTH EXISTS WITH THE SOUL, AND IS BEGOT BY THE SOUL.

Perhaps what we have often said is true; viz., that the soul without
reason and the body without form did mutually ever coexist, and neither
of them had generation or beginning. But after the soul did partake of
reason and harmony, and being through consent made wise, it wrought a
change in matter, and being stronger than the other's motions, it drew
and converted these motions to itself. So the body of the world drew its
original from the soul, and became conformable and like to it. For
the soul did not make the nature of the body out of itself, or out
of nothing; but it wrought an orderly and pliable body out of one
disorderly and formless. Just as if a man should say that the virtue
of the seed is with the body, and yet that the body of the fig-tr