sing it to be his sentence) that God always plays the
geometer? I said that this sentence was not plainly set down in any of
his books; yet there are good arguments that it is his, and it is very
much like his expression. Tyndares presently subjoining said: Perhaps,
Diogenianus, you imagine that this sentence intimates some curious and
difficult speculation, and not that which he hath so often mentioned,
when he praiseth geometry as a science that takes off men from sensible
objects, and makes them apply themselves to the intelligible and eternal
Nature, the contemplation of which is the end of philosophy, as the view
of the initiatory mysteries into holy rites. For the nail of pain and
pleasure, that fastens the soul to the body, seems to do us the
greatest mischief, by making sensible things more powerful over us than
intelligible, and by forcing the understanding to determine the rather
according to passion than reason. For this faculty, being accustomed
by the vehemency of pain or pleasure to be intent on the mutable and
uncertain body, as if it really and truly were, grows blind as to that
which really is, and loses that instrument and light of the soul,
which is worth a thousand bodies, and by which alone the deity can be
discovered. Now in all sciences, as in plain and smooth mirrors, some
marks and images of the truth of intelligible objects appear, but in
geometry chiefly; which, according to Philo, is the chief and principal
of all, and doth bring back and turn the understanding, as it were,
purged and gently loosened from sense. And therefore Plato himself
dislikes Eudoxus, Archytas, and Menaechmus for endeavoring to bring down
the doubling the cube to mechanical operations; for by this means all
that was good in geometry would be lost and corrupted, it falling
back again to sensible things, and not rising upward and considering
immaterial and immortal images, in which God being versed is always God.

After Tyndares, Florus, a companion of his, and who always jocosely
pretended to be his admirer, said thus: Sir, we are obliged to you for
making your discourse not proper to yourself, but common to us all; for
you have made it possible to disprove it by demonstrating that geometry
is not necessary to the gods, but to us. Now the deity doth not stand in
need of science, as an instrument to withdraw his intellect from things
created and to turn it to the real things; for these are all in him,
with him, and about h