SECTION I

METAPHYSICAL FRAGMENTS

(Stob.Ec.Phys. 1:-?13)

1. There are necessarily two principles of beings; the one containing the series of beings organized, and finished, the other, of unordered and unfinished beings. That one which is susceptible of being expressed, by speech, and which can be explained, both embraces beings, and determines and organises the non-being.

For every time that it approaches the things of becoming, it orders them, and measures them, and makes them participate in the essence and form of the universal. On the contrary, the series of beings which escape speech and reason, injures ordered things and destroys those which aspire to essence and becoming; whenever it approaches them, it assimilates them to its own nature.

But since there are two principles of things of an opposite character, the one the principle of good, and the other the principle of evil, there are therefore also two reasons, the one of beneficent nature, the other of maleficent nature.

That is why the things that owe their existence to art, and also those which owe it to nature, must above all participate in these two principles; form and substance.

The form is the cause of essence; substance is the substrate which [it] receives the form. Neither can substance alone participate in form, by itself; nor can form by itself apply itself to substance; there must therefore exist another cause which moves the substance of things; and forms them. This cause is primary, as regards substance, and the most excellent of all. Its most suitable name is God.

There are therefore three principles: God, the substance of things, and form. God is the artist, the mover; the substance is the matter, the moved ; the essence is what you might call the art, and that to which the substance is brought by the mover. But since the mover contains forces which are self-contrary, those of simple bodies, and as the contraries are in need of a principle harmonizing and unifying them, it must necessarily receive its efficacious virtues and proportions from the numbers, and all that is manifested in numbers and geometric forms; virtues and proportions capable of binding and uniting into form the contraries that exist in the substance of things. For, by itself, substance is formless; only after having been moved towards form does it become form, and receives the rational relations of order. Likewise, if movement exists, besides the thing moved, there must exist a prime mover; there must therefore be three principles; the substance of things, the form, and the principle that moves itself, and which by its power is the first; not only must this principle be an intelligence, it must be above intelligence, and we call it God.

Evidently the relation of equality applies to the being which can be defined to language, and reason. The relation of inequality applies to the irrational being; and cannot be fixed by language; it is substance; that is why all begetting and destruction take place in substance, and do not occur without it.

2. In short, the philosophers began only by so to speak contrary principles; but above these elements they knew another superior one, as is testified to by Philolaus, who says that God has produced, and realized the finite and infinite, and shown that at the limit is attached the whole series which has a greater affinity with the One, and to Infinity, the one that is below. Thus, above these two principles they have posited a unifying cause, superior to everything which, according to Archenetus, is the cause before the cause, and, according to Philolaus, the universal principle.

3a. Which unity are you referring to? Of supreme unity, or of the infinitely small unity that you can find in the parts? The Pythagoreans distinguished between the Unity and the Monad, as says Archytas ; Unity and the Monad have a natural affinity but yet they differ.

3b. Archytas and Philolaus indiscriminately call the unity a monad, and monad a unity. The majority however add to the same monad, the distinction of first monad, for there is a monad which is not the first, and which is posterior to the monad in itself, and to unity.

3c. Pythagoras said that the human soul was a tetragon with right angles. Archytas, on the contrary, instead of defining the soul by the tetragon, did so by a circle, because the soul is a self-mover, and consequently, the prime mover; but this [is] a circle or a sphere.

3d. Plato and Archytas and the other Pythagoreans claim that there are three parts in the soul; reason, courage and desire.

4. The beginning of the knowledge of beings is in the things that produce themselves. Of these some are intelligible, and others sensible; the former are immovable, the latter are moved. The criterion of intelligible things is the World; that of sensible things is sensation.

Of the things that do not manifest in things themselves, some are science, the others, opinion; science is immovable; opinion is movable. We must, besides, admit these three things; the subject that judges, the object that is judged, and the rule by which that object is judged. What judges, is the mind, or sensation; that is judged, is the logos or rational essence; the rule of judgment is the act itself which occurs in the being; whether intelligible or sensible. The mind is the judge of essence, whether it tends towards an intelligible being, or a sensible one. When reason seeks intelligible things, it tends towards an intelligible element; when it seeks things of sense, it tends towards their element. Hence come, those false graphic representation in figures and numbers seen in geometry, those researches in causes and probable ends, whose object are beings subject to becoming, and moral acts, .... physiology or politics. It is while tending towards the intelligible element that reason recognizes that harmony is in the double relation; but sensation alone attests that this double relation is concordant. In mechanics, the object of science is figures, numbers, proportions; -- namely rational proportions; the effects are perceived by sensation; for you can neither study nor know them outside of the matter or movement. In short it s impossible to know the reason of an individual thing, unless you have preliminarily by the mind grasped the essence of the individual thing. The knowledge of the existence, and of quality, belongs to reason and sensations; to reason, whenever we effect a thing's demonstration by a syllogism whose conclusion is inevitable; to sensation, when the latter is the criterion of a thing's essence.

5. Sensation occurs in the body, reason in the soul. The former is the principle of sensible things, the latter, of intelligible ones. Popular measures are number, length, the foot, weight and equilibrium; the scales; while the rule and the measure of straightness in both vertical and longitudinal directions is the right angle.

Thus sensation is the principle and measure of the bodies; reason is the principle and measure of intelligible things. The former is the principle of beings that are intelligible and naturally primary; the latter, of sense-objects, and naturally secondary. Reason is the principle of our soul; sensation, the principle of our body. The mind is the judge of the noblest things; sensation, of the most useful. Sensation was created in view of our bodies, and to serve them; reason in view of the soul, and to initiate wisdom therein. Reason is the principle of science; sensation, of opinion. The latter derives its activity from sensible things; the former from the intelligible. Sensible objects participate in movement and change; intelligible objects participate in immutability and eternity. There is no analogy between sensation and reason; for sensation's object is the sensible, which moves, changes, and never remains self-identical; therefore as you can see it, it improves or deteriorate. Reason's object is the intelligible; whose essence is immobility, wherefore in the intelligible we cannot conceive of either more nor less, better or worse; and just as reason sees the primary being, and the (cosmic) model, so sensation sees the image, and the copied. Reason sees man in himself; sensation sees in them the circle of the sun, and the forms of artificial objects. Reason is perfectly simple and indivisible, as unity, and the point; it is the same with intelligible beings.

The idea is neither the limit nor the frontier of the body; it is only the figure of being, that by which the being exists, while sensation has parts, and is divisible.

Some beings are perceived by sensation, others by opinion, others by science, and others by reason.

The bodies that offer resistance are sensible; opinion knows those that participate in the ideas, and are its images, so to speak. Thus some particular man participates in the idea of man, and this triangle, in the triangle-idea. The object of science are the necessary accidents of ideas; thus the object of geometry is the properties of the figures; reason knows the ideas themselves, and the principles of the sciences and of their objects; for example, the circle, the triangle, ,and the pure sphere in itself. Likewise, in us, in our souls, there are four kinds of knowledge, pure thought, science, opinion and sensation; two are principles of knowledge (thought and sensation); two are its purpose, science and opinion. It is always the similar which is capable of knowing the similar; reason knows the intelligible things; science, the knowable things; opinion, conjecturable things; sensation, sensible things.

That is why thought must rise from things that are sensible, to the conjecturable ones and from these to the knowable, and on to the intelligible and he who wishes to know the truth about these objects, must in a harmonious grouping combine all these means and objects of knowledge. This being established, you might represent them under the image of a line divided into two equal parts, each of which would be similarly divided; if we separate the sensible, dividing it into two parts, in the same proportion, the one will be clearer, the other obscurer. One of the sections of the of the sensible contains images of things, such as you see reflected in water, or mirrors; the second represents the plants and animals of which the former are images. Similarly dividing the intelligible, the different kinds of sciences will represent the images; for the students of geometry begin by establishing by hypothesis, the odd and the even, figures, three kinds of angles, and from these hypotheses deduce their science; as to the things themselves, they leave them aside, as if they knew them, though they not cannot account for them to themselves or to others; they employ sensible things as images, but these things are neither the object nor the end proposed in their researches and reasonings; which pursue only things in themselves, such as the diameter or square. The second section is that of the intelligible; object of dialectics. It really makes no hypotheses, positing principles whence it rises to arrive to the unconditioned, to the universal principle; then, by an inverse movement, grasping that principle, it descends to the end of the reasoning, without employing any sensible object, exclusively using pure ideas. By these four divisions, you can also analyse the soul-states, and give the highest the name of thought, reasoning to the second, faith to the third, and imagination to the fourth.

6. Archytas, at the beginning of his book on Wisdom gives this advice; in all human things wisdom is as superior as sight is to all the other senses of the body, as mind is superior to soul, as the sun is superior to the stars. Of all the senses, sight is the one that extends furthest in its sphere of action, and gives us the most ideas. Mind, being supreme, accomplishes its legitimate operation by reason and reasoning; it is like sight, and the power of the noblest objects; the sun is the eye and soul of natural things, for it is through it that they are all seen, begotten, and thought; through it the beings produced by root or seed, are fed, developed, and endowed with sensation. Of all beings, man is the wisest; by far; for he is able to contemplate beings, and to acquire knowledge and understanding of all. That is why divinity has engraved in him, and has revealed to him the system of speech, which extends to everything, a system in which are classified all the beings, kinds of being, and the meanings of nouns and verbs. For the specialised seats of the voice are the pharynx, the mouth and the nose. As man is naturally organized to produce sounds, through which nouns and verbs are expressed and formed, likewise he is naturally destined to contemplate the notions contained in the visible objects; such, in my view, is the purpose for which man has been created, and was born; and for which he received from God his organs and faculties.

Man is born and is created to know the essence of universal nature; and precisely the function of wisdom is to possess and contemplate the intelligence manifested in the beings.

The object of wisdom is no particular being, but all the beings, absolutely; and it should not begin to seek the principles of an individual being, but the principles common to all. The object of wisdom is all the beings, as the object of sight is all visible things. The function of wisdom is to see all the beings in their totality, and to know their universal attributes; and that is how wisdom discovers the principles of all beings.

He who is capable of analysing all the species, and to trace and group them, by an inverse operation, into one single principle, he seems to me the wisest, and the closest to the truth; he seems to have found that sublime observatory from the peak of which he may observe God, and all the things that belong to the series and order of divine things; being master of this royal road, his mind will be able to rush forwards, and arrive at the end of the career, uniting principles to the purposes of things, and knowing that God is the principle, the middle and the end of all things made according to the rules of justice and right reason.