The Ε at Delphi (12-13)

There are some who associate the senses also, since they are of the same number, with those primal elements, observing that touch functions against something resistant, and is earthly, and that taste, through moisture in the things tasted, absorbs their qualities. Air, when it is struck, becomes voice or sound in the hearing of it. Of the two remaining senses, odour, which the sense of smell has received as its portion, since it is an exhalation and is engendered by heat, bears a resemblance to fire; and in sight, which flashes to its goal owing to its kinship with aether and light, there occurs a combination and coalescence of the two, which behaves as they do. The living being possesses no other sense, nor has the world any other nature single and uncombined; but a marvellous distribution and apportionment each to each has, as it seems, been made of the five to the five.

Therewith I checked myself and, after waiting a moment, said, What ails us, Eustrophus, that we all but passed over Homer[*] as if he were not the first

But the discussion must be carried further back, as Euripides[*] remarks. For those who exalt Four teach us a lesson that is not without value, that by reason of this number all solids have come into being. For since every such solid body exists through the acquisition of depth by length and breadth, and for length must be presupposed a single point assigned to unity, and length without breadth, which is called a line, is also duality, and the movement of the line breadthwise generates a plane in the third instance, and when depth is added, through the four factors the increase progresses to a solid — it is clear to everyone that four, when it has carried Nature forward to the point of completing a solid body and producing a volume that may be felt and that is resistant, has then left Nature lacking in the most important thing of all. For the inanimate thing is, to put it simply, orphaned, incomplete, and good for nothing, unless there be an animating soul to make use of it. The impulse or dispensation that creates the soul therein, a transformation brought about through five factors in all, gives to Nature its due completeness, and is as much more potent than four as the living being differs in worth from the inanimate thing.

Moreover, the symmetry and power of five, rather than that of any other number, has prevailed and has not permitted the animate to progress to unlimited classes of beings, but has produced five forms

If you should, moreover, make divisions of the soul itself to accord with Nature, the first and least clear part of it is the nutritive, second the perceptive, then the appetitive, and, next after this, the spirited; but when it had reached the power to reason, and had completed its nature, it came to rest there at the fifth element as at the highest point.[*]