De E apud Delphos

But as for its greatest excellency, I fear, lest being spoken it should press our Plato as much as he himself said Anaxagoras was pressed by the name of the moon, when he made a certain opinion concerning her illuminations, which was very ancient, to be an invention of his own. For has he not said this in his dialogue entitled Cratylus?[*](See Cratyl. p. 403 A.)

Yes indeed, answered Eustrophus; but I see not any thing that has fallen out like it. And yet you know, that in the Sophister[*](See Sophist. p. 254 D.) he demonstrates five principal beginnings, to wit, that which is, or Ens (τὸ ὄν), the Same, the Different, adding to these, for a fourth and fifth, Motion, and Rest. Again, in his dialogue called Philebus,[*](See Phileb. p. 23 C-E.) using another manner of division, he says, that there is one thing Infinite, and another the End; and that all generation consists of these two mixed together. Then he puts the cause by which they are mixed for the fourth kind; and has left us to conjecture the fifth, by which the things that were mixed have again a division and dissipation. Now I

am of opinion that these last are delivered as the images or representations of those before,—to wit, the things engendered of Ens, the Infinite of Motion, the End of Rest, the Mixing Principle of the Same, and the Separating Principle of the Different. But if these are different from those, yet both that way and this way these principles are still distinguished into five kinds and differences. Now some one, said he, being persuaded of these things and seeing them before Plato, consecrated to the God two E E, for a mark and symbol of the number of all things. And having perhaps further understood that good also appears in five kinds, of which the first is the mean, the second the commensurate, the third understanding, the fourth the sciences, arts, and true opinions in the soul, and the fifth a certain pleasure, pure and unmixed with sorrow; he stops there, subjoining that of Orpheus:

In the sixth age stay your desire of singing.