regained his first and better nature. Having given this law to his
creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed them,
some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other planets; and he
ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them and to make the
necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all but self-inflicted
evil.

Having given these commands, the Creator remained in his own nature. And
his children, receiving from him the immortal principle, borrowed from the
world portions of earth, air, fire, water, hereafter to be returned, which
they fastened together, not with the adamantine bonds which bound
themselves, but by little invisible pegs, making each separate body out of
all the elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the courses
of the soul. These swelling and surging as in a river moved irregularly
and irrationally in all the six possible ways, forwards, backwards, right,
left, up and down. But violent as were the internal and alimentary fluids,
the tide became still more violent when the body came into contact with
flaming fire, or the solid earth, or gliding waters, or the stormy wind;
the motions produced by these impulses pass through the body to the soul
and have the name of sensations. Uniting with the ever-flowing current,
they shake the courses of the soul, stopping the revolution of the same and
twisting in all sorts of ways the nature of the other, and the harmonical
ratios of twos and threes and the mean terms which connect them, until the
circles are bent and disordered and their motion becomes irregular. You
may imagine a position of the body in which the head is resting upon the
ground, and the legs are in the air, and the top is bottom and the left
right. And something similar happens when the disordered motions of the
soul come into contact with any external thing; they say the same or the
other in a manner which is the very opposite of the truth, and they are
false and foolish, and have no guiding principle in them. And when