They do not tell us at all, however, how
there can be movement if limit and unlimited and odd and even are
the only things assumed, or how without movement and change there
can be generation and destruction, or the bodies that move through the
heavens can do what they do.
Further, if one either granted them that spatial magnitude
consists of these elements, or this were proved, still how would
some bodies be light and others have weight? To judge from what they
assume and maintain they are speaking no more of mathematical bodies
than of perceptible; hence they have said nothing whatever about
fire or earth or the other bodies of this sort, I suppose because they
have nothing to say which applies peculiarly to perceptible things.
Further, how are we to combine the beliefs that the attributes
of number, and number itself, are causes of what exists and happens in
the heavens both from the beginning and now, and that there is no
other number than this number out of which the world is composed? When
in one particular region they place opinion and opportunity, and, a
little above or below, injustice and decision or mixture, and
allege, as proof, that each of these is a number, and that there
happens to be already in this place a plurality of the extended bodies
composed of numbers, because these attributes of number attach to
the various places,-this being so, is this number, which we must
suppose each of these abstractions to be, the same number which is
exhibited in the material universe, or is it another than this?
Plato says it is different; yet even he thinks that both these
bodies and their causes are numbers, but that the intelligible numbers
are causes, while the others are sensible.
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