ave a distinct being of their own, are nevertheless
comprehended, though in a different manner, in their producing whole.
-----------------

"Further still, it may be said, where will be the venerableness of your
boasted science about divine natures? For it is absurd to call these
dogmas, which are collected from many places, Platonic, and which, as you
acknowledge, are reduced from foreign names to the philosophy of Plato;
nor are you able to evince the whole entire truth about divine natures.
Perhaps, indeed, they will say that certain persons, junior to Plato,
have delivered in their writings, and left to their disciples, one
perfect form of philosophy. You, therefore, are able to produce one
entire theory about nature from the Timaeus; but from the Republic, or
Laws, the most beautiful dogmas about morals, and which tend to one form
of philosophy. Alone, therefore, neglecting the treatise of Plato, which
contains all the good of the first philosophy, and which may be called
the summit of the whole theory, you will be deprived of the most perfect
knowledge of beings, unless you are so much infatuated as to boast on
account of fabulous fictions, though an analysis of things of this kind
abounds with much of the probable, but not of the demonstrative. Besides,
things of this kind are only delivered adventitiously in the Platonic
dialogues; as the fable in the Protagoras, which is inserted for the sake
of the political science, and the demonstrations respecting it. In like
manner the fable in the Republic is inserted for the sake of justice; and
in the Gorgias for the sake of temperance. For Plato combines fabulous
narrations with investigations of ethical dogmas, not for the sake of the
fables, but for the sake of the leading design, that we may not only
exercise the intellectual part of the soul, through contending reasons,
but that the divine part of the soul may more perfectly receive the
knowledge of beings, through its sympathy with more mystic concerns.
For from other discourses we resemble those who are compelled to the
reception of truth; but from fables we are affected in an ineffable
manner, and call forth our unperverted conceptions, venerating the mystic
information which they contain.

"Hence, as it appears to me, Timaeus with great propriety thinks it fit
that we should produce the divine genera, following the inventors of
fables as sons of the gods, and subscribe to their always generating
secondary nat