though their forms be different.
Man alone, erect, aspiring, lifts his forehead to the skies,
And in upright posture steadfast seems earth's baseness to despise.
If with earth not all besotted, to this parable give ear,
Thou whose gaze is fixed on heaven, who thy face on high dost rear:
Lift thy soul, too, heavenward; haply lest it stain its heavenly worth,
And thine eyes alone look upward, while thy mind cleaves to the earth!

VI.

'Since, then, as we lately proved, everything that is known is cognized
not in accordance with its own nature, but in accordance with the nature
of the faculty that comprehends it, let us now contemplate, as far as
lawful, the character of the Divine essence, that we may be able to
understand also the nature of its knowledge.

'God is eternal; in this judgment all rational beings agree. Let us,
then, consider what eternity is. For this word carries with it a
revelation alike of the Divine nature and of the Divine knowledge. Now,
eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single
moment. What this is becomes more clear and manifest from a comparison
with things temporal. For whatever lives in time is a present proceeding
from the past to the future, and there is nothing set in time which can
embrace the whole space of its life together. To-morrow's state it
grasps not yet, while it has already lost yesterday's; nay, even in the
life of to-day ye live no longer than one brief transitory moment.
Whatever, therefore, is subject to the condition of time, although, as
Aristotle deemed of the world, it never have either beginning or end,
and its life be stretched to the whole extent of time's infinity, it yet
is not such as rightly to be thought eternal. For it does not include
and embrace the whole space of infinite life at once, but has no present
hold on things to come, not yet accomplished. Accordingly, that which
includes and possesses the whole fulness of unending life at once, from
which nothing future is absent, from which nothing past has escaped,
this is rightly called eternal; this must of necessity be ever present
to itself in full self-possession, and hold the infinity of movable time
in an abiding present. Wherefore they deem not rightly who imagine that
on Plato's principles the created world is made co-eternal with the
Creator, because they are told that he believed the world to have had
no beginning in time,[S] and to be destine