Plato however does not so; who, despoiling the first matter of all manner of distinction, and separating from God, as far as it is possible, the causes of evil, has thus delivered himself concerning the world, in his Politicus. The world, saith he, received from the Illustrious Builder all things beautiful and lovely; but whatsoever happens to be noxious and irregular in heaven, it derives from its ancient habit and disposition, and conveys them into the several creatures. And a little farther in the same treatise he saith: In process of time, when oblivion had encroached upon the world, the distemper of its ancient confusion more prevailed, and the hazard is, lest being dissolved it should again be sunk and plunged into the immense abyss of its former irregularity. But there can be no dissimilitude in the first matter, as being void of quality and distinction. Of which when Eudemus with several others was altogether ignorant, he seems deridingly to cavil with Plato, and taxes him with asserting the first matter to be the cause, the root, and principle of all evil, which he had at other times so frequently dignified with the tender appellations of mother and nurse. Whereas Plato gives to matter only the titles of the mother and nurse; but the cause of evil he makes to be the moving force residing within it, not governed by order and reason though not without a soul neither, which, in his treatise of the Laws, he calls expressly the soul repugnant and in hostility with that other propitiously and kindly acting. For though the soul be the principle of motion, yet is it the understanding and intelligence which measures that motion by order and harmony, and is the cause of both. For God could not have brought to rest mere sleepy and sluggish matter, but he brought it to rest when it had been troubled and disquieted by a senseless and stupid cause. Neither did he infuse into nature the principles of alteration and affections; but when it was under the pressure of those unruly disorders and alterations, he discharged it of its manifold enormities and irregularities, making use of symmetry, proportion, and number. For these are the most proper instruments, not by alteration and lawless motion to distract the several beings with passions and distinctions, but rather to render them fixed and stable, and nearest in their composition to those things that in themselves continue still the same upon the equal poise of diuturnity. And this, in my judgment, is the sense and meaning of Plato.