Plutarch, De animae procreatione in Timaeo
Goodwin, Ed.

But the substance of the soul, in Philebus, he called an infinite being, the privation of number and proportion; having neither period nor measure either of diminution or excess or distinction or dissimilitude. But as to that [p. 332] order which he alleges in Timaeus to be the mixture of nature with the indivisible substance, but which being applied to bodies becomes liable to division,—he would not have it thought to be a bulk made up by units or points, nor longitude and breadth, which are qualities more consentaneous to bodies than to the soul, but that disorderly unlimited principle, moving both itself and other substances, that which he frequently calls necessity, and which within his treatise of laws he openly styles the disorderly, ill-acting, or harm-doing soul. For such was this soul of herself; but at length she came to partake of understanding, ratiocination, and harmony, that she might be the soul of the world. Now that all-receiving principle of matter enjoyed both magnitude, space, and distance; but beauty, form, and measure of proportion it had none. However, all these it obtained, to the end that, when it came to be thus embellished and adorned, it might assume the form of all the various bodies and organs of the earth, the sea, the heavens, the stars, and of all those infinite varieties of plants and living creatures. Now as for those who attribute to this matter, and not to the soul, that which in Timaeus is called necessity, in Philebus vast disproportion and unlimited exorbitancy of diminution and excess,—they can never maintain it to be the cause of disorder, since Plato always alleges that same matter to be without any form or figures, and altogether destitute of any quality or effectual virtue properly belonging to it; comparing it to such oils as have no scent at all, which the perfumers mix in their tinctures. For there is no likelihood that Plato would suppose that to be the cause and principle of evil which is altogether void of quality in itself, sluggish, and never to be roused on to action, and yet at the same time brand this immensity with the harsh epithets of base and mischievous, and call it necessity repugnant and contumaciously rebellious [p. 333] against God. For this same necessity, which renverses heaven (to use his own phrase in his Politicus) and turns it the quite contrary way from decency and symmetry, together with innate concupiscence, and that inbred confusion of ancient nature, hurly-burly'd with all manner of disorder, before they were wrought and kneaded into the graceful decorum of the world,—whence came they to be conveyed into several varieties of forms and beings, if the subject, which is the first matter, were void of all quality whatsoever and deprived of all efficient cause; more especially the Architect being so good of himself, and intending a frame the nearest approaching to his own perfections? For besides these there is no third principle. And indeed, we should stumble into the perplexed intricacies of the Stoics, should we advance evil into the world out of nonentity, without either any preceding cause or effect of generation, in regard that among those principles that have a being, it is not probable that either real good or that which is destitute of all manner of quality should afford birth or substance to evil. But Plato escaped those pitfalls into which they blundered who came after him; who, neglecting what he carefully embraced, the third principle and energetic virtue in the middle between God and the first matter, maintain the most absurd of arguments, affirming the nature of evils to have crept in spontaneously and adventitiously, I know not how nor by what strange accidents. And yet they will not allow an atom of Epicurus so much as a moment's liberty to shift in its station, which, as they say, would infer motion out of nonentity without any impulsive cause; nevertheless themselves presuming all this while to affirm that vice and wickedness, together with a thousand other incongruities and vexations afflicting the body, of which no cause can be ascribed to any of the principles, came into being (as it were) ‘by consequence.’

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