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Yet they do not well who despise the discriminative faculty in us; for being great, it comprehends all sensibles, and attains to things divine.
Of sensibles, the first subdivision comprehends solid bodies, the second comprehends the images and representations of them. Moreover, to every one of these four he has assigned its proper criterion; to the first reason; to the mathematics, the understanding; to sensibles, belief; to images and likenesses, conjecture. At first glance it will appear that the sensible is the greater portion.
She stretched her limbs and moved slightly to try her muscles. "Yes, I am a very tired, but not the kind of tired that makes you want to go to bed. I want to talk, talk, talk, and not about ourselves either, but about sensibles. Tell me about your people your sister." He had expected her to ask this, for the subject seemed to have an inexhaustible charm for her.
Hence too, as Proclus well observes, it is evident that the soul does not collect her knowledge from sensibles, nor from things partial and divisible discover the whole and the one.
For if these sciences receive the soul replete with images, and knowing nothing subtile and unattended with material garrulity; and if they elucidate reasons possessing an irrefragable necessity of demonstration, and forms full of all certainty and immateriality, and which by no means call to their aid the inaccuracy of sensibles, do they not evidently purify our intellectual life from things which fill us with a privation of intellect, and which impede our perception of true being?
But I will not tire my reader's patience by pointing out all the pests of conversation, nor dwell particularly on the Sensibles, who pronounce dogmatically on the most trivial points, and speak in sentences; the Wonderers, who are always wondering what o'clock it is, or wondering whether it will rain or no, or wondering when the moon changes; the Phraseologists, who explain a thing by all that, or enter into particulars, with this and that and t'other; and lastly, the Silent Men, who seem afraid of opening their mouths lest they should catch cold, and literally observe the precept of the Gospel, by letting their conversation be only yea and nay.
And the case is the same in the universe, as to sensible and intelligible. For intelligibles are the principles of bodily things, but everything is greater than the principle whence it came. Yet, on the contrary, some will say that, by comparing sensibles with intelligibles, we match things mortal with divine, in some measure; for God is in intelligibles.
It is not fit, therefore, that the truth of things eternal should be received from the many, nor the discrimination of universals from sensibles, nor a judgment respecting what is good from irrational natures; but it is requisite that the soul entering within herself, should investigate herself the true and the good, and the eternal reasons of things.
As there are two genera of things, therefore, the intelligible and the sensible, so likewise there are two kingdoms of these; that of Providence, upwards, which reigns over intelligibles and sensibles, and that of Fate downwards, which reigns over sensibles only.
For I think the latter are species of the former. In the Timaeus the discourse about the intelligible gods is assumed for the sake of the proposed physiology. On which account, it is every where necessary that images should be known from paradigms, but that the paradigms of material things should be immaterial, of sensibles, intelligible, and of physical forms, separate from nature.
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