righteous life upon earth "should return again to the habitation of his star, and there have a blessed existence;" but if he lived unrighteously, he should descend lower and lower in the scale of creation—from a man to a woman, and from a woman to some animal, until at last the spirit should triumph over the flesh, and his reason, which had never become extinct, should restore him to his first and higher self.
And in the head of man the gods put an immortal soul, to be master of the body; and they gave to the body itself its proper limbs and powers of movement and sensation, and in the eyes they placed a pure and gentle fire, which burns not, but streams forth and mingles with the light of day. And they gave man sight, that he might discern the unerring and intelligent motion of the stars, and order his own mind with like exactness; and they gave him voice and hearing, that music might harmonise his soul.
Besides the invisible and imperishable forms of the elements, and the visible images of these Forms—namely, the elements themselves—there is a third kind of being, a formless space or chaos, where these images are stored up, and which is the source and nurse of all generation. From this chaos the great Architect brought forth the four elements, and shook them together "in the vessel of space," and sifted and divided them "as grain is sifted by the winnowing fan," and fashioned them according to certain combinations of form and number. Thus the earth was formed like a cube, the most perfect and solid of all figures; while fire took the shape of a pyramid, and
