10. Five, when multiplied, gives alternately five itself and the perfect
ten. It is also essential in harmonies.
11. Plato holds that, _if_ there are more worlds than one, there _may_
be five, and no more. Aristotle that there is one world composed of five
elements, the five regular solids.
12. The five senses are related to the five elements and the five
solids.
13. We must not forget Homer, and his five-fold division of the
universe. But, going back: Four dimensions (point, line, plane, solid)
are all very well. But animate being requires a fifth.
14. The true derivation is not 2 + 3 = 5 but 1 + 4 i.e., unity (which is
itself really a square) _plus_ the first square.
15. There are five modes of being (see the _Sophist_, and _Philebus_ of
Plato). Some early inquirer saw this, and set up _two_ E’s.
16. I ask the initiated whether five has not a special virtue in their
mysteries. (‘Yes,’ from NICANDER, ‘but it is a secret.’) Well I must
wait till I become a priest myself.
17. AMMONIUS, though in sympathy with Mathematics, deprecates too much
exactness. There is much to be said for the number seven. But the ‘E’ is
really something different from all the suggestions. The God greets his
visitors with ‘Know Thyself.’ They answer, THOU ART.
18. _We_ ‘are’ not at all, but always change from state to state, and so
(says Heraclitus) does all Nature.
19. In true being is no past, present, or future; our common speech
confesses to our not being.
20. But God IS, and is rightly addressed as ‘Thou Art’ or ‘Thou Art
One’.
21. The identification of Apollo with the sun is a beautiful attempt to
grasp the spiritual through the sensible. Not so the stories of his
change into fire, and the like, which are better ascribed to some daemon
than to the God. ‘Know Thyself’ calls us back from these lofty
speculations: ‘Man, know thy nature and its limitations!’