The cause, therefore, of the coming-to-be of the things which owe their existence to nature is that they are in such-and-such a determinate condition: and it is this which constitutes, the 'nature' of each thing-a 'nature' about which he says nothing. What he says, therefore, is no explanation of 'nature'. Moreover, it is this which is both 'the excellence' of each thing and its 'good': whereas he assigns the whole credit to the 'mingling'. (And yet the 'elements'
at all events are 'dissociated' not by Strife, but by Love: since the 'elements' are by nature prior to the Deity, and they too are Deities.)Again, his account of motion is vague. For it is not an adequate explanation to say that 'Love and Strife set things moving, unless the very nature of Love is a movement of this kind and the very nature of Strife a movement of that kind. He ought, then, either to have defined or to have postulated these characteristic movements, or to have demonstrated them-whether strictly or laxly or in some other fashion. Moreover, since (a) the '******' bodies appear to move 'naturally' as well as by compulsion, i.e. in a manner contrary to nature (fire, e.g. appears to move upwards without compulsion, though it appears to move by compulsion downwards); and since (b) what is 'natural' is contrary to that which is due to compulsion, and movement by compulsion actually occurs; it follows that 'natural movement' can also occur in fact. Is this, then, the movement that Love sets going? No: for, on the contrary, the 'natural movement'
moves Earth downwards and resembles 'dissociation', and Strife rather than Love is its cause-so that in general, too, Love rather than Strife would seem to be contrary to nature. And unless Love or Strife is actually setting them in motion, the '******' bodies themselves have absolutely no movement or rest. But this is paradoxical: and what is more, they do in fact obviously move. For though Strife 'dissociated', it was not by Strife that the 'Ether' was borne upwards. On the contrary, sometimes he attributes its movement to something like chance ('For thus, as it ran, it happened to meet them then, though often otherwise"), while at other times he says it is the nature of Fire to be borne upwards, but 'the Ether' (to quote his words) 'sank down upon the Earth with long roots'. With such statements, too, he combines the assertion that the Order of the World is the same now, in the reign of Strife, as it was formerly in the reign of Love. What, then, is the 'first mover' of the 'elements'?
What causes their motion? Presumably not Love and Strife: on the contrary, these are causes of a particular motion, if at least we assume that 'first mover' to be an originative source'.
An additional paradox is that the soul should consist of the 'elements', or that it should be one of them. How are the soul's 'alterations' to take Place? How, e.g. is the change from being musical to being unmusical, or how is memory or forgetting, to occur? For clearly, if the soul be Fire, only such modifications will happen to it as characterize Fire qua Fire: while if it be compounded out of the elements', only the corporeal modifications will occur in it. But the changes we have mentioned are none of them corporeal.