the limits of variety 173
clean kinds of animals when he wishes to appoint them for the use of
members of his commonwealth. He adds a general method for proving
and testing the ten kinds, based on two signs, the parted hoof and the
chewing of cud. Any kind which lacks both or one of these is unclean.
Now both these two are symbols to teacher and learner of the method best
suited for acquiring knowledge, the method by which the better is distin-
guished from the worse, and thus confusion is avoided. For just as a
cud- chewing animal after biting through the food keeps it at rest in the
gullet, again after a bit draws it up and masticates it and then passes it on
to the belly, so the pupil after receiving from the teacher through his ears
the principles and love of wisdom prolongs the process of learning, as he
cannot at once apprehend and grasp them securely, till by using memory
to call up each thing that he has heard by constant exercises which act as
the cement of conceptions, he stamps a firm impression of them on his
soul. But the firm apprehension of conceptions is clearly useless unless we
discriminate and distinguish them so that we can choose what we should
choose and avoid the contrary, and this distinguishing is symbolized by
the parted hoof. For the way of life is twofold, one branch leading to
vice, the other to virtue and we must turn away from the one and never
forsake the other. Therefore all creatures whose hooves are uniform or
multiform are unclean, the one because they signify the idea that good and
bad have one and the same nature, which is like confusing concave and
convex or uphill and downhill in a road; the multiform because they set
before our life many roads, which are rather no roads, to cheat us, for
where there is a multitude to choose from it is not easy to find the best and
most serviceable path.^22
The Moses thus revealed by Philo was a Platonized teacher. What
better evidence could there be for the existence of the Platonic forms
than the vision of the Tabernacle vouchsafed to Moses before its
construction:
It was determined, therefore, to fashion a tabernacle, a work of the highest
sanctity, the construction of which was set forth to Moses on the mount by
divine pronouncements. He saw with the soul’s eye the immaterial forms
of the material objects about to be made, and these forms had to be repro-
duced in copies perceived by the senses, taken from the original draught,
so to speak, and from patterns conceived in the mind ... So the shape of
the model was stamped upon the mind of the prophet, a secretly painted
or moulded prototype, produced by immaterial and invisible forms; and
then the resulting work was built in accordance with that shape by the