METAPHYSICS(BOOKI) 147
the numbers, but Plato by way of participation, having changed the name. What this
participation or imitation of the forms might be, however, they were in unison in leav-
ing behind to be sought.
What’s more, apart from the sensible things and the forms, he said there were
among things mathematical ones, in between, differing from the sensible ones in being
everlasting and motionless, and from the forms in that there are any multitude of them
alike, while each form itself is only one. And since the forms are the causes of the others,
he thought that the elements of the forms were the elements of all beings. As material,
then, the great and the small were the sources, and as thinghood, the one, for out of the
former, by participation in the one, the forms are composed as numbers. So in saying that
the one was an independent thing, and not any other thing said to be one, he spoke in
much the same way as the Pythagoreans, and in saying that numbers were the causes of
thinghood for other things he spoke exactly as they did; but to have made a dyad in place
of the infinite as one thing, and to have made the infinite out of the great and the small,
was peculiar to him. It was also peculiar to him to set the numbers apart from the per-
ceptible things, while they had said that the things themselves were numbers, and they
did not set the mathematical things between them. Now his having made the one and the
numbers be apart from the things we handle, and not the same way the Pythagoreans had
said, and his introduction of the forms came about because of his investigation in the
realm of definitions (for the earlier thinkers had no part in dialectic), but his having made
the other nature a dyad was so that the numbers, outside of the primes, might be gener-
ated out of it in a natural way, as though from some sort of modeling clay.
But surely things happen in the opposite way, for this way is not reasonable. For
they make many things out of this material, while the form generates only once, but it is
apparent that from one material comes one table, while the person who brings the form
to bear, though he is one, makes many tables. And it is similar with the male in relation
to the female; for she becomes pregnant by one act of intercourse, while the male is the
cause of many pregnancies, and surely these things are images of the origins of things.
But Plato made distinctions in this way about the things that are being sought, and it is
clear from what has been said that he used only two causes, the one that is responsible
for the what-it-is and the one that results from material (for the forms are causes for the
other things of what they are, and the one is such a cause for the forms). And it is clear
what the underlying material is said to be, over against which the forms are, in the case
of perceptible things, and the one, among the forms, that it is the dyad of the great and
the small. And further, he referred the cause of what is good and bad respectively to
each of the two elements, just as we say certain of the earlier philosophers, such as
Empedocles and Anaxagoras, were trying to find a way to do.
- As far as the Pythagoreans are concerned, then, let the things now said be left
alone (for it is enough to touch on them this much). But as for those who set up the
forms, first of all, in seeking to understand the causes of the things around us, they
brought in other things, equal to these in number, as though someone who wanted to
count a smaller number of things thought he couldn’t do it, but could count them if he
made them more. For the forms are just about equal to, or not fewer than, those things
in search of the causes of which they went on from the latter to the former. For over
against each particular thing there is something with the same name, and also for the
other things besides the beings, to which there belongs a one-over-many, both among
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