timaeus   

appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there
he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in
attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and
if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would
continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil
nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and
transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the
like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent
and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and
water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better
state. Having given all these laws to his creatures, that he might
be guiltless of future evil in any of them, the creator sowed some
of them in the earth, and some in the moon, and some in the other
instruments of time; and when he had sown them he committed to the
younger gods the fashioning of their mortal bodies, and desired them
to furnish what was still lacking to the human soul, and having made
all the suitable additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal
animal in the best and wisest manner which they could, and avert
from him all but self-inflicted evils.
When the creator had made all these ordinances he remained in his
own accustomed nature, and his children heard and were obedient to
their father's word, and receiving from him the immortal principle
of a mortal creature, in imitation of their own creator they
borrowed portions of fire, and earth, and water, and air from the
world, which were hereafter to be restored-these they took and
welded them together, not with the indissoluble chains by which they
were themselves bound, but with little pegs too small to be visible,
making up out of all the four elements each separate body, and
fastening the courses of the immortal soul in a body which was in a
state of perpetual influx and efflux. Now these courses, detained as
in a vast river, neither overcame nor were overcome; but were hurrying
and hurried to and fro, so that the whole animal was moved and
progressed, irregularly however and irrationally and anyhow, in all
the six directions of motion, wandering backwards and forwards, and
right and left, and up and down, and in all the six directions. For
great as was the advancing and retiring flood which provided
nourishment, the affections produced by external contact caused
still greater tumult-when the body of any one met and came into
collision with some external fire, or with the solid earth or the
gliding waters, or was caught in the tempest borne on the air, and the
motions produced by any of these impulses were carried through the
body to the soul. All such motions have consequently received the
general name of "sensations," which they still retain. And they did in
fact at that time create a very great and mighty movement; uniting
with the ever flowing stream in stirring up and violently shaking
the courses of the soul, they completely stopped the revolution of the
same by their opposing current, and hindered it from predominating and
advancing; and they so disturbed the nature of the other or diverse,
that the three double intervals [i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8], and the
three triple intervals [i.e. between 1, 3, 9, 27], together with the
mean terms and connecting links which are expressed by the ratios of 3
: 2, and 4 : 3, and of 9 : 8-these, although they cannot be wholly
undone except by him who united them, were twisted by them in all
sorts of ways, and the circles were broken and disordered in every
possible manner, so that when they moved they were tumbling to pieces,
and moved irrationally, at one time in a reverse direction, and then
again obliquely, and then upside down, as you might imagine a person
who is upside down and has his head leaning upon the ground and his
feet up against something in the air; and when he is in such a
position, both he and the spectator fancy that the right of either
is his left, and left right. If, when powerfully experiencing these
and similar effects, the revolutions of the soul come in contact
with some external thing, either of the class of the same or of the
other, they speak of the same or of the other in a manner the very