על בריאת העולם כ״בOn the Account of the World's Creation 22
א׳
1[67] At that time, indeed, all things took shape simultaneously. But, though all things took shape together, the fact that living organisms were afterwards to come into existence one out of another rendered necessary an adumbration of the principle of order in the narrative. Now in particular creatures the order we find is this, that they begin at what is lowest in its nature, and end in the best of all; what this best of all is we must go on to show. Now seed is the original starting-point of living creatures. That this is a substance of a very low order, resembling foam, is evident to the eye. But when it has been deposited in the womb and become solid, it acquires movement, and at once enters upon natural growth. But growth is better than seed, since in created things movement is better than quiescence. But nature, or growth, like an artificer, or (to speak more properly) like a consummate art, forms living creatures, by distributing the moist substance to the limbs and different parts of the body, the substance of life-breath to the faculties of the soul, affording them nourishment and endowing them with perception. We must defer for the present the faculty of reasoning, out of consideration for those who maintain that it comes in from without, and is divine and eternal.
ב׳
2[68] Well, then, natural growth started from so poor a thing as seed, but it ended in that which is of greatest worth, the formation of the living creature and of man. Now we find that this selfsame thing has occurred in the case of the creation of the universe also. For when the Creator determined to form living creatures, those first in order were inferior, if we may so speak, namely fishes, while those that came last in order were best, namely men; and coming between the two extremes, better than those that preceded them, but inferior to the others, were the rest, namely land creatures and birds of the air.