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and what is impossible, in the subjects of your investigation. For the Gods, indeed, and the natures that are more excellent than we, through the wish of what is beautiful, and from an unenvying and exuberant fulness of good, benevolently impart to those that are worthy, such things as are fit for them, commiserating the labours of sacerdotal men, but being delighted with those that they have begotten, nourished, and instructed. But the middle genera are the inspective guardians of judgment. These inform us what ought to be done, and from what it is fit to abstain. They also give assistance to just works, but impede such as are unjust; and as many endeavour to take away unjustly the property of others, or basely to injure or destroy some one, they cause these to suffer the same things as they have done to others. But there is, likewise, another most irrational genus of dæmons,[1] which is without judgment, and is allotted only one power, through an arrangement by which each of these dæmons presides over one work alone. As therefore, it is the province of a sword to cut, and to do
- ↑ According to Proclus, in Alcibiad. Prior, there are three orders of dæmons, the first of which are more intellectual, the second are of a more rational nature, and the third, of which Iamblichus is now speaking, are various, more irrational, and more material.
