C. had just been translating the Zimaeus and he could scarcely have

inserted a palpable blunder without correction or notice. Add that the phrase apte cadentes ad is not only more appropriate for a continuous in- fluence than for a single creative act, but that it appears to refer to the correspondence between the organs of sense and the external cause of sensation, according to the principle ‘like is known by like’; see Zim. 68 of the sense of sight, and p. 37 of the soul’s power of cognizing various kinds of objects in virtue of its own constitution from corresponding elements.
apte cadere: lit. ‘to fall into its niche’, here ‘nicely adapted to affect the soul’, Cado by itself has nearly the same force, e.g. § 95 cur ista beatitudo in solem cadere non potest, ‘why is that blessedness unsuited to, incongruous with, our idea of the sun?’ So just below in figuram cadere. We are now in a position to reply to the off-hand Unde of Velleius. The five solids are all generated according to Plato (Zim. 53) out of two sorts of right-angled triangles, ras & ére rovrwy apxas avabev Beds oiSe Kai avdpar os ay éxeivo pidos 7), that is, they belong to the ideal, supersensual world, from which the Deity took his pattern for making the sensible world, and of which the rational soul is cognizant, unless it has been so much steeped in sense as to have lost its original faculties.
longum est. The Ind. is generally used where we might have expected the Subj. with verbs or phrases expressing duty, necessity, possibility, &c., especially when sum is employed with the Fut. Part. or Gerundive, the pre- dication being made absolutely and not in reference to a particular hypo- thetical action; see Roby §§ 1535, 1566, 1570, Key § 1214 foll., Draeger § 145, Krueger’s Untersuchungen (of Ind. in past tenses) Vol. 11 pp. 333— 388. Other examples of longum est are found WV. D. 1 30, 11 159, of possum 1 101, 1 121, 126, 131, so bellum erat 1 84, opus erat 89. For the similar Greek use of the past tense of the Ind. without dy in such words as ée, exphy, e&tv, Sixavov nv, see Madv. Gr. Gr. § 118, Jelf § 858.
ad omnia: sc. dicere ‘it would take long (to speak in reference to) to comment on all his theories’, Cf. Lael. 32 nist quid ad haec forte vultis with Reid’s n., and my n. on § 17 alias,
optata: ‘castles in the air’ ‘dreams’, so ull. 1 utrum cogitata sapien- tum an optauta furiosorum videntur? Ac. UW 121 somnia censet haec esse