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[4]
For fire produces more motion than anything else in nature, and all birth is a mode of motion, or is accompanied by motion. All other portions of matter, in the absence of heat, lie inert and dead, yearning for the force of fire to inform them, like a spirit, and on its accession in any manner soever, they become capable of acting and being acted upon. This principle of fire, then, Numa, who was an extraordinary man, and whose wisdom gave him the repute of holding converse with the Muses, is said to have hallowed and ordered to be kept sleepless, that it might image forth the ever-living force which orders the universe aright.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 2.
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