[82] We have something similar to the above-mentioned words in another passage, “The Lord spake once, I have heard these two things” (Ps. 61 [62] 11). For “once” is like the unmixed, for the unmixed is a monad and the monad is unmixed, whereas twice is like the mixed, for the mixed is not single, since it admits both combination and separation.
[83] God then speaks in unmixed monads or unities. For His word is not a sonant impact of voice upon air, or mixed with anything else at all, but it is unbodied and unclothed and in no way different from unity. But our hearing is the product of two factors, of a dyad.
[84] For the breath from the seat of the master-principle driven up through the windpipe is shaped in the mouth by the workmanship, as it were, of the tongue, and rushing out it mixes with its congener the air, and impinging on it produces in a harmonious union the mixture which constitutes the dyad. For the consonance caused by different sounds is harmonized in a dyad originally divided which contains a high and a low pitch.
[85] Right well then did the lawgiver act when he opposed to the multitude of unjust thoughts the just man as one—numerically less, but greater in value. His purpose is that the worse should not prove the weightier when tested as in the scales, but by the victorious force of the opposite tendency to the better cause should kick the beam and prove powerless.