In the animals sense and thought are breathed in; the cosmos received them once from God
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Hermes — πάντων οὖν τῶν ζώων καὶ ἡ αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ νόησις ἔξωθεν ἐπεισέρχεται, εἰσπνέουσα ὑπὸ τοῦ περιέχοντος· ὁ δὲ κόσμος ἅπαξ λαβὼν ἅμα τῷ γενέσθαι, ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ λαβὼν ἔχει.
In all the living beings, then, both sense-perception and intellection enter in from outside, breathed in from the surrounding. But the cosmos, having received them once at the same time as its coming to be, and having received them from God, holds them.
A short but pointed distinction. In all the other living beings, both sense-perception and intellection enter from outside, breathed in from the surrounding — the enveloping air, the environment, feeds them their perceiving and thinking moment by moment. But the cosmos, having received them once for all at the very moment of its coming-to-be, holds them as taken directly from God. The creatures are continually resupplied from without; the cosmos was endowed once, at its origin, from the source itself.
This brief section draws a sharp line between the creatures and the world that contains them, and it turns on a single contrast of tense and source. In the animals — all of them — 'sense-perception and intellection enter from outside (ἔξωθεν ἐπεισέρχεται), breathed in from the surrounding (εἰσπνέουσα ὑπὸ τοῦ περιέχοντος).' The vocabulary is respiratory: the living thing inhales its perceiving and thinking from τὸ περιέχον, 'the enveloping,' the ambient air and environing world. Creaturely mind is borrowed breath, drawn in and let out, dependent moment by moment on what surrounds it.
The cosmos is different, and the difference is its dignity. It 'received them once (ἅπαξ), at the same time as its coming to be (ἅμα τῷ γενέσθαι), and having received them from God (ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ), holds them.' Two things set it apart: the once and the from-whom. The world was not fed its sense and thought piecemeal from an environment — it has no environment, being itself the enveloping — but was endowed with them in a single original act, and endowed directly from God rather than from any intermediate surrounding. The little section thus completes the ladder the treatise has been climbing: the creatures depend on the cosmos, the cosmos depends on God, and where the creature is perpetually resupplied, the world holds its endowment as a permanent possession from the source. It prepares the final movement, where God turns out to be not a source outside the world at all, but the one in whom all things are and from whom nothing is ever left out.
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