Page:The Natural History of Pliny.djvu/59

 Chap. 6.] ACCOUNT OF THE WOELD. 25 cannot do everything. For be cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good. Nor can he make mortals immortal, or recall to life those who are dead ; nor can he effect, that he who has once lived shall not have lived, or that he who has enjoyed honours shall not have enjoyed them ; nor has he any influence over past events but to cause them to be forgotten. And, if we -illus- trate the nature of our coimexion with God by a less serious argument, he cannot make twice ten not to be twenty, and many other things of this kind. By these considerations the power of Nature is clearly proved, and is sho-Mi to be what we call Grod. It is not foreign to the subject to have di- gressed into these matters, familiar as they are to every one, from the continual discussions that take place respecting God CHAP. 6. (8.) — OF THE XATUKE OF THE STARS ; OF THE MOTIOIf OF THE PLAKETS. Let us return from this digression to the other parts of nature. The stars which are described as fixed in the heavens-, are not, as the vulgar suppose, attached each of them to different individuals^, the brighter to the rich, those that are less so to the poor, and the dim to the aged, shining according to the lot of the individual, and separately assigned to mortals ; for they have neither come into existence, nor ^ It is scarcely necessary to remark, that the opinions here stated re- specting the Deity are taken partly from the tenets of the Epicureans, combined with the Stoical doctrine of Fate. The examples which are ad- duced to prove the power of fate over the Deity are, for the most part, rather verbal than essential. 2 " afFixa mundo." The peculiar use of the word mundus in this pas- sage is worthy of remark, in connexion with note ^, ch. 1. page 13. 3 We have many references in Phny to the influence of the stars upon the earth and its inhabitants, constituting what was formerly regarded as so important a science, judicial astrology. Ptolemy has drawn up a regular code of it in his " Centum dicta," or " Centiloquimns." We have a higlily interesting account of the supposed science, its origin, pro- gress, and general principles, in Whewell's History of the Inductive Sci- ences, p. 293 et seq. I may also refer to the same work for a sketch of the history of astronomy among the Greeks and the other nations of antiquity.