Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/118

 all things were only one single being, and that that being was immutable and a god, not born, but everlasting, of a globular form. Parmenides considered that it is fire that moves the earth, which is formed out of it. Leucippus thought that there was a plenum, and a vacuum; Democritus resembled him in this idea, but was more copious on other matters: Empedocles adopts the theory of the four ordinary and commonly known elements. Heraclitus refers everything to fire; Melissus thinks that what exists is infinite, immutable, always has existed, and always will. Plato thinks that the world was made by God, so as to be eternal, out of matter which collects everything to itself. The Pythagoreans affirm that everything proceeds from numbers, and from the principles of mathematicians.

Now of all these different teachers the wise man will, I imagine, select some one to follow; all the rest, numerous, and great men as they are, will be discarded by him and condemned; but whichever doctrine he approves of he will retain in his mind, being comprehended in the same manner as those things which he comprehends by means of the senses; nor will he feel any greater certainty of the fact of its now being day, than, since he is a Stoic, of this world being wise, being endowed with intellect, which has made both itself and the world, and which regulates, sets in motion, and governs everything. He will also be persuaded that the sun, and moon, and all the stars, and the earth, and sea, are gods, because a certain animal intelligence pervades and passes through them all: but nevertheless that it will happen some day or other that all this world will be burnt up with fire.

XXXVIII. Suppose that all this is true: (for you see already that I admit that something is true,) still I deny that these things are comprehended and perceived. For when that wise Stoic of yours has repeated all that to you, syllable by syllable, Aristotle will come forward pouring forth a golden stream of eloquence, and pronounce him a fool; and assert that the world has never had a beginning, because there never existed any beginning of so admirable a work from the adoption of a new plan: and that the world is so excellently made in every part that no power could be great enough to cause such motion, and such changes; nor could any time whatever be long enough to produce an old age capable of causing all this beauty to decay and perish. It will be indispensable for