closed, we must conceive to be a Deity[1], to be eternal, without bounds, neither created, nor subject, at any time, to destruction[2]. To inquire what is beyond it is no concern of man, nor can the human mind form any conjecture respecting it. It is sacred, eternal, and without bounds, all in all; indeed including everything in itself; finite, yet like what is infinite; the most certain of all things, yet like what is uncertain, externally and internally embracing all things in itself; it is the work of nature, and itself constitutes nature.[3]
It is madness to harass the mind, as some have done, with attempts to measure the world, and to publish these attempts; or, like others, to argue from what they have made out, that there are innumerable other worlds, and that we must believe there to be so many other natures, or that, if only one nature produced the whole, there will be so many suns and so many moons, and that each of them will have immense trains of other heavenly bodies. As if the same question would not recur at every step of our inquiry, anxious as we must be to arrive at some termination; or, as if this infinity, which we ascribe to nature, the former of all things, cannot be more easily comprehended by one single formation,
- ↑ The following passage from Cicero may serve to illustrate the doctrine of Pliny: "Novem tibi orbibus, vel potius globis, connexa sunt omnia: quorum unus est cœlestis, extimus, qui reliquos omnes complectitur, summus ipse Deus, arcens et continens cœlum;" Som. Scip. § 4. I may remark, however, that the term here employed by our author is not Deus but Numen.
- ↑ We have an interesting account of the opinions of Aristotle on this subject, in a note in M. Ajasson's translation, i. 231 et seq., which, as well as the greater part of the notes attached to the second book of the Natural History, were written by himself in conjunction with M. Marcus.
- ↑ The philosophers of antiquity were divided in their opinions respecting the great question, whether the active properties of material bodies, which produce the phænomena of nature, are inherent in them, and necessarily attached to them, or whether they are bestowed upon them by some superior power or being. The Academics and Peripatetics generally adopted the latter opinion, the Stoics the former: Pliny adopts the doctrine of the Stoics; see Enfield's Hist. of Phil. i. 229, 283, 331.
exclusa terra," and mundus, "Cœlum et quidquid cœli ambitu continetur." In the passage from Plato, referred to above, the words which are translated by Ficinus cœlum and mundus, are in the original οὐρανὀς and κόσμος; Ficinus, however, in various parts of the Timæus, translates οὐρανὀς by the word mundus: see t. ix. p. 306, 311, et alibi.
