BOOK I. XIII. 5-XIV. 5
the earth, that it is to the pit, that it is to these wretched laws of ours, the laws of the dead, and that it is not to the laws of the gods that you look?
CHAPTER XIV
That the Deity oversees all men
Now when someone asked him how a man could be convinced that each thing which he does is under the eye of God, Do you not think, he answered, that all things are united in one?—I do, said the other.—Very well, do you not think that what is on earth feels the influence[1] of that which is in heaven?—I do, he replied.—For how else comes it that so regularly, as if from God's command, when He bids the plants flower, they flower, when He bids them put forth shoots, they put them forth, when He bids them bear their fruit, they bear it, when to ripen, they ripen; when again He bids them drop their fruit and let fall their leaves and gather themselves together and remain quiet and take their rest, they remain quiet and take their rest? And how else comes it that at the waxing and waning of the moon and at the approach and recession of the sun we see among the things that are on earth so great an alteration and change to the opposite? 5But are the plants and our own bodies so closely bound up with the universe, and do they so intimately share its affections,[1] and is not the
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 This is the famous principle of συμπάθεια (συμπάθεῖν and συμπέποθεν in the text here), i.e., the physical unity of the cosmos in such a form that the experience of one part necessarily affects every other. This doctrine, especially popular with the Stoics, is essentially but a philosophic formulation of the vague ideas that underlie the practices of sympathetic magic. For the literature on this topic see Pease on Cicero's De Divinatione, ii. 34, where συμπάθεια is defined by Cicero as a coniunetio naturae et quasi concentus et consensus.
