Chap. 1.] ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD. 15 



closed, we must conceive to be a Deity \ to be eternal, with- 

 out bounds, neither created, nor subject, at any time, to 

 destruction^. 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 ; in- 

 deed including everything in itself ; finite, yet like what is 

 infinite ; the most certain of all things, yet like what is un- 

 certain, externally and internally embracing all things in 

 itself; it is the work of nature, and itself constitutea 

 nature^. 



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, 



eiclusa terra," and munduSy " Coelujn et quidquid coeli ambitu conti- 

 netur." In the passage from Plato, referred to above, the words which 

 are translated by Ficinus caelum and mundus^ are in the original ovpavbs 

 and KO<T/xos ; Ficinus, however, in various parts of the Timseus, translates 

 ovpavbs by the word mundus : see t. be. p. 306, 311, et alibi. 



^ The following passage from Cicero may serve to illustrate the doctrine 

 of Pliny : " Novem tibi orbibus, vel potius globis, connexa simt omnia : 

 quorum unus est coelestis, extimus, qui rehquos omnes complectitvir, 

 summus ipse Deus, arcens et continens coelum ; " Som. Scip. § 4. I may 

 remark, however, tliat the term here employed by our author is not Deus 

 but Numen. 



2 We have an interesting account of the opinions of Aristotle on this 

 subject, in a note in M. Ajasson's translation, ii. 234 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 respect- 

 ing the great question, whether the active properties of material bodies, 

 which produce the phoenomena 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. 



