4 
Ckap. 1.] ACCOUNT OF THE WOBLB. 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 constitutes 
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 mundus, " Coelmn et quidquid coeli ambitu conti- 
netur." In the passage from Plato, referred to above, the words which 
are translated by Ficinns coelum and mundus, are in the original ovpavbs 
and Koafios ; Ficinus, however, in various parts of the Timseus, translates 
ovpavbs by the word mundus : see t. ix. 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 sunt omnia : 
quorum unus est coelestis, extimus, qui rehquos omnes complectitur, 
summus ipse Deus, arcens et continens coelum ; " Som. Scip. § 4. I may 
remark, however, that 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. 
3 The philosophers of antiquity were divided in their opinions respect- 
ing the great question, whether the active properties of material bodies, 
which produce the phsenomena 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. , 
