In addition to all this Critolaus says that apart from external causes of death to living creatures, there are three to which they are subject, disease, old age and privation, to none of which the world can fall a prey. For it is compacted from the whole of the elements, so that it cannot suffer violence from any part that has been left out and defies control. It has dominion over the forces which produce infirmities, and the subservience of these forces keeps it from disease and decay of age. It is absolutely self-sufficient and independent of every need. It is lacking in nothing which can ensure permanence and has excluded the successive alternations between inanition and repletion, which living creatures experience through their gross avidity and thereby court not life but death, or to speak more cautiously, an existence more pitiful than extinction. Again if there was no everlasting form of nature to be seen, those who propound the destruction of the world might seem to have a good excuse for their iniquity, since they had no example of perpetual existence before them. But since according to the best professors of natural philosophy, fate has no beginning or end, being a chain connecting the causes of each event in unfailing continuity without a gap or break, why should we not also declare that the nature of the world or cosmic system is age-long, since it is order of the disordered, adjustment of the unadjusted, concord of the discordant, unification of the discrepant, appearing as cohesion in wood and stone, growth in crops and trees, conscious life in all animals, mind and reason in men and the perfection of virtue in the good? And if the nature of the world is uncreated and indestructible, clearly the world also is the same, held together as it is by the might of an eternal bond. Some conquered by truth and the arguments of their opponents have changed their views. For beauty has power to call us to it and truth is marvellously beautiful as falsehood is monstrously ugly. Thus Boethus of Sidon and Panaetius, powerful supporters of the Stoic doctrines, did under divine inspiration abandon the conflagrations and regenerations and deserted to the more religious doctrine that the whole world was indestructible. It is said too that Diogenes in his youth subscribed to the doctrine of the conflagration but in later years felt doubts and suspended judgement, for it is not given to youth but to old age to discern things precious and worthy of reverence, particularly those which are judged, not by unreasoning and deceitful sense, but by mind when absolutely pure and unalloyed.
On the Eternity of the World 15
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