In one sense, the world or Cosmos signifies the whole system of heaven and the stars including the earth and the plants and animals thereon; in another sense the heaven only. It was on heaven that Anaxagoras had been gazing, when in answer to the person who asked why he suffered discomfort by spending the whole night under the open sky said he did it in order to contemplate the Cosmos, meaning by Cosmos the choric movements and revolutions of the stars. The third sense, which is approved by the Stoics, is something existing continuously to and through the general conflagration, a substance either reduced or not reduced to order, and time, they say, is what measures its movement. Our present discussion is concerned with the world in the first sense, namely the world which consists of heaven and earth and the life on them. The word destruction in one sense means a change for the worse, in another complete removal from existence, and this we must pronounce to be a thing which cannot possibly be, for just as nothing comes into being out of the non-existent, so nothing is destroyed into non-existence. Nothing from what is not can come to be, Nor was it ever heard or brought to pass, That what exists should perish utterly. So too the tragic poet Naught that is born can die; Hither and thither its parts disperse And take another form. Nothing in fact is so foolish as to raise the question whether the world is destroyed into non-existence. The point is whether it undergoes a transmutation from its ordered arrangement through the various forms of the elements and their combinations being either resolved into one and the self-same conformation or reduced into complete confusion as things are when broken or shattered.
On the Eternity of the World 2
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.