To establish their third point they employ an argument of this sort. Anything, the parts of which are all perishable, necessarily perishes itself. All the parts of the world are perishable, therefore, the world itself is perishable. This point which we reserved for future argument must now be examined. To begin with earth. What part of it, great or small, is there which is not dissolved by the action of time? Do not the strongest stones become dank and decay through the weakness of their cohesiveness, that current of spirit force, that bond which is not unbreakable but merely difficult to loose? They break in pieces and first disintegrate into a stream of fine dust and afterwards waste away till there is nothing left of them. Again if water is not whipped by the wind but left unmoved, does it not become like a dead thing through its inactivity? It certainly changes and becomes very malodorous like an animal bereft of its vital force. As for the air, its destruction is evident to everybody, for sickness and decay and what may be called death is natural to it. How, indeed, could anyone, who aimed at truth rather than elegance of language, describe a pestilence save as a death of the air which diffuses its own distemper to destroy all things to which the life force has been given? We need not spend many words on fire, for when it has lost its sustenance it is extinguished at once, in itself lame as the poets say. While with a support it stands erect because the kindled fuel is still there; when that is used up it is seen no more. Much the same is said to happen with the snakes in India. They creep up to those hugest of animals, the elephants, and wind themselves round their backs and the whole of their belly. Then making an incision in a vein, as chance directs, they imbibe the blood, sucking it in greedily with violent inhalations and continuous hissing. For a time the elephants hold out, leaping about in their helplessness, and beating their sides with the trunk to try and reach the snakes, then as their life-power is continually being drained, they can leap no more but stand still quivering. Soon afterwards when their legs have lost all strength they drop down through lack of blood and expire. But in their fall they involve the authors of their death in the same fate. The way of it is as follows: the snakes no longer getting their nourishment try to loosen the bond which they have drawn round their victims, as they now desire release, but being squeezed and pressed down by the weight of the elephants, most especially when the ground happens to be hard and stony, they wriggle about and do everything they can to free themselves but are fettered by the force of the weight upon them. In their helpless straits, their manifold exertions only exhaust them, and like people stoned to death or caught by the sudden fall of a wall, unable even to free their heads they are stifled and die. Now if each part of the world suffers destruction, clearly the world compacted from them will not be indestructible. The fourth and last proposition must, they tell us, be argued out as follows. If the world was everlasting, the animals in it would be everlasting also, and most especially the human race inasmuch as it is superior to the rest. But man also is seen to be of late origin by those who wish to search into the facts of nature. For it is probable or rather necessary that the existence of the arts should coincide with that of man, that they are in fact coeval, not only because system and method are natural to a rational being but also because it is impossible to live without them. Let us observe then the dates of each of the arts, disregarding the myths palmed off on the gods by the play-wrights. … But if man is not from everlasting, so neither is any other living creature, therefore neither the regions which have given them a habitat, earth and water and air. This shows clearly that the world is destructible.
On the Eternity of the World 24
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