Further, their third argument stands self-convicted as an unsound proposition from the very terms of the enunciation with which it begins. For the truth surely is not that a thing is destructible if all its parts are destroyed, but if all its parts are destroyed together and simultaneously, just as one who has had the tip of his finger cut away is not prevented from living, but if the whole system of his parts and limbs is cut away, he will die at once. In the same way, if the elements one and all were put out of existence at one and the same time, it would be necessary to admit that the world is liable to destruction. But if each of them separately is changed into the nature of its neighbour, it is not destroyed but rather rendered immortal, as says the tragic poet philosophizing Nothing that is born can die, Hither and thither its parts disperse And take another form. Finally it is the height of folly to take the arts as the standard of measurement for mankind. Anyone who follows this topsy-turvey line of reasoning will make out that the world is quite new, framed hardly a thousand years ago, since those who tradition tells us were the inventors of the sciences do not go back farther than that number of years. And if they must say that the arts are coeval with the human race, they must do so not carelessly and perfunctorily but with the aid of natural history. And what does natural history tell us? Destructions of things on earth, destructions not of all at once but of a very large number, are attributed by it to two principal causes, to tremendous onslaughts of fire and water. These two visitations, we are told, descend in turns after very long cycles of years. When the agent is the conflagration, a stream of heaven-sent fire pours out from above and spreads over many places and over-runs great regions of the inhabited earth. When it is the deluge, it sweeps along in every form which water takes. The rivers, either spring fed or winter torrents, not only flow with a full volume but exceed the usual level to which they rise and either break down their banks by force or over-leap them mounting to a very great height. Then streaming over they are diffused into the adjoining lowland, which is at first divided into great lakes as the water always subsides into the deeper hollows, then again as it flows on and submerges the intervening isthmuses which divide the lakes, making many into one, is converted into a great expanse of boundless sea. Through these contending powers the inhabitants of contrasted regions have perished alternately. Fire is fatal to the dwellers in the mountains and hills and places ill-supplied with water, as they do not possess the abundance of water which is the natural instrument of defence against fire. Water, on the other hand, destroys those who live near rivers, or lakes, or the sea, for it is a way that evils have, that those who live close to them are the first if not the only ones to feel their power. Since the chief part of mankind perish in the way here mentioned apart from numberless minor ways the arts, too, necessarily fail. Science in itself is lost to sight, without someone to put it in practice. But when the epidemics of evil have abated and from those who have not fallen victims to their overwhelming terrors a new race begins to bloom again and grow, the arts also, which are not then born for the first time but have sunk into insignificance through the diminution of persons possessing them, establish themselves once more. We have described to the best of our abilities the arguments transmitted to us to maintain the indestructibility of the world. In what follows we have to expound the answers given in opposition to each point.
On the Eternity of the World 27
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.