ts of land barren and uninhabitable; some, because they
are scorched by the too near approach of the sun; others, because they
are bound up with frost and snow, through the great distance which the
sun is from them. Therefore, if the world is a Deity, as these are
parts of the world, some of the Deity's limbs must be said to be
scorched, and some frozen.

These are your doctrines, Lucilius; but what those of others are I will
endeavor to ascertain by tracing them back from the earliest of ancient
philosophers. Thales the Milesian, who first inquired after such
subjects, asserted water to be the origin of things, and that God was
that mind which formed all things from water. If the Gods can exist
without corporeal sense, and if there can be a mind without a body, why
did he annex a mind to water?

It was Anaximander's opinion that the Gods were born; that after a
great length of time they died; and that they are innumerable worlds.
But what conception can we possibly have of a Deity who is not eternal?

Anaximenes, after him, taught that the air is God, and that he was
generated, and that he is immense, infinite, and always in motion; as
if air, which has no form, could possibly be God; for the Deity must
necessarily be not only of some form or other, but of the most
beautiful form. Besides, is not everything that had a beginning subject
to mortality?

XI. Anaxagoras, who received his learning from Anaximenes, was the
first who affirmed the system and disposition of all things to be
contrived and perfected by the power and reason of an infinite mind; in
which infinity he did not perceive that there could be no conjunction
of sense and motion, nor any sense in the least degree, where nature
herself could feel no impulse. If he would have this mind to be a sort
of animal, then there must be some more internal principle from whence
that animal should receive its appellation. But what can be more
internal than the mind? Let it, therefore, be clothed with an external
body. But this is not agreeable to his doctrine; but we are utterly
unable to conceive how a pure simple mind can exist without any
substance annexed to it.

Alcmaeon of Crotona, in attributing a divinity to the sun, the moon, and
the rest of the stars, and also to the mind, did not perceive that he
was ascribing immortality to mortal beings.

Pythagoras, who supposed the Deity to be one soul, mixing with and
pervading all nature, from which our souls are