e things are plainly against
common sense which the Stoics say and feign,--that there are in one
substance two individual qualities, and that the same substance, which
has particularly one quality, when another quality is added, receives
and equally conserves them both. For if there may be two, there may be
also three, four, and five, and even more than you can name, in one and
the same substance; I say not in its different parts, but all equally
in the whole, though even infinite in number. For Chrysippus says, that
Jupiter and the world are like to man, as is also Providence to the
soul; when therefore the conflagration shall be, Jupiter, who alone of
all the gods is incorruptible, will retire into Providence, and they
being together, will both perpetually remain in the one substance of the
ether.

But leaving now the gods, and beseeching them to give these Stoics
common sense and a common understanding, let us look into their
doctrines concerning the elements. It is against the common conceptions
that one body should be the place of another, or that a body should
penetrate through a body, neither of them containing any vacuity, but
the full passing into the full, and in which there is no vacuity--but
is full and has no place by reason of its continuity--receiving the
mixture. But these men, not thrusting one thing into one, nor yet two
or three or ten together, but jumbling all the parts of the world, being
cut piecemeal, into any one thing which they shall first light on, and
saying that the very least which is perceived by sense will contain the
greatest that shall come unto it, boldly frame a new doctrine, proving
themselves here, as in many other things, to be holding for their
suppositions things repugnant to common sense. And presently upon this
they are forced to admit into their discourse many monstrous and strange
positions, mixing whole bodies with whole; of which this also is one,
that three are four. For this others put as an example of those things
which cannot be conceived even in thought. But to the Stoics it is a
matter of truth, that when one cup of wine is mixed with two of water,
if it is not to disappear and if the mixture is to be equalized, it must
be spread through the whole and be confounded therewith, so as to make
that which was one two by the equalization of the mixture. For the one
remains, but is extended as much as two, and thus is equal to the double
of itself. Now if it happens in the