ll that they are by reason, proceeding leisurely, reduced to this, if
they shall call to mind how Chrysippus, in his First Book of Natural
Questions, argues thus: "Is not night a body? And are not then the
evening, dawning, and midnight bodies? Or is not a day a body? Is not
then the first day of the month a body? And the tenth, the fifteenth,
and the thirtieth, are they not bodies? Is not a month a body? Summer,
autumn, and the year, are they not bodies?"

These things they maintain against the common conceptions; but those
which follow they hold also against their own, engendering that which
is most hot by refrigeration, and that which is most subtile by
condensation. For the soul, to wit, is a substance most hot and most
subtile. But this they make by the refrigeration and condensation of
the body, changing, as it were, by induration the spirit, which of
vegetative is made animal. Moreover, they say that the sun became
animated, his moisture changing into intellectual fire. Behold how the
sun is imagined to be engendered by refrigeration! Xenophanes indeed,
when one told him that he had seen eels living in hot water, answered,
We will boil them then in cold. But if these men engender heat by
refrigeration and lightness by condensation, it follows, they must also
generate cold things by heat, thick things by dissolution, and heavy
things by rarefaction, that so they may keep some proportion in their
absurdity.

And do they not also determine the substance and generation of
conception itself, even against the common conceptions? For conception
is a certain imagination, and imagination an impression in the soul. Now
the nature of the soul is an exhalation, in which it is difficult for
an impression to be made because of its tenuity, and for which it is
impossible to keep an impression it may have received. For its nutriment
and generation, consisting of moist things, have continual accession and
consumption. And the mixture of respiration with the air always makes
some new exhalation which is altered and changed by the flux of the air
coming from abroad and again going out. For one may more easily imagine
that a stream of running water can retain figures, impressions, and
images, than that a spirit can be carried in vapors and humors, and
continually mingled with another idle and strange breath from without.
But these men so far forget themselves, that, having defined the
conceptions to be certain stored-up intelligenc