d them and prepared such things for them; so he that praises
Providence, which has afforded fishes, birds, honey, and wine, and at
the same time finds fault with those who reject not these things, nor
content themselves with

The fruits of Ceres and thirst-quenching springs,

which are present and sufficient to nourish us, seems to make no scruple
of speaking things contradictory to himself.

Moreover, having said in his book of Exhortations, that the having
carnal commerce with our mothers, daughters, or sisters, the eating
forbidden food, and the going from a woman's bed or a dead carcass to
the temple, have been without reason blamed, he affirms, that we ought
for these things to have a regard to the brute beasts, and from what
is done by them conclude that none of these is absurd or contrary to
Nature; for that the comparisons of other animals are fitly made for
this purpose, to show that neither their coupling, bringing-forth, nor
dying in the temples pollutes the Divinity. Yet he again in his Fifth
Book of Nature says, that Hesiod rightly forbids urinating into rivers
and fountains, and that we should rather abstain from doing this against
any altar, or statue of the gods; and that it is not to be admitted for
an argument, that dogs, asses, and young children do it, who have no
discretion or consideration of such things. It is therefore absurd to
say in one place, that the savage example of irrational animals is fit
to be considered, and in another, that it is unreasonable to allege it.

To give a solution to the inclinations, when a man seems to be
necessitated by exterior causes, some philosophers place in the
principal faculty of the soul a certain adventitious motion, which is
chiefly manifested in things differing in no way from one another. For
when, with two things altogether alike and of equal importance, there is
a necessity to choose the one, there being no cause inclining to either,
for that neither of them differs from the other, this adventitious
power of the soul, seizing on its inclination, determines the doubt.
Chrysippus, discoursing against these men, as offering violence to
Nature by imagining an effect without a cause, in many places alleges
the die and the balance, and several other things, which cannot fall or
incline either one way or the other without some cause or difference,
either wholly within them or coming to them from without; for that
what is causeless (he says) is wholly in