of the body, it is probable that all bodies have this first motion
according to Nature towards the centre of the world,--the world being
thus moved as concerns itself, and the parts being moved as being its
parts." What, then, ailed you, good sir (might some one say to him),
that you have so far forgotten those words, as to affirm that the world,
if it had not casually possessed the middle place, would have been
dissoluble and corruptible? For if it is by nature so framed as always
to incline towards the middle, and its parts from every side tend to
the same, into what place soever of the vacuum it should have been
transposed,--thus containing and (as it were) embracing itself,--it
would have remained incorruptible and without danger of breaking. For
things that are broken and dissipated suffer this by the separation and
dissolution of their parts, every one of them hasting to its own place
from that which it had contrary to Nature. But you, being of opinion
that, if the world should have been seated in any other place of the
vacuum, it would have been wholly liable to corruption, and affirming
the same, and therefore asserting a middle in that which naturally
can have no middle,--to wit, in that which is infinite,--have indeed
dismissed these tensions, coherences, and inclinations, as having
nothing available to its preservation, and attributed all the cause of
its permanency to the possession of place. And, as if you were ambitious
to confute yourself, to the things you have said before you join this
also: "In whatsoever manner every one of the parts moves, being coherent
to the rest, it is agreeable to reason that in the same also the whole
should move by itself; yea, though we should, for argument's sake,
imagine and suppose it to be in some vacuity of this world; for as,
being kept in on every side, it would move towards the middle, so it
would continue in the same motion, though by way of disputation we
should admit that there were on a sudden a vacuum round about it."
No part then whatsoever, though encompassed by a vacuum, loses its
inclination moving it towards the middle of the world; but the world
itself, if chance had not prepared it a place in the middle, would have
lost its containing vigor, the parts of its essence being carried some
one way, some another.

And these things indeed contain great contradictions to natural
reason; but this is also repugnant to the doctrine concerning God and
Providence, that