Physics 133
- According to Apollodorus in his Physics, body is that which is
extended in three [dimensions], length, breadth and depth; this is also
called solid body; surface is the limit of a body or that which has only
length and breadth, but no depth; Posidonius, in book 5 of his On
Meteorological Phenomena, says that it exists both in conception and in
reality. A line is the limit of a surface or a length with no breadth, or
that which has only length. A point is the limit of a line, and it is the
smallest [possible] mark.
God and mind and fate and Zeus are one thing, but called by many
different names. 136. In the beginning, then, he was by himself and
turned all substance into water via air; and just as the seed is contained
in the seminal fluid, so this, being the spermatic principle of the cosmos,
remains like this in the fluid and makes the matter easy for itself to work
with in the generation of subsequent things. Then, it produces first the
four elements, fire, water, air, earth. And Zeno discusses this in his On
the Universe and Chrysippus [does so] in book one of his Physics and
Archedemus in some work entitled On Elements.
An element is that from which generated things are first generated
and that into which they are dissolved in the end. 137. The four elements
together are unqualified substance, i.e., matter; and fire is the hot, water
the wet, air the cold, and earth the dry. Nevertheless, there is still in
the air the same part. Anyway, fire is the highest, and this is called aither;
in this is produced first the sphere of the fixed stars, and then the sphere
of the planets. Next comes the air, then the water, and, as the foundation
for everything, the earth, which is in the middle of absolutely everything.
They use the term 'cosmos' in three senses: [1] the god himself who
is the individual quality consisting of the totality of substance, who is
indestructible and ungenerated, being the craftsman of the organization,
taking substance as a totality back into himself in certain [fixed] temporal
cycles, and again generating it out of himself; 138. [2] they also call the
organization itself of the stars cosmos; and [3] thirdly, that which is
composed of both.
And the cosmos in the sense of the individual quality of the substance
of the universe is either, as Posidonius says in his Elements of the Study
of Meteorological Phenomena, a complex of heaven and earth and the
natures in them, or a complex of gods and men and the things which
come to be for their sake. Heaven is the outermost periphery in which
everything divine is located.
The cosmos is administered by mind and providence (as Chrysippus
says in book five of his On Providence and Posidonius in book thirteen
of his On Gods), since mind penetrates every part of it just as soul does
us. But it penetrates some things more than others. 139. For it penetrates