ÉPINOMIS.

Let us return to what has already been said, to consider first whether it is with reason or against all reason that we have established two substances—one spiritual, the other corporeal—and within each a host of beings that differ from one another, just as they differ from each other, and no third substance that is found in the first two. As for the difference between the soul and the body, we shall make it consist in the fact that the soul has intelligence and the body is deprived of it, that the soul commands and the body obeys, and that the soul is the cause of all that exists while the body produces nothing. Thus, to claim that celestial phenomena are the effect of some other cause, and are not produced by the concurrence of the soul and the body, is a madness, an absurdity. If, therefore, the system we propose is to prevail over all others, and if one can affirm that all these effects are divine, one must say one of two things: either that the stars are gods, and honor them as such, or that they are images of them, and look upon them as animated statues of the gods, created by the hands of the gods themselves; for these are not unskilled or negligible craftsmen. One cannot, as I have said, refuse the stars one or the other of these titles; and if one admits only that they are statues of the gods, they demand particular homage; especially since there are none more beautiful, more common to all men, nor exposed in more remarkable places, nor finally comparable to them in purity, majesty, and life: so that one can assert that the thing is as I say.

Now, to advance in the knowledge of the gods, after having considered two species of visible animals in relation to us, of which one is immortal