Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (15)

Such is probably the case with the cosmos too, if it really is a living being[*]: in many places it has

earth and in many fire and water and breath as the result not of forcible expulsion[*] but of rational arrangement. After all, the eye has its present position in the body not because it was extruded thither as a result of its lightness, and the heart is in the chest not because its heaviness has caused it to slip and fall thither but because it was better that each of them should be so located. Let us not then believe with regard to the parts of the cosmos either that earth is situated here because its weight has caused it to subside or that the sun, as Metrodorus of Chios[*] once thought, was extruded into the upper region like an inflated skin by reason of its lightness or that the other stars got into their present positions because they tipped the balance, as it were, at different weights. On the contrary, the rational principle is in control; and that is why the stars revolve fixed like radiant eyes [*] in the countenance of the universe, the sun in the hearts capacity transmits and disperses out of himself heat and light as it were blood and breath, and earth and sea naturally serve the cosmos to the ends that bowels and bladder do an animal. The moon, situate between sun and earth as the liver or another of the soft viscera[*] is between heart and bowels, transmits hither the warmth from above and sends upwards the exhalations from our region, refining them in herself by a kind of concoction and purification.[*] It is not clear to us whether her earthiness and solidity have any use suitable to other ends also. Nevertheless, in everything the better has control of the necessary.[*] Well, what probability can we thus conceive in the statements of the Stoics? They say that the luminous and tenuous part of the ether by reason of its subtility became sky and the part which was condensed or compressed became stars, and that of these the most sluggish and turbid is the moon.[*] Yet all the same anyone can see that the moon has not been separated from the ether but that there is still a large amount of it about her in which she moves and much of it beneath her in which [they themselves assert that the bearded stars] and comets whirl. So it is not the inclinations consequent upon weight and lightness that have circumscribed the precincts[*] of each of the bodies, but their arrangement is the result of a different principle.