Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (7)

At this — for I wished Lucius to have time to collect his thoughts — I called to Theon. Which of

the tragic poets was it, Theon, I asked, who said that physicians

With bitter drugs the bitter bile purge?

Theon replied that it was Sophocles.[*] Yes, I said, and we have of necessity to allow them this procedure; but to philosophers one should not listen if they desire to repulse paradoxes with paradoxes and in struggling against opinions that are amazing fabricate others that are more amazing and outlandish,[*] as these people do in introducing their motion to the centre. What paradox is not involved in this doctrine? Not the one that the earth is a sphere although it contains such great depths and heights and irregularities?[*] Not that people live on the opposite hemisphere clinging to the earth like wood-worms or geckos turned bottomside up?[*] — and that we ourselves in standing remain not at right angles to the earth but at an oblique angle, leaning from the perpendicular like drunken men?[*] Not that incandescent masses of forty tons[*] falling through the depth of the earth stop when they arrive at the centre, though nothing encounter or support them; and, if in their downward motion the impetus should carry them past the centre, they swing back again and return of themselves? Not that pieces of meteors burnt out on either side of the earth do not move downwards continually but falling upon the surface of the earth force their way into it from the outside and conceal themselves about the centre?[*] Not that a turbulent stream of water, if in flowing downwards it should reach the middle point, which they themselves call incorporeal,[*] stops suspended [or] moves round about it, oscillating in an incessant and perpetual see-saw?[*] Some of these a man could not even mistakenly force himself to conceive as possible. For this amounts to upside down and all things topsy-turvy, everything as far as the centre being down and everything under the centre in turn being up.[*] The result is that, if a man should so coalesce with the earth[*] that its centre is at his navel, the same person at the same time has his head up and his feet up too. Moreover, if he dig through the further side, his [bottom] in emerging is [up], and the man digging himself up is pulling himself down from above [*]; and, if someone should then be imagined to have gone in the opposite direction to this man, the feet of both of them at the same time turn out to be up and are so called.