ἱστορίαι Historiai
D.L. 10.87-89 Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II (Books VI-X), Diogenes Laertius; served verbatim
plurality of causes in conformity with the facts, so soon as we duly understand what may be plausibly alleged respecting them. But when we pick and choose among them, rejecting one equally consistent with the phenomena, we clearly fall away from the study of nature altogether and tumble into myth. Some phenomena within our experience afford evidence by which we may interpret what goes on in the heavens. We see how the former really take place, but not how the celestial phenomena take place, for their occurrence may possibly be due to a variety of causes. However, we must observe each fact as presented, and further separate from it all the facts presented along with it, the occurrence of which from various causes is not contradicted by facts within our experience. " A world is a circumscribed portion of the universe, winch contains stars and earth and all other visible tilings, cut off from the infinite, and terminating [and terminating in a boundary which may be either thick or thin, a boundary whose dissolution will bring about the wreck of all within it] in an exterior which may either revolve or be at rest, and be round or triangular or of any other shape whatever. All these alternatives are possible : they are contradicted by none of the facts in this world, in which an extremity can nowhere be discerned. " That there is an infinite number of such worlds can be perceived, and that such a world may arise in a world or in one of the intermundia (by which term we mean the spaces between worlds) in a tolerably empty space and not, as some maintain, in a vast

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← D.L. 10.85-87 contents D.L. 10.89-91 →

Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II (Books VI-X), Diogenes Laertius — translated by R. D. Hicks, 1925
Apparatus shelf — Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II (R. D. Hicks translation, Loeb L185) · R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann / New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, MCMXXV (1925)
license: public-domain (US: published 1925, pre-1930 — the MCMXXV title page verified from the scan itself; only the English rectos are served, Hicks's translation)