These things being said, as I was giving Lucius his turn to follow and continue the discourse,—there being nothing left to be added but the demonstrations of this doctrine,—Aristotle smiling said: I am a witness, that you have directed all your contradictions and all your refutations against those who, supposing the moon to be half fire, affirm in general that all bodies do of their own accord tend either upwards or downwards; but if there is any one who holds that the stars have of their own nature a circular motion, and that they are of a substance wholly different from the four elements, you have not thought of saying any thing, so much as accidentally or by the way, against him; and therefore I am wholly unconcerned in your discourse. Indeed, good sir, said Lucius, if you should suppose the other stars, and the whole heaven apart, to be of a pure and sincere nature, free from all change and alteration of passion, and should bring in also a circle, in which they make their motion by a perpetual revolution, you would not perhaps find any one now to contradict you, though there are in this infinite doubts and difficulties. But when the discourse descends so far as to touch the moon, it cannot maintain in her that perfection of being exempt from all passion and alteration, nor that heavenly beauty of her body. But to let pass all other inequalities and differences, the very face which appears in the body of the moon necessarily proceeds from some passion of her own substance or the mixture of another; for what is mixed suffers, because it loses its first purity, being filled by force with that which is worse. Besides, as for the slowness and dulness of her course, her feeble and inefficacious heat, by which, as Ion says, The black grape comes not to maturity, to what shall we attribute them but to her weakness and passion, if an eternal and celestial body can be subject to passion? In brief, my friend Aristotle, if the moon is earth, she is a most fair and admirable thing, and excellently well adorned; but if you regard her as a star or light or a certain divine and heavenly body, I am afraid she will prove deformed and foul, and disgrace that beautiful appellation, if of all bodies, which are in heaven so numerous, she alone stands in need of light borrowed of another, and, as Parmenides has it, Looks always backwards on the sun’s bright rays. Our friend therefore indeed, having in a lecture of his demonstrated this proposition of Anaxagoras, that the sun communicates to the moon what brightness she has, was well esteemed for it. As for me, I will not say what I have learned of you or with you, but having taken it for granted, will pass on to the rest. It is then probable that the moon is illuminated, not like a glass or crystal, by the brightness of the sun’s rays shining through her, nor yet again, by a certain collustration and conjunction of light and brightness, as when many torches set together augment the light of one another. For so she would be no less full in her conjunction or first quarter than in her opposition, if she did not obstruct or repel the rays of the sun, but let them pass through her by reason of her rarity, or if he did by a contemperature shine upon her and kindle the light within her. For we cannot allege her declinations and aversions in the conjunction or new moon, as when it is half-moon or when she appears crescent or in the wane; but being then perpendicularly (as Democritus says) under him that illuminates her, she receives and admits the sun; so that then it is probable she should appear, and he shine through her. But this she is so far from doing, that she is not only then unseen, but also often hides the sun, as Empedocles has it: The sun’s bright beams from us she turns aside, And of the earth itself as much doth hide, As her orb’s breadth can cover; as if the light of the sun fell not upon another star, but upon night and darkness. And as for what Posidonius says, that the depth of the moon’s body is the cause why the light of the sun cannot pierce through her to us, this is evidently refuted; for the air, which is infinite and of a far greater depth than the body of the moon, is nevertheless all over illustrated and enlightened by the rays of the sun. It remains then that, according to the opinion of Empedocles, the light of the moon which appears to us comes from the repercussion and reflection of the sun’s beams. And for this reason it comes not to us hot and bright, as in all probability it would, if her shining proceeded either from inflammation or the commixtion of two lights. But as voices reverberated cause an echo more obscure and less express than the speech that was pronounced, and as the blows of darts and arrows, rebounding from some wall against which they are shot, are more mild and gentle; So Titan’s lustre, smiting the moon’s orb, yields but a faint and feeble reflection and repercussion of brightness upon us, its force being abated and weakened by the refraction.