ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 1.5 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim
WHETHER THE UNIVERSE IS ONE. The Stoics pronounce that the world is one thing, and this they say is the universe and is corporeal. Empedocles's opinion is, that the world is one ; yet by no means the system of this world must be styled the universe, but that it is a small part of it, and the remainder is idle matter. What to Plato seems the truest he thus declares, that there is one world, and that world is the universe ; and this he endeavors to evince by three arguments. First, that the world could not be complete and perfect, if it did not within itself include all beings. Secondly, nor could it give the true resemblance of its original and exemplar, if it were not the one only begotten thing. Thirdly, it could not be incorruptible, if there were any being out of its compass to whose power it might be obnoxious. But to Plato it may be thus returned. Fu'st, that the world is not complete and perfect, nor doth it contain all things within itself. And if man is a perfect being, yet he doth not encompass all things. Secondly, that there are many exemplars and originals of statues, houses, and pictures. Thirdly, how is the world perfect, if any thing beyond it is possible to be moved about it 1 But the world is not incorruptible, nor can it be so conceived, because it had an original. To Mctrodorus it seems absurd, that in a large field one only stalk should grow, and in an infinite space one only world exist ; and that this universe is infinite is manifest by this, that there are causes infinite. Now if this world were finite and the causes which produced it infinite, it is necessary that the worlds likewise be infinite ; for where all causes do concur, there the effects also must appear, let the causes be what they will, either atoms or elements.

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

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Plato — a life

Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch — translated by John Dowel (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)