How then is it, that they admit and allow Nature,
soul, and living creature? Even in the same manner as
they do an oath, prayer, and sacrifice, and the adoration
of the Gods. Thus they adore by word and mouth, only
naming and feigning that which by their principles they
totally take away and abolish. If now they call that which
is born Nature, and that which is engendered generation,
—as those who ordinarily call the wood itself wood-work
and the voices that accord and sound together symphony,
—whence came it into his mind to object these words
against Empedocles? ‘Why,’ says he, ‘do we tire ourselves in taking such care of ourselves, in desiring and
longing after certain things, and shunning and avoiding
others? For we neither are ourselves, nor do we live by
making use of others.’ But be of good cheer, my dear
little Colotes, may one perhaps say to him: there is none
who hinders you from taking care of yourself by teaching
that the nature of Colotes is nothing else but Colotes himself, or who forbids you to make use of things (now things
with you are pleasures) by showing that there is no nature
of tarts and marchpanes, of sweet odors, or of venereal
delights, but that there are tarts, marchpanes, perfumes,
[p. 350]
and women. For neither does the grammarian who says
that ‘the strength of Hercules’ is Hercules himself deny
the being of Hercules; nor do those who say that symphonies and roofings are but bare derivations affirm that
there are neither sounds nor timbers; since also there are
some who, taking away the soul and prudence, do not yet
seem to take away either living or being prudent.
And when Epicurus says that the nature of things consists in bodies and their place, do we so comprehend him
as if he meant that Nature were something else than the
things which are, or as if he insinuated that it is simply
the things which are, and nothing else?—as, to wit, he
is wont to call voidness itself the nature of voidness, and
the universe, by Jupiter, the nature of the universe. And
if any one should thus question him; What sayst thou,
Epicurus, that this is voidness, and that the nature of
voidness? No, by Jupiter, would he answer; but this
community of names is in use by law and custom. I
grant it is. Now what has Empedocles done else, but
taught that Nature is nothing else save that which is born,
and death no other thing but that which dies? But as the
poets very often, forming as it were an image, say thus in
figurative language,
Strife, tumult, noise, placed by some angry God,
Mischief, and malice there had their abode;
1
so do most men attribute generation and corruption to
things that are contracted together and dissolved. But so
far has he been from stirring and taking away that which
is, or contradicting that which evidently appears, that he
casts not so much as one single word out of the accustomed
use; but taking away all figurative fraud that might hurt
or endamage things, he again restored the ordinary and
useful signification to words in these verses:
[p. 351]
When from mixed elements we sometimes see
A man produced, sometimes a beast, a tree,
Or bird, this birth and geniture we name;
But death, when this so well compacted frame
And juncture is dissolved. This use I do approve.
And yet I myself say that Colotes, though he alleged these
verses, did not understand that Empedocles took not away
men, beasts, trees, or birds, which he affirmed to be composed of the elements mixed together; and that, by teaching how much they are deceived who call this composition
Nature and life, and this dissolution unhappy destruction
and miserable death, he did not abrogate the using of the
customary expressions in this respect.
