ving thing, having a {234} soul or reason in it. This
soul or reason one teacher likened to the air, another to the sky,
another to the sun. For the soul of nature is, as it were, a finer air
or fire, having a power of creation in it, and moving in an ordered way
to the production of things.

[399]

The universe is one and of limited extension, being spherical in form,
for this is the form which best adapts itself to movement. Outside
this universe is infinite bodiless space; but within the universe there
is no empty part; all is continuous and united, as is proved by the
harmony of relation which exists between the heavenly bodies and those
upon the earth. The world as such is destructible, for its parts are
subject to change and to decay; yet is this change or destruction only
in respect of the qualities imposed upon it from time to time by the
Reason inherent in it; the mere unqualified Matter remains
indestructible.

[408]

In the universe evil of necessity exists; for evil being the opposite
of good, where no evil is there no good can be. For just as in a
comedy there are absurdities, which are in themselves bad, but yet add
a certain attraction to the poem as a whole, so also one may blame evil
regarded in itself, yet for the whole it is not without its use. So
also God is the cause of death equally with birth; for even as cities
when the inhabitants have multiplied overmuch, {235} remove their
superfluous members by colonisation or by war, so also is God a cause
of destruction. In man in like manner good cannot exist save with
evil; for wisdom being a knowledge of good and evil, remove the evil
and wisdom itself goes. Disease and other natural evils, when looked
at in the light of their effects, are means not of evil but of good;
there is throughout the universe a balance and interrelation of good
and evil. Not that God hath in Himself any evil; the law is not the
cause of lawlessness, nor God Himself responsible for any violation of
right.

[404]

The Stoics indulged in a strange fancy that the world reverted after a
mighty cycle of years in all its parts to the same form and structure
which it possessed at the beginning, so that there would be once more a
Socrates, a Plato, and all the men that had lived, each with the same
friends and fellow-citizens, the same experiences, and the same
endeavours. At the termination of each cycle there was a burning up of
all things, and thereafter a renewal