philosopher says that
God is without a body, he makes him an irrational and insensible being.
Besides, how can the world move itself, if it wants a body? Or how, if
it is in perpetual self-motion, can it be easy and happy?

Xenocrates, his fellow-pupil, does not appear much wiser on this head,
for in his books concerning the nature of the Gods no divine form is
described; but he says the number of them is eight. Five are moving
planets;[85] the sixth is contained in all the fixed stars; which,
dispersed, are so many several members, but, considered together, are
one single Deity; the seventh is the sun; and the eighth the moon. But
in what sense they can possibly be happy is not easy to be understood.

From the same school of Plato, Heraclides of Pontus stuffed his books
with puerile tales. Sometimes he thinks the world a Deity, at other
times the mind. He attributes divinity likewise to the wandering stars.
He deprives the Deity of sense, and makes his form mutable; and, in the
same book again, he makes earth and heaven Deities.

The unsteadiness of Theophrastus is equally intolerable. At one time he
attributes a divine prerogative to the mind; at another, to the
firmament; at another, to the stars and celestial constellations.

Nor is his disciple Strato, who is called the naturalist, any more
worthy to be regarded; for he thinks that the divine power is diffused
through nature, which is the cause of birth, increase, and diminution,
but that it has no sense nor form.

XIV. Zeno (to come to your sect, Balbus) thinks the law of nature to be
the divinity, and that it has the power to force us to what is right,
and to restrain us from what is wrong. How this law can be an animated
being I cannot conceive; but that God is so we would certainly
maintain. The same person says, in another place, that the sky is God;
but can we possibly conceive that God is a being insensible, deaf to
our prayers, our wishes, and our vows, and wholly unconnected with us?
In other books he thinks there is a certain rational essence pervading
all nature, indued with divine efficacy. He attributes the same power
to the stars, to the years, to the months, and to the seasons. In his
interpretation of Hesiod's Theogony,[86] he entirely destroys the
established notions of the Gods; for he excludes Jupiter, Juno, and
Vesta, and those esteemed divine, from the number of them; but his
doctrine is that these are names which by some kind of allusion