6. But what can I do ? For old men more ancient than these hamstring my soul: Pherecydes saying that the principles are Jupiter, and Tellus ⁷, and Saturn—Jupiter the aether, Tellus the Earth, and Saturn Time. The aether is the agent, but the earth is passive, and Time in which all created things are comprised. These old men have contentions with one another. For Leucippus, deeming all these things madness, says that the principles are boundless, motionless, and infinitesimal ; and that the lighter parts going up, become fire and air, whilst the heavier parts, subsiding, become water and earth. How long am I taught such things, learning nothing true? Unless else Democritus will set me free from error, declaring that the principles are Existence and Non-existence, and that Existence is full, but Non-existence is empty ⁸; but the full affects all things by change or by order in the empty. Perhaps I might listen to good Democritus, and should like - 197 - to laugh with him, did not Heraclitus persuade me otherwise, at the same time weeping and saying, Fire is the principle of all things: it has two states of being, thinness and thickness: the one active, the other passive, the one blending, the other separating. This is enough for me, and I should already be drunk with so many principles: but Epicurus ⁹ calls me away from thence also, by no means to revile his good doctrine, of atoms and of emptiness. For by the varied and manifold interweaving of these, all things are born and perish.