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But I would willingly ask this our fault-finder, whether themselves do not in their affairs perceive this difference, by which some things are permanent and immutable in their substances, — as they say of their atoms, that they are at all times and continually after one and the same manner, because of their impassibility and hardness, — but that all compounded things are fluxible, changeable, generated, and perishing; forasmuch as infinite images are always departing and going from them, and infinite others, as it is probable, repair to them from the ambient air, filling up what was diminished from the mass, which is much diversified and transvasated, as it were, by this change, since those atoms which are in the very bottom of the said mass can never cease stirring and reciprocally beating upon one another; as they themselves affirm. There is then in things such a diversity of substance But Epicurus is in this wiser and more learned than Plato. that he calls them all equally entia, — to wit, the impalpable voidness, the solid and resisting body, the principles, and the things composed of them, — and thinks that the eternal participates of the common substance with that which is generated, the immortal with the corruptible, and the natures that are impassible, perdurable, unchangeable, and that can never fall from their being, with those which have their essence in suffering and changing, and can never continue in one and the same state. But though Plato had with all the justness imaginable deserved to be condemned for having offended in this, yet should he have been sentenced by these gentlemen, who speak Greek more elegantly and discourse more correctly than he, only as having confounded the terms, and not as having taken away the things and driven life from us, because he named them fientia (or things engendered), and not entia (things that have being), as these men do.
