Book 1
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ALL the natural philosophers from Thales to Plato rejected a vacuum. Empedocles says that there is nothing of a vacuity in nature, nor any thing superabundant. Leucippus, Democritus, Demetrius, Metrodorus, Epicurus, that the atoms are infinite in number; and that a vacuum is infinite in magnitude. The Stoics, that within the compass of the world there is no vacuum, but beyond it the vacuum is infinite. Aristotle,We should probably here read Pythagoras. (G.) that the vacuum beyond the world is so great that the heaven has liberty to breathe into it, for the heaven is fiery.
Chapter XIX. OF PLACE.
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PLATO, to define place, calls it that thing which in its own bosom receives forms and ideas; by which metaphor he signifies matter, being (as it were) a nurse or receptacle of beings. Aristotle, that it is the ultimate superficies of the circumambient body, contiguous to that which it doth encompass.
Chapter XX. OF SPACE.
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THE Stoics and Epicureans make a place, a vacuum, and a space to differ. A vacuum is that which is void of any thing that may be called a body; place is that which is possessed by a body; a space that which is partly filled with a body, as a cask with wine.
Chapter XXI. OF TIME.
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IN the sense of Pythagoras, time is that sphere which encompasses the world. Plato says that it is a movable image of eternity, or the interval of the world’s motion. Eratosthenes, that it is the solar motion.
Chapter XXII. OF THE ESSENCE AND NATURE OF TIME.
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PLATO says that the heavenly motion is time. Most of the Stoics affirm that motion itself is time. Most philosophers think that time had no beginning; Plato, that time had only an ideal beginning.
Chapter XXIII. OF MOTION.
