Book 1
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PLATO distinguisheth and refers some things to Providence, others to necessity. Empedocles makes the nature of necessity to be that cause which employs principles and elements. Democritus makes it to be a resistance, impulse, and force of matter. Plato sometimes says that necessity is matter; at other times, that it is the habitude or respect of the efficient cause towards matter.
Chapter XXVII. OF DESTINY OR FATE.
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HERACLITUS, who attributes all things to fate, makes necessity to be the same thing with it. Plato admits of a necessity in the minds and the actions of men, but yet he introduceth a cause which flows from ourselves. The Stoics, in this agreeing with Plato, say that necessity is a cause invincible and violent; that fate is the ordered complication of causes, in which there is an intexture of those things which proceed from our own determination, so that some things are to be attributed to fate, others not.
Chapter XXVIII. OF THE NATURE OF FATE.
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ACCORDING to Heraclitus, the essence of fate is a certain reason which penetrates the substance of all being; and this is an ethereal body, containing in itself that seminal faculty which gives an original to every being in the universe. Plato declares that it is the eternal reason and the eternal law of the nature of the universe. Chrysippus, that it is a spiritual faculty, which in due order doth manage and rule the universe. Again, in his book styled the Definitions, that fate is the reason of the world, or that it is that law whereby Providence rules and administers every thing that is in the world; or it is that reason by which all things past have been, all things present are, and all things future will be. The Stoics say that it is a chain of causes, that is, it is an order and connection of causes which cannot be resisted. Posidonius, that it is a being the third in degree from Jupiter; the first of beings is Jupiter, the second nature, and the third fate.
Chapter XXIX. OF FORTUNE.
