wanting, either implanted in their homogenic nature or scattered through their homogenic substance, organs suitable for organic activity, although these are not fashioned of flesh and blood as animals, or composed of regular limbs, which are also hardly perceptible in certain plants and vegetables; since regular limbs are not necessary for all life. Nor can any organs be discerned or imagined by us in any of the stars, the sun, or the planets, which are specially operative in the universe; yet they live and imbue with life the small particles in the prominences on the earth. If there be anything of which men can boast, it is in fact life, intelligence; for the other animals are ennobled by life; God also (by whose nod all things are ruled) is a living soul. Who therefore will demand organs for the divine intelligences, which rise superior to every combination of organs and are not restrained by materialized organs? But in the several bodies of the stars the implanted force acts otherwise than in those divine existences which are supernaturally ordained; and in the stars, the sources of things, otherwise than in animals; in animals again otherwise than in plants. Miserable were the condition of the stars, abject the lot of the earth, if that wonderful dignity of life be denied to them, which is conceded to worms, ants, moths, plants, and toadstools; for thus worms, moths, grubs would be bodies more honoured and perfect in nature; for without life no body is excellent, valuable, or distinguished. But since living bodies arise and receive life from the earth and the sun, and grass grows on the earth apart from any seeds thrown down (as when soil is dug up from deep down in the earth, and put on some very high place or on a very high tower, in a sunny spot, not so long after various grasses spring up unbidden) it is not likely that they can produce what is not in them; but they awaken life, and therefore they are living. Therefore the bodies of the globes, as important parts of the universe, in order that they might be independent and that they might continue in that condition, had a need for souls to be united with them, without which there can be neither life, nor primary activity, nor motion, nor coalition, nor controlling power, nor harmony, nor endeavour, nor sympathy; and without which there would be no generation {210} of anything, no alternations of the seasons, no propagation; but all things would be carried this way and that, and the whole universe would fall into wretchedest Chaos, the earth in short would be vacant, dead, and useless. But it is only on the superficies of the globes that the concourse of living and animated beings is clearly perceived, in the great and pleasing variety of which the great master-workman is well pleased. But those souls which are restrained within a kind of barrier and in prison cells, as it were, do not emit immaterial effused forms outside the limits of their bodies; and bodies are not moved