If fall I must, I should desire to fall from the height of heaven.[78] [77] The name is doubtful, as is, indeed, the quotation also. [78] The sense may be: I would have the heavens fall along with me; this meaning would suit the context better. We may adopt the language. If fall I must, let the earth be shaken at my fall; not that one ought to pray for a public disaster, but it is a great solace of death to see that the earth is likewise subject to death. III It will be useful also to be assured that none of these things is the 1 doing of the gods, and that the moving of heaven or earth is no work of angry deities. Those phenomena have causes of their own. It is not by special command that they put forth their rage, but, just as in our own bodies, the disturbance arises from certain inherent imperfections; at the moment when they seem to inflict injury, they sustain it. Through our ignorance of the truth all these things are terrible, the more as their infrequency increases our alarm. Familiar occurrences seem less 2 serious; the unusual causes greater terror. But why is anything unusual in our estimation? The reason is that we grasp the meaning of nature only superficially, and not rationally; we dwell too exclusively on what she has done, and do not consider what she can do. Accordingly, we pay the penalty of this neglect in our terror of things that we suppose unprecedented, when they are not really unprecedented, but merely unusual. For instance, are not superstitious fears inspired both privately and even for the safety of the State, if either the sun has been seen in eclipse or if the moon, whose obscuration is more frequent, has partially or wholly been concealed? And is not this far 3 more so in the case of such sights as we have spoken of: torches driven athwart the heavens, the sky on fire over the greater part of its extent, comets, mock suns, stars appearing in the daytime, the sudden passage of stars that mark their trail with a bright light? Our wonder at these is in no case free from fear. As the cause of the fear is ignorance, is it not worth while to gain the knowledge that will dispel it? How much better it would be to inquire into the causes of the alarming sights, to bend, in fact, our whole mind to the task? Nothing, surely, could be found more deserving than that, of having the mind’s energies not only lent to it, but devoted to it. IV