The same may be said of all the stars; who being all of them most large and clear fountains of virtue and operation, may also, be called eternal virtues: the earth may be called eternal patience; the moon, an eternal borrower and beggar; and man of all other the most miserable, eternally mortal.

And what were this, but to believe again in the old play of the gods?
Yea in more gods by millions, than ever Hesiodus dreamed of.

But instead of this mad folly, we see it well enough with our feeble and mortal eyes; and the eyes of our reason discern it better; that the sun, moon, stars, and the earth, are limited bounded, and constrained: themselves they have not constrained nor could.

"Omne determinatum causam habet aliquam efficientem, quae illud determinaverit:" "Everything bounded hath some efficient cause, by which it is bounded." Now for Nature; as by the ambiguity of this name, the school of Aristotle hath both commended many errors unto us, and sought also thereby to obscure the glory of the high moderator of all things, shining in the creation, and in the governing of the world: so if the best definition be taken out of the second of Aristotle's "Physics," or "primo de Coelo," or out of the fifth of his "Metaphysics"; I say that the best is but nominal, and serving only to difference the beginning of natural motion from artificial: which yet the Academics open better, when they call it "a seminary strength, infused into matter by the soul of the world": who give the first place to Providence, the second to Fate, and but the third to Nature.
"Providentia" (by which they understand God) "dux et caput; Fatum, medium ex providentia prodiens; Natura postremum"[39] But be it what he will, or be it any of these (God excepted) or participating of all: yet that it hath choice or understanding (both which are necessarily in the cause of all things) no man hath avowed.

For this is unanswerable of Lactantius, "Is autem facit aliquid, qui aut voluntatem faciendi habet, aut scientiam:" "He only can be said to be the doer of a thing, that hath either will or knowledge in the doing it." But the will and science of Nature, are in these words truly expressed by Ficinus: "Potest ubique Natura, vel per diversa media, vel ex diversis materiis, diversa facere: sublata vero mediorum materiatumque diversitate, vel unicum, vel similimum operatur, neque potest quando adest materia non operari"; "It is the power of Nature by the diversity of means, or out of diversity of matter, to produce divers things: but taking away the diversity of means, and the diversity of matter, it then works but one or the like work; neither can it but work, matter being present." Now if Nature made choice of diversity of matter, to work all these variable works of heaven and earth, it had then both understanding and will; it had counsel to begin; reason to dispose; virtue and knowledge to finish, and power to govern: without which all things had been but one and the same: all of the matter of heaven; or all of the matter of earth.