What being is there but a God superior to man?
Therefore there is a God." These arguments are founded on the same erroneous principles as Zeno's, for he does not define what is meant by being better or more excellent, or distinguish between an intelligent cause and a natural cause.
Chrysippus adds, "If there are no Gods, there is nothing better than man; but we cannot, without the highest arrogance, have this idea of ourselves." Let us grant that it is arrogance in man to think himself better than the world; but to comprehend that he has understanding and reason, and that in Orion and Canicula there is neither, is no arrogance, but an indication of good sense.

"Since we suppose," continues he, "when we see a beautiful house, that it was built for the master, and not for mice, we should likewise judge that the world is the mansion of the Gods." Yes, if I believed that the Gods built the world; but not if, as I believe, and intend to prove, it is the work of nature.
XI.

Socrates, in Xenophon, asks, "Whence had man his understanding, if there was none in the world ?" And I ask, Whence had we speech, harmony, singing; unless we think it is the sun conversing with the moon when she approaches near it, or that the world forms an harmonious concert, as Pythagoras imagines?
This, Balbus, is the effect of nature; not of that nature which proceeds artificially, as Zeno says, and the character of which I shall presently examine into, but a nature which, by its own proper motions and mutations, modifies everything.
For I readily agree to what you said about the harmony and general agreement of nature, which you pronounced to be firmly bound and united together, as it were, by ties of blood; but I do not approve of what you added, that "it could not possibly be so, unless it were so united by one divine spirit." On the contrary, the whole subsists by the power of nature, independently of the Gods, and there is a kind of sympathy (as the Greeks call it) which joins together all the parts of the universe; and the greater that is in its own power, the less is it necessary to have recourse to a divine intelligence.
XII.

But how will you get rid of the objections which Carneades made?
"If," says he, "there is no body immortal, there is none eternal; but there is no body immortal, nor even indivisible, or that cannot be separated and disunited; and as every animal is in its nature passive, so there is not one which is not subject to the impressions of extraneous bodies; none, that is to say, which can avoid the necessity of enduring and suffering: and if every animal is mortal, there is none immortal; so, likewise, if every animal may be cut up and divided, there is none indivisible, none eternal, but all are liable to be affected by, and compelled to submit to, external power.

Every animal, therefore, is necessarily mortal, dissoluble, and divisible." For as there is no wax, no silver, no brass which cannot be converted into something else, whatever is composed of wax, or silver, or brass may cease to be what it is.