We see vast tracts of land barren and uninhabitable; some, because they are scorched by the too near approach of the sun; others, because they are bound up with frost and snow, through the great distance which the sun is from them.

Therefore, if the world is a Deity, as these are parts of the world, some of the Deity's limbs must be said to be scorched, and some frozen.
These are your doctrines, Lucilius; but what those of others are I will endeavor to ascertain by tracing them back from the earliest of ancient philosophers.

Thales the Milesian, who first inquired after such subjects, asserted water to be the origin of things, and that God was that mind which formed all things from water.

If the Gods can exist without corporeal sense, and if there can be a mind without a body, why did he annex a mind to water?
It was Anaximander's opinion that the Gods were born; that after a great length of time they died; and that they are innumerable worlds.
But what conception can we possibly have of a Deity who is not eternal?
Anaximenes, after him, taught that the air is God, and that he was generated, and that he is immense, infinite, and always in motion; as if air, which has no form, could possibly be God; for the Deity must necessarily be not only of some form or other, but of the most beautiful form.

Besides, is not everything that had a beginning subject to mortality?
XI.