THE NATURE OF THE GODS. 265to its natural state, if it were not that, when heat is applied

to it, it again becomes liquefied and dissolved, and so dif fuses itself. Therefore, by northern and other cold winds it is frozen and hardened, and in turn it dissolves and melts again by heat. The seas likewise, we find, when agitated by winds, grow warm, so that from this fact we may un derstand that there is heat included in that vast body of water ; for we cannot imagine it to be external and adven titious heat, but such as is stirred up by agitation from the deep recesses of the seas ; and the same thing takes place with respect to our bodies, which grow warm with motion and exercise. And the very air itself, which indeed is the coldest ele ment, is by no means void of heat ; for there is a great quantity, arising from the exhalations of water, which ap pears to be a sort of steam occasioned by its internal heat, like that of boiling liquors. The fourth part of the uni verse is entirely fire, and is the source of the salutary and vital heat which is found in the rest. From hence we may conclude that, as all parts of the Avorld are sustained by heat, the world itself also has such a great length of time subsisted from the same cause ; and so much the more, be cause we ought to understand that that hot and fiery prin ciple is so diffused over universal nature that there is con tained in it a power and cause of generation and procreation, from which all animate beings, and all those creatures of the vegetable world, the roots of which are contained in the earth, must inevitably derive their origin and their increase. XL It is nature, consequently, that continues and pre serves the world, and that, too, a nature which is not des titute of sense and reason ; for in every essence that is not simple, but composed of several parts, there must be some predominant quality as, for instance, the mind in man, and in beasts something resembling it, from which arise all the appetites and desires for anything. As for trees, and all the vegetable produce of the earth, it is thought to be in their roots. I call that the predominant quality, 1 which

The Latin word is principatus, which exactly corresponds with the 

Greek word here used by Cicero ; by which is to be understood the su perior, the most prevailing excellence in every kind and species of things

through the universe.