De Defectu Oraculorum
Plutarch
Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. V. Babbitt, Frank Cole, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1936 (printing).
As for the stone which some assume to exist in the regions outside the world, it does not readily afford a concept regarding either its fixity or its motion. For how is it either to remain fixed, if it has weight, or to move towards the world like other heavy substances when it is no part of the world and has no place in the order of its being? Land embraced in another world and bound up with it ought not to raise any question as to how it comes about that it does not break away from the whole and transfer itself to our world, because we see the nature and the tension under which each of the parts is held secure. For if we take the expressions below and above as referring, not to the world, but outside of it,[*](Cf.Moralia, 1054 b.) we shall become involved in the same difficulties as Epicurus,[*](Frag. 299.) who would have all his atoms move to places under our feet, as if either the void had feet, or infinity granted us to conceive of below and above within itself! Wherefore we may well wonder at Chrysippus,[*](Cf. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, i. 551 (p. 174), and Moralia, 1054 c.) or rather be quite unable to understand what possessed him to assert that the world has been firmly set in the centre and that its substance, having pre-empted the central place from time eternal, thereby gains the greatest help towards its permanence, and that is as much as to say its immunity from destruction. This is actually what he says in the fourth book of his work on Things Possible, where he indulges in a day-dream of a central place in the infinite and still more preposterously ascribes the cause of the permanence of the world to the non-existent centre; yet in other