afterwards this water being exhaled and rarefied into vapors became
air; after all this the world itself, and all other corporeal
beings, shall be dissolved by fire in the universal conflagration.
By them therefore it appears that fire is what gives beginning to
all things, and is that in which all things receive their period.

Epicurus the son of Neocles, the Athenian, his philosophical
sentiments being the same with those of Democritus, affirms that
the principles of all being are bodies which are only perceptible
by reason; they admit not of a vacuity, nor of any original, but
being of a self-existence are eternal and incorruptible; they are
not liable to any diminution, they are indestructible, nor is it
possible for them to receive any transformation of parts, or admit
of any alterations; of these reason is only the discoverer;
they are in a perpetual motion in vacuity, and by means of the
empty space; for the vacuum itself is infinite, and the bodies that
move in it are infinite. Those bodies acknowledge these three
accidents, figure, magnitude, and gravity. Democritus acknowledged
but two, magnitude and figure. Epicurus added the third, to wit,
gravity; for he pronounced that it is necessary that bodies receive
their motion from that impression which springs from gravity,
otherwise they could not be moved. The figures of atoms cannot be
incomprehensible, but they are not infinite. These figures are
neither hooked nor trident-shaped nor ring-shaped, such figures as
these being exposed to collision; but the atoms are impassible,
impenetrable; they have indeed figures of their own, which are
conceived only by reason. It is called an atom, by reason not of
its smallness but of its indivisibility; in it no vacuity, no
passible affection is to be found. And that there is an atom is
perfectly clear; for there are elements which have a perpetual