Accidents

The two natures are matter and void.

All of nature is built of these 2 things. There are bodies and the void, in which they are placed and where they move hither and thither.

For that body exists is declared by the feeling which all share alike.

Were there not room and empty space, which we call void, nowhere could bodies be placed, nor could they wander at all hither and thither in any direction; and this I have above shown to you but a little while before.

There is no third nature.

Besides these there is nothing which you could say is parted from all body and sundered from void, which could be discovered, as it were a third nature in the list.

1. Touch shows matter, intangibility void.

For whatever shall exist, must needs be something in itself.

If it suffer touch, however small and light, it will increase the count of body by a bulk great or maybe small, if it exists at all, and be added to its sum. But if it is not to be touched, inasmuch as it cannot on any side check anything from wandering through it and passing on its way, in truth it will be that which we call empty void.

2. Body acts or suffers: void is the field of action.

Or again, whatsoever exists by itself, will either do something or suffer itself while other things act upon it, or it will be such that things may exist and go on in it.

But nothing can do or suffer without body, nor afford room again, unless it be void and empty space.

And so besides void and bodies no third nature by itself can be left in the list of things, which might either at any time fall within the purview of our senses, or be grasped by any one through reasoning of the mind.

Properties and Accidents.

For all things that have a name, you will find either properties linked to these two things or you will see them to be their accidents.

That is a property which in no case can be sundered or separated without the fatal disunion of the thing, as is weight to rocks, heat to fire, moisture to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to the void.

On the other hand, slavery, poverty, riches, liberty, war, concord, and other things by whose coming and going the nature of things abides untouched, these we are used.

Time is not a separate existence, but an accident of things as is natural, to call accidents.

Even so time exists not by itself, but from actual things comes a feeling, what was brought to a close in time past, then what is present now, and further what is going to be hereafter.

No man feels time by itself apart from the motion or quiet rest of things.

Then again, when men say that ‘the rape of Tyndarus’s daughter’,False argument from past events, because the persons, whose accidents they were, are no more.

Or ‘the vanquishing of the Trojan tribes in war’ are things, beware that they do not perchance constrain us to avow that these things exist in themselves, just because the past ages have carried off beyond recall those races of men, of whom, in truth, these were the accidents.

For firstly, we might well say that whatsoever has happened is an accident in one case of the countries, in another even of the regions of space. Or again, if there had been no substance of things nor place and space, in which all things are carried on, never would the flame of love have been fired by the beauty of Tyndaris, But

1. they may be called accidents of places;

2. without matter and space, they could not have occurred; nor swelling deep in the Phrygian heart of Alexander have kindled the burning battles of savage war, nor unknown of the Trojans would the timber horse have set Pergama aflame at dead of night, when the sons of the Greeks issued from its womb.

So that you may see clearly that all events from first to last do not exist, and are not by themselves like body, nor can they be spoken of in the same way as the being of the void, but rather so that you might justly call them the accidents of body and place, in which they are carried on, one and all.