kid, or waterman, or Cepheus, or Andromeda, or the spectres that have names given them in Hades, have the stars that are scattered over the firmament (for we must remember that these men, and the titles themselves, came into existence long after the origin of man),—[what I say is in common between the two], that the heretics, astonished at the marvel, should thus strive by means of such discourses to strengthen their own opinions?
Chapter li.
The Hebdomadarii—System of the Arithmeticians—pressed into the Service of Heresy—Instances of, in Simon and Valentinus—the Nature of the Universe deducible from the Physiology of the Brain.
But since almost every heresy [that has sprung up] through the arithmetical art has discovered measures of hebdomads and certain projections of Æons, each rending the art differently, while whatever variation prevailed was in the names merely; and [since] Pythagoras became the instructor of these, first introducing numbers of this sort among the Greeks from Egypt, it seems expedient not to omit even this, but, after we have given a compendious elucidation, to approach the demonstration of those things that we propose to investigate.
Arithmeticians and geometers arose, to whom especially Pythagoras first seems to have furnished principles. And from numbers that can continually progress ad infinitum by multiplication, and from figures, these derived their first principles,[1] as capable of being discerned by reason alone; for a principle of geometry, as one may perceive, is an indivisible point. From that point, however, by means of the art, the generation of endless figures from the point is discovered. For the point being drawn into length becomes a line, after being thus continued, having a point for its extremity. And a line flowing out into breadth begets a surface, and the limits of the surface are lines; but a surface
- ↑ Sextus Empiricus, adv. Geom. 29 et seq. (See book vi. chap. xviii. of The Refutation.)
