Hence things which are governed and connected by Fate are entirely
altermotive and corporeal. If this then is demonstrated, it is manifest
that admitting Fate to be a cause of connection, we must assert that it
presides over altermotive and corporeal natures. If, therefore, we look
to that which is the proximate cause of bodies, and thorough which also
altermotive beings are moved, breathe, and are held together, we shall
find that this is nature, the energies of which are to generate, nourish,
and increase. If, therefore, this power not only subsists in us, and all
other animals and plants, but prior to partial bodies there is, by a much
greater necessity, one nature of the world which comprehends and is
motive of all bodies; it follows that nature must be the cause of things
connected, and that in this we must investigate Fate. Hence, Fate is
nature, or that incorporeal power which is the one life of the world,
presiding over bodies, moving all things according to time, and
connecting the motions of things that, by places and times, are distant
from each other. It is likewise the cause of the mutual sympathy of
mortal natures, and of their conjunction with such as are eternal. For
the nature which is in us, binds and connects all the parts of our body,
of which also it is a certain Fate. And as in our body some parts have a
principal subsistence, and others are less principal, and the latter are
consequent to the former, so in the universe, the generations of the less
principal parts are consequent to the motions of the more principal, viz.
the sublunary generations to the periods of the celestial bodies; and the
circle of the former is the image of the latter.

Hence it is not difficult to see that Providence is deity itself, the
fountain of all good. For whence can good be imparted, to all things, but
from divinity? So that no other cause of good but deity is, as Plato
says, to be assigned. And, in the next place, as this cause is superior
to all intelligible and sensible natures, it is consequently superior to