7. In the bounded space of this universe, as was said, immense bodies revolve, which, performing their circuits round the sun as a common centre, grow to their respective ages.
(The sun is the parent of his world, the earth and planets, for from him, from whom they subsist, they also existed.)
The sun, like an aged parent, regards these revolving globes no otherwise than as his own offspring that have attained to a considerable maturity in years; for he continually consults their interests general and particular (singularem), and although they are distant, he never fails to exercise over them his care and parental protection, since by his rays he is, as it were, present in his provision for them; he cherishes them with the warmth issuing forth from his immense bosom; he adorns their bodies and members every year with a most beautiful clothing; he nourishes their inhabitants with a perpetual supply of food; he promotes the life of all things, and, moreover, enlightens them with his luminous radiance. 1 Since the sun thus executes all the functions of parental duty, it follows from the connection and tenor of causes, that if we are desirous to unfold the history of the earth from its earliest infancy, and to examine it from its origin, we must have recourse to the sun himself; for every effect is a continuity of causes from the first cause, and the cause by which anything subsists is continued to the cause by which it exists, since subsistence is a kind of perpetual existence.
[2] Moreover he also adorns them with the most beautiful clothing; for the universal face of the earth, with its fields, shrubberies, and gardens, blossoms at the new breathings of his warmth, namely, in the spring and summer seasons; and all things which clothe that face, though dead, rise again from their tombs to a kind of life; but instantly, when the sun descends from his height, and becomes lower by the inclination of the plane of the horizon, cold begins to prevail, in consequence of which the subjects of the vegetable kingdom sink to decay, and are consigned to death; thus he nourishes the inhabitants with perpetual food excited from the bosom of the earth, and preserves their life.
[3] Moreover also he gives times, which derive from the sun their greatest and least durations, and their vicissitudes; for ages with their years, years with their days, and days with their hours, exist by his alternately changed aspects, and by his risings varying to his settings, and by his settings returning again to risings; and thus they become subjects of number, because subjects of sense. He presides over annual and diurnal motions; for as the sun by his rays excites active and living powers in all other things, so also he stirs up and renovates his whole universe with the ethereal atmospheres excited according to the nature of his rays, by a general force corresponding to irradiation, and thus by a kind of animation; without such an origin of motion these great bodies could in no wise be kept in a constant revolution around him, their source. From particular forces there results a general force, as a compound results from the simples of which it is the aggregate.
[4] Moreover also he enlightens those orbs with his luminous radiance; for, as was said, his rays convey along with them both heat and light, but this according to his elevations above the horizon, and according to distances, also according to columns of air and the time of his continuance in the hemisphere; thus in his rays there are two natures, so distinct, that one exists without the other; as in midwinter, when the sun shines with as great light as in midsummer from the same degree of altitude; to this latter nature of his is opposed shade, but to the other, cold; by his luminous radiance he enlightens those things which he produces by heat, that they may affect our sight.
Фусноти:
1. Let us consider these things more particularly: that the sun is present by his rays with all the wandering bodies in his universe, is manifest from his heat and light, for both are contained in his rays, heat in the measure and proportion of his altitude, and according to the density and column of the atmosphere through which the rays pass, also in some degree according to his continuance above the horizon, and the meeting of heat exhaling from the object; and lastly, according to the distance or angle which his wide gaze embraces; for bodies in the extreme limit of his universe are affected with a less power of heat than those which move at a less distance and more immediately under his view; wherefore the sun cherishes with heat bursting forth from his large bosom, these bodies which, according to our proposition, have been derived from him.
(The sun is the parent of his world, of the earth and of the planets.)
