On the Universe

On the reckoning of time and days.

Although heaven itself—meanwhile, while all things were gradually brought forth from privation and the potentiality of matter by divine and celestial means through the seven natures referring to the seven days of creation at convenient intervals, which they call days—had been moved for countless ages, yet in truth the existence of time could never have been HAD, if there had not been included within heaven an intellect that counts, that is, man, for whose sake all things exist, who himself might note the number of the motion. Therefore, the Egyptians are trifling, who place many years above sacred chronology, since they prove nothing that happened in them; the Chaldeans dreamed much falser things with their 300,000 years, but most of all and most impudently of all, Aristotle and those who, with him, postulate the eternity of the sensible world, because all things are in