Lorenzo de' Medici, Seven Philosophical Questions in Verse

and the powers of my mind seem to fail me at the mere reading of them. Nevertheless, so that I may not seem to spurn your first commands, I will take on this most difficult province of mine. I know that no one can do justice to this matter, just as no one can truly do justice to your divine mind itself, especially if it could be called back for a while from the stormy and turbulent sea of the Republic. But you have entrusted this to me for that reason (as I believe), not so that you might learn something from me, but only so that you might receive a certain tasting of my lucubrations and make a trial of my genius. Relying, therefore, on the exuberant gift of divine grace, I shall begin, with a happy omen, to resolve the first question:

Regarding the first question, many opinions of philosophers and others are brought forward:

A large blue initial D marks the start of the paragraph.

That doubt (whether all things proceed from God, or some do so, such that others do not) is old and ancient. For Democritus, the inventor of those atoms, opined that the superior world was not put together by chance, nor by any providence (as Aristotle relates in the 4th book of his auditu phisico Physics/Lectures on Nature). Which was also the opinion of Leucippus. And they posit chance as a cause. Epicurus also writes that he removed divine providence from our nether regions. And thus, that God does not produce those things, since nothing can be brought about which is not first known by a first cause. For a first cause cannot be per accidens by accident because every cause per accidens presupposes a cause per se in itself/essentially. And every cause per se that does not know presupposes

causes knowing per se.