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By this demonstration she implied that her children were much more to be praised for being like a standing tree, than those of Physis, that made a figure of a tree upside down.
One says: It is all vibrations; but his reason, unsatisfied, asks: And what makes the vibrations vibrate? Another: It is all physiological units; but his reason asks: What is the "physis," the nature and "innate tendency" of the units? A third: It may be all caused by infinitely numerous "gemmules;" but his reason asks him: What puts infinite order into those gemmules, instead of infinite anarchy?
I'll tell you what I read of them in some ancient apologues, replied Pantagruel. Physis that is to say, Nature at her first burthen begat Beauty and Harmony without carnal copulation, being of herself very fruitful and prolific.
Thus they could not help running up against the popular ideas of the gods, and treating them in the same way. A leading part was here played by the sophistic distinction between nomos and physis, Law and Nature, i.e. that which is based on human convention, and that which is founded on the nature of things.
Yet as you know that apes esteem their young the handsomest in the world Antiphysis extolled her offspring, and strove to prove that their shape was handsomer and neater than that of the children of Physis, saying that thus to have spherical heads and feet, and walk in a circular manner, wheeling round, had something in it of the perfection of the divine power, which makes all beings eternally turn in that fashion; and that to have our feet uppermost, and the head below them, was to imitate the Creator of the universe; the hair being like the roots, and the legs like the branches of man; for trees are better planted by their roots than they could be by their branches.
Would you have had them appeal to unnatural law? law according to which God did not make this world? Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in his time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais saw it done in his time; and wrote his chapters on the "Children of Physis and the Children of Antiphysis."
Hence it followed in principle that religion came under the domain of “the law,” being consequently the work of man; and hence again the obvious conclusion, according to sophistic reasoning, was that it was nothing but human imagination, and that there was no physis, no reality, behind it at all.
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