( i ) 1. Deceased was now that my evil and abominable youth, and I was passing into early manhood [his thirty-first year]; the more defiled by vain things as I grew in years, who could not imagine any substance but such as is wont to be seen with these eyes. I thought not of Thee, O God, under the figure of a human body; since I began to hear aught of wisdom, I always avoided this; and rejoiced to have found the same in the faith of our spiritual mother, Thy Catholic Church. But what else to conceive Thee I knew not. And I, a man, and such a man, sought to conceive of Thee the sovereign, only, true God; and I did in my inmost soul believe that Thou wert incorruptible, and uninjurable, and unchangeable; because though not knowing whence or how, yet I saw plainly and was sure that that which may be corrupted must be inferior to that which cannot; what could not be injured I preferred unhesitatingly to what could receive injury; the unchangeable to things subject to change. My heart passionately cried out against all my phantoms, and with this one blow I sought to beat away from the eye of my mind all that unclean troop, which buzzed around it. And lo, being scarce put off, in the twinkling of an eye they gathered again thick about me, flew against my face, and beclouded it; so that though not under the form of the human body, yet was I constrained to conceive of Thee (that incorruptible, uninjurable, and unchangeable, which I preferred before the corruptible, and injurable, and changeable) as being in space, whether infused into the world, or diffused infinitely without it. Because whatsoever I conceived, deprived of this space, seemed to me nothing, yea altogether nothing, not even a void, as if a body were taken out of its place, and the place should remain empty of any body at all, of earth and water, air and heaven, yet would it remain a void place, as it were a specious nothing.

(He “sees that the cause of sin lies in free-will, rejects the Manichean heresy, but cannot altogether embrace the doctrine of the Church; recovered from the belief in Astrology, but miserably perplexed about the origin of evil; is led to find in the Platonists the seeds of the doctrine of the Divinity of the WORD, but not of His humiliation; hence he obtains clearer notions of God’s majesty, but, not knowing Christ to be the Mediator, remains estranged from Him; all his doubts removed by the study of Holy Scripture, especially St. Paul.” This Book completes Augustine’s thirty-first year.)

(Dealing with his abandonment of astrology, a naively elaborate proof of the falsity of that science is brought forward, to-wit: By careful planning, two children of widely different parents were observed, who were born at approximately the same time. According to astrology, their horoscopes should be the same, for the stars would obviously be in the same positions at their simultaneous birth. But one was a slave, the other a successful freeman. In addition, the common phenomenon of twins, born at the same hour or so nearly at the same moment that the stars could not vary enough to be noted, is cited. The twins, according to their horoscopes, should be similarly endowed with abilities, and similarly favored by fortune. Yet this has seldom proved the case.)