"I was composed of a formal and a material substance; and of these neither will pass away into nothingness, just as neither came to exist out of nothingness. Thus every part of me will be assigned its place by change into some part of the universe, and that again into another part of the universe, and so on to infinity. By a similar change both my parents and I came to exist, and so on to another infinity of regression."
—Marcus Aurelius