Aristotle ON GENERATION AND CORRUPTION Complete

Translated by H. Joachim.

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Perhaps it is impossible for growth to take place in either of these ways. For since the matter is 'separate', either (a) it will occupy no place (as if it were a point), or (b) it will be a 'void', i.e. a non-perceptible body. But the first of these alternatives is impossible. For since what comes-to-be out of this incorporeal and sizeless something will always be 'somewhere', it too must be 'somewhere'-either intrinsically or indirectly. And the second alternative necessarily implies that the matter is contained in some other body. But if it is to be 'in' another body and yet remains 'separate' in such a way that it is in no sense a part of that body (neither a part of its substantial being nor an 'accident' of it), many impossibilities will result. It is as if we were to suppose that when, e.g. air comes-to-be out of water the process were due not to a change of the but to the matter of the air being 'contained in' the water as in a vessel. This is impossible. For (i) there is nothing to prevent an indeterminate number of matters being thus 'contained in' the water, so that they might come-to-be actually an indeterminate quantity of air; and (ii) we do not in fact see air coming-to-be out of water in this fashion, viz. withdrawing out of it and leaving it unchanged.

It is therefore better to suppose that in all instances of coming-to-be the matter is inseparable, being numerically identical and one with the 'containing' body, though isolable from it by definition. But the same reasons also forbid us to regard the matter, out of which the body comes-to-be, as points or lines. The matter is that of which points and lines are limits, and it is something that can never exist without quality and without form.

Now it is no doubt true, as we have also established elsewhere,' that one thing 'comes-tobe' (in the unqualified sense) out of another thing: and further it is true that the efficient cause of its coming-to-be is either (i) an actual thing (which is the same as the effect either generically-or the efficient cause of the coming-to-be of a hard thing is not a hard thing or specifically, as e.g. fire is the efficient cause of the coming-to-be of fire or one man of the birth of another), or (ii) an actuality. Nevertheless, since there is also a matter out of which corporeal substance itself comes-to-be (corporeal substance, however, already characterized as such-and-such a determinate body, for there is no such thing as body in general), this same matter is also the matter of magnitude and quality-being separable from these matters by definition, but not separable in place unless Qualities are, in their turn, separable.

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