Aristotle ON GENERATION AND CORRUPTION Complete

Translated by H. Joachim.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

66 pages - You are on Page 56

Perhaps we may suggest the following solution. (i) There are differences of degree in hot and cold. Although, therefore, when either is fully real without qualification, the other will exist potentially; yet, when neither exists in the full completeness of its being, but both by combining destroy one another's excesses so that there exist instead a hot which (for a 'hot') is cold and a cold which (for a 'cold') is hot; then what results from these two contraries will be neither their matter, nor either of them existing in its full reality without qualification. There will result instead an 'intermediate': and this 'intermediate', according as it is potentially more hot than cold or vice versa, will possess a power-of-heating that is double or triple its power-of-cooling, or otherwise related thereto in some similar ratio. Thus all the other bodies will result from the contraries, or rather from the 'elements', in so far as these have been 'combined': while the elements' will result from the contraries, in so far as these 'exist potentially' in a special sense-not as matter 'exists potentially', but in the sense explained above. And when a thing comes-to-be in this manner, the process is cobination'; whereas what comes-to-be in the other manner is matter. Moreover (ii) contraries also 'suffer action', in accordance with the disjunctively-articulated definition established in the early part of this work.' For the actually-hot is potentially-cold and the actually cold potentially-hot; so that hot and cold, unless they are equally balanced, are transformed into one another (and all the other contraries behave in a similar way). It is thus, then, that in the first place the 'elements' are transformed; and that (in the second place) out of the 'elements' there come-to-be flesh and bones and the like-the hot becoming cold and the cold becoming hot when they have been brought to the 'mean'. For at the 'mean' is neither hot nor cold. The 'mean', however, is of considerable extent and not indivisible. Similarly, it is qua reduced to a 'mean' condition that the dry and the moist, as well as the contraries we have used as examples, produce flesh and bone and the remaining compounds.

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