Aristotle ON THE PARTS OF ANIMALS Complete

Translated by W. Ogle.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

144 pages - You are on Page 27

Iron, again, and stones and other similar bodies are longer in getting heated than water, but when once heated burn other substances with a much greater intensity. Another distinction is this. In some of the bodies which are called hot the heat is derived from without, while in others it belongs to the bodies themselves; and it makes a most important difference whether the heat has the former or the latter origin. For to call that one of two bodies the hotter, which is possessed of heat, we may almost say, accidentally and not of its own essence, is very much the same thing as if, finding that some man in a fever was a musician, one were to say that musicians are hotter than healthy men. Of that which is hot per se and that which is hot per accidens, the former is the slower to cool, while not rarely the latter is the hotter to the touch. The former again is the more burning of the two-flame, for instance, as compared with boiling water-while the latter, as the boiling water, which is hot per accidens, is the more heating to the touch. From all this it is clear that it is no simple matter to decide which of two bodies is the hotter. For the first may be the hotter in one sense, the second the hotter in another. Indeed in some of these cases it is impossible to say simply even whether a thing is hot or not. For the actual substratum may not itself be hot, but may be hot when coupled witb heat as an attribute, as would be the case if one attached a single name to hot water or hot iron. It is after this manner that blood is hot. In such cases, in those, that is, in which the substratum owes its heat to an external influence, it is plain that cold is not a mere privation, but an actual existence.

There is no knowing but that even fire may be another of these cases. For the substratum of fire may be smoke or charcoal, and though the former of these is always hot, smoke being an uprising vapour, yet the latter becomes cold when its flame is extinguished, as also would oil and pinewood under similar circumstances. But even substances that have been burnt nearly all possess some heat, cinders, for example, and ashes, the dejections also of animals, and, among the excretions, bile; because some residue of heat has been left in them after their combustion. It is in another sense that pinewood and fat substances are hot; namely, because they rapidly assume the actuality of fire.

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