Aristotle PHYSICS Complete

Translated by R. Hardie and R. Gaye.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

128 pages - You are on Page 78

Part 5

If then a body has another body outside it and containing it, it is in place, and if not, not. That is why, even if there were to be water which had not a container, the parts of it, on the one hand, will be moved (for one part is contained in another), while, on the other hand, the whole will be moved in one sense, but not in another. For as a whole it does not simultaneously change its place, though it will be moved in a circle: for this place is the place of its parts. (Some things are moved, not up and down, but in a circle; others up and down, such things namely as admit of condensation and rarefaction.)

As was explained, some things are potentially in place, others actually. So, when you have a homogeneous substance which is continuous, the parts are potentially in place: when the parts are separated, but in contact, like a heap, they are actually in place.

Again, (1) some things are per se in place, namely every body which is movable either by way of locomotion or by way of increase is per se somewhere, but the heaven, as has been said, is not anywhere as a whole, nor in any place, if at least, as we must suppose, no body contains it. On the line on which it is moved, its parts have place: for each is contiguous the next.

But (2) other things are in place indirectly, through something conjoined with them, as the soul and the heaven. The latter is, in a way, in place, for all its parts are: for on the orb one part contains another. That is why the upper part is moved in a circle, while the All is not anywhere. For what is somewhere is itself something, and there must be alongside it some other thing wherein it is and which contains it. But alongside the All or the Whole there is nothing outside the All, and for this reason all things are in the heaven; for the heaven, we may say, is the All. Yet their place is not the same as the heaven. It is part of it, the innermost part of it, which is in contact with the movable body; and for this reason the earth is in water, and this in the air, and the air in the aether, and the aether in heaven, but we cannot go on and say that the heaven is in anything else.

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