Page - 439 - in The Complete Aristotle

body also is infinite, and that there is an infinite number of worlds. Why should there be body in one part of the void rather than in another? Grant only that mass is anywhere and it follows that it must be everywhere. Also, if void and place are infinite, there must be infinite body too, for in the case of eternal things what may be must be. But the problem of the infinite is difficult: many contradictions result whether we suppose it to exist or not to exist. If it exists, we have still to ask how it exists; as a substance or as the essential attribute of some entity? Or in neither way, yet none the less is there something which is infinite or some things which are infinitely many? The problem, however, which specially belongs to the physicist is to investigate whether there is a sensible magnitude which is infinite. We must begin by distinguishing the various senses in which the term ‘infinite’ is used. (1) What is incapable of being gone through, because it is not in its nature to be gone through (the sense in which the voice is ‘invisible’). (2) What admits of being gone through, the process however having no termination, or what scarcely admits of being gone through. (3) What naturally admits of being gone through, but is not actually gone through or does not actually reach an end. Further, everything that is infinite may be so in respect of addition or division or both. < div id=“section23” class=“section” title=“5”> 5 Now it is impossible that the infinite should be a thing which is itself infinite, separable from sensible objects. If the infinite is neither a magnitude nor an aggregate, but is itself a substance and not an attribute, it will be indivisible; for the divisible must be either a magnitude or an aggregate. But if indivisible, then not infinite, except in the sense (1) in which the voice is ‘invisible’. But this is not the sense in which it is used by those who say that the infinite exists, nor that in which we are investigating it, namely as (2) ‘that which cannot be gone through’. But if the infinite exists as an attribute, it would not be, qua infinite an element in substances, any more than the invisible would be an element of speech, though the voice is invisible. Further, how can the infinite be itself any thing, unless both number and 439