Page - 673 - in The Complete Aristotle

action, since all the properties which belong to the one belong identically and in the same degree to the other; and (b) that ‘unlikes’, i.e. ‘differents’, are by nature such as to act and suffer action reciprocally. For even when the smaller fire is destroyed by the greater, it suffers this effect (they say) owing to its ‘contrariety’ since the great is contrary to the small. But (ii) Democritus dissented from all the other thinkers and maintained a theory peculiar to himself. He asserts that agent and patient are identical, i.e. ‘like’. It is not possible (he says) that ‘others’, i.e. ‘differents’, should suffer action from one another: on the contrary, even if two things, being ‘others’, do act in some way on one another, this happens to them not qua ‘others’ but qua possessing an identical property. Such, then, are the traditional theories, and it looks as if the statements of their advocates were in manifest conflict. But the reason of this conflict is that each group is in fact stating a part, whereas they ought to have taken a comprehensive view of the subject as a whole. For (i) if A and B are ‘like’- absolutely and in all respects without difference from one another —it is reasonable to infer that neither is in any way affected by the other. Why, indeed, should either of them tend to act any more than the other? Moreover, if ‘like’ can be affected by ‘like’, a thing can also be affected by itself: and yet if that were so-if ‘like’ tended in fact to act qua ‘like’-there would be nothing indestructible or immovable, for everything would move itself. And (ii) the same consequence follows if A and B are absolutely ‘other’, i.e. in no respect identical. Whiteness could not be affected in any way by line nor line by whiseness-except perhaps ‘coincidentally’, viz. if the line happened to be white or black: for unless two things either are, or are composed of, ‘contraries’, neither drives the other out of its natural condition. But (iii) since only those things which either involve a ‘contrariety’ or are ‘contraries’-and not any things selected at random-are such as to suffer action and to act, agent and patient must be ‘like’ (i.e. identical) in kind and yet ‘unlike’ (i.e. contrary) in species. (For it is a law of nature that body is affected by body, flavour by flavour, colour by colour, and so in general what belongs to any kind by a member of the same kind-the reason being that ‘contraries’ are in every case within a single identical kind, and it is ‘contraries’ which reciprocally act and suffer action.) Hence agent and patient must be in one sense identical, but in another sense other than (i.e. ‘unlike’) one another. And since (a) patient and agent are generically identical (i.e. ‘like’) but specifically ‘unlike’, while (b) it is ‘contraries’ that exhibit this character: it is clear that ‘contraries’ and their ‘intermediates’ are such as to suffer action and to act reciprocally-for indeed it is these that constitute the entire sphere of passing-away and coming-to-be. We can now understand why fire heats and the cold thing cools, and in general why the active thing assimilates to itself the patient. For agent and 673