Page - 685 - in The Complete Aristotle

On Generation and Corruption, Book II Translated by H. H. Joachim < div class=“section” title=“1”> 1 We have explained under what conditions ‘combination’, ‘contact’, and ‘action-passion’ are attributable to the things which undergo natural change. Further, we have discussed ‘unqualified’ coming-to-be and passing-away, and explained under what conditions they are predicable, of what subject, and owing to what cause. Similarly, we have also discussed ‘alteration’, and explained what ‘altering’ is and how it differs from coming-to-be and passing- away. But we have still to investigate the so-called ‘elements’ of bodies. For the complex substances whose formation and maintenance are due to natural processes all presuppose the perceptible bodies as the condition of their coming-to-be and passing-away: but philosophers disagree in regard to the matter which underlies these perceptible bodies. Some maintain it is single, supposing it to be, e.g. Air or Fire, or an ‘intermediate’ between these two (but still a body with a separate existence). Others, on the contrary, postulate two or more materials-ascribing to their ‘association’ and ‘dissociation’, or to their ‘alteration’, the coming-to-be and passing-away of things. (Some, for instance, postulate Fire and Earth: some add Air, making three: and some, like Empedocles, reckon Water as well, thus postulating four.) Now we may agree that the primary materials, whose change (whether it be ‘association and dissociation’ or a process of another kind) results in coming- to-be and passingaway, are rightly described as ‘originative sources, i.e. elements’. But (i) those thinkers are in error who postulate, beside the bodies we have mentioned, a single matter-and that corporeal and separable matter. For this ‘body’ of theirs cannot possibly exist without a ‘perceptible contrariety’: this ‘Boundless’, which some thinkers identify with the ‘original real’, must be either light or heavy, either cold or hot. And (ii) what Plato has written in the Timaeus is not based on any precisely-articulated conception. For he has not stated clearly whether his ‘Omnirecipient” exists in separation from the ‘elements’; nor does he make any use of it. He says, indeed, that it is a substratum prior to the so-called ‘elements’-underlying them, as gold 685