Page - 686 - in The Complete Aristotle

underlies the things that are fashioned of gold. (And yet this comparison, if thus expressed, is itself open to criticism. Things which come-to-be and pass- away cannot be called by the name of the material out of which they have come-tobe: it is only the results of ‘alteration’ which retain the name of the substratum whose ‘alterations’ they are. However, he actually says’ that the truest account is to affirm that each of them is “gold”’.) Nevertheless he carries his analysis of the ‘elements’-solids though they are-back to ‘planes’, and it is impossible for ‘the Nurse’ (i.e. the primary matter) to be identical with ‘the planes’. Our own doctrine is that although there is a matter of the perceptible bodies (a matter out of which the so-called ‘clements’ come-to-be), it has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety. A more precise account of these presuppositions has been given in another work’: we must, however, give a detailed explanation of the primary bodies as well, since they too are similarly derived from the matter. We must reckon as an ‘originative source’ and as ‘primary’ the matter which underlies, though it is inseparable from, the contrary qualities: for the hot’ is not matter for ‘the cold’ nor ‘the cold’ for ‘the hot’, but the substratum is matter for them both. We therefore have to recognize three ‘originative sources’: firstly that which potentially perceptible body, secondly the contrarieties (I mean, e.g. heat and cold), and thirdly Fire, Water, and the like. Only ‘thirdly’, however: for these bodies change into one another (they are not immutable as Empedocles and other thinkers assert, since ‘alteration’ would then have been impossible), whereas the contrarieties do not change. Nevertheless, even so the question remains: What sorts of contrarieties, and how many of them, are to be accounted ‘originative sources’ of body? For all the other thinkers assume and use them without explaining why they are these or why they are just so many. < div class=“section” title=“2”> 2 Since, then, we are looking for ‘originative sources’ of perceptible body; and since ‘perceptible’ is equivalent to ‘tangible’, and ‘tangible’ is that of which the perception is touch; it is clear that not all the contrarieties constitute ‘forms’ and ‘originative sources’ of body, but only those which correspond to touch. For it is in accordance with a contrariety-a contrariety, moreover, of tangible qualities-that the primary bodies are differentiated. That is why neither whiteness (and blackness), nor sweetness (and bitterness), nor 686