Page - 779 - in The Complete Aristotle

4 We must now describe the forms taken by the passive qualities the moist and the dry. The elements of bodies, that is, the passive ones, are the moist and the dry; the bodies themselves are compounded of them and whichever predominates determines the nature of the body; thus some bodies partake more of the dry, others of the moist. All the forms to be described will exist either actually, or potentially and in their opposite: for instance, there is actual melting and on the other hand that which admits of being melted. Since the moist is easily determined and the dry determined with difficulty, their relation to one another is like that of a dish and its condiments. The moist is what makes the dry determinable, and each serves as a sort of glue to the other-as Empedocles said in his poem on Nature, ‘glueing meal together by means of water.’ Thus the determined body involves them both. Of the elements earth is especially representative of the dry, water of the moist, and therefore all determinate bodies in our world involve earth and water. Every body shows the quality of that element which predominates in it. It is because earth and water are the material elements of all bodies that animals live in them alone and not in air or fire. Of the qualities of bodies hardness and softness are those which must primarily belong to a determined thing, for anything made up of the dry and the moist is necessarily either hard or soft. Hard is that the surface of which does not yield into itself; soft that which does yield but not by interchange of place: water, for instance, is not soft, for its surface does not yield to pressure or sink in but there is an interchange of place. Those things are absolutely hard and soft which satisfy the definition absolutely, and those things relatively so which do so compared with another thing. Now relatively to one another hard and soft are indefinable, because it is a matter of degree, but since all the objects of sense are determined by reference to the faculty of sense it is clearly the relation to touch which determines that which is hard and soft absolutely, and touch is that which we use as a standard or mean. So we call that which exceeds it hard and that which falls short of it soft. < div class=“section” title=“5”> 5 A body determined by its own boundary must be either hard or soft; for it either yields or does not. 779