[1069b]
[1]
the last belongs to some other science,
if there is no principle common to all three.
Sensible substance is liable to change. Now if change proceeds from
opposites or intermediates—not however from all opposites
(for speech is not white), but only from the contrary1—then there must be something underlying
which changes into the opposite contrary; for the contraries2 do not
change. Further, something persists, whereas the
contrary does not persist. Therefore besides the contraries there is
some third thing, the matter . Now if change is of four
kinds, in respect either of substance or of quality or of quantity or
of place, and if change of substance is generation or destruction in
the simple sense, and change of quantity is increase or decrease, and
change of affection is alteration, and change of place is locomotion,
then changes must be in each case into the corresponding contrary
state.It must be the
matter, then, which admits of both contraries, that changes. And since
"that which is" is twofold, everything changes from that which is
potentially to that which is actually; e.g. from potentially white to
actually white. The same applies to increase and decrease. Hence not
only may there be generation accidentally from that which is not, but
also everything is generated from that which is,
[20]
but is potentially and is not
actually.And this is
the "one" of Anaxagoras; for his "all things were together,"3 and the "mixture"
of Empedocles and Anaximander and the doctrine of Democritus would be
better expressed as "all things were together potentially, but not
actually."4 Hence these thinkers must have had some
conception of matter. All things which change have matter, but
different things have different kinds; and of eternal things such as
are not generable but are movable by locomotion have matter; matter,
however, which admits not of generation, but of motion from one place
to another.5One
might raise the question from what sort of "not-being" generation
takes place; for not-being has three senses.6 If a thing exists through a potentiality,
nevertheless it is not through a potentiality for any chance thing;
different things are derived from different things.Nor is it satisfactory to say that "all
things were together," for they differ in their matter, since
otherwise why did they become an infinity and not one? For Mind is
one; so that if matter is also one, only that could have come to be in
actuality whose matter existed potentially. The causes and principles,
then, are three; two being the pair of contraries, of which one is the
formula or form and the other the privation, and the third being the
matter.7 We must next observe8 that
neither matter nor form (I mean in the proximate sense) is generated.
All change is of some subject by some agent into some object.
1 Cf. Aristot. Met. 10.7.
2 i.e., contrary qualities. Cf. Aristot. Met. 8.5.1.
3 Anaxagoras Fr. 1 (Diels).
4 In this passage I follow Ross's punctuation and interpretation, which seem to me to be certainly right. Anaxagoras's undifferentiated infinity of homoeomerous particles (although contrasted with the unifying principle of Mind, cf. Aristot. Met. 1.8.14） can be regarded as in a sense a unity. Again, μῖγμα(as Ross points out) in its Aristotelian sense of "complete fusion" is a fair description of Anaximander's "indeterminate." The general meaning of the passage is that in each of the systems referred to the material principle in its elemental state should have been described as existing only potentially.
5 Cf. Aristot. Met. 12.1.3, Aristot. Met. 8.1.7, 8.
6 (1) the negation of a category, (2) falsity, (3) unrealized potentiality. Cf. Aristot. Met. 14.2.10.
7 This classification is found in Aristot. Physics 1.6, 7, but is foreign to the main treatise of the Metaphysics. See Introduction.
8 See Introduction.
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18, translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.