The statement that complete separation never will take place is correct enough, though Anaxagoras is not fully aware of what it means. For affections are indeed inseparable. If then colours and states had entered into the mixture, and if separation took place, there would be a ‘white’ or a ‘healthy’ which was nothing but white or healthy, i. e. was not the predicate of a subject.
the Basic Works Of Aristotleby aristotle
It is plain then that they all in one way or another identify the contraries with the principles. And with good reason. For first principles must not be derived from one another nor from anything else, while everything has to be derived from them. But these conditions are fulfilled by the primary contraries, which are not derived from anything else because they are primary, nor from each other because they are contraries.
Our first presupposition must be that in nature nothing acts on, or is acted on by, any other thing at random, nor may anything come from anything else, unless we mean that it does so in virtue of a concomitant attribute.
If, then, “substance” is not attributed to anything, but other things are attributed to it, how does “substance” mean what is rather than what is not?
Being will not have magnitude, if it is substance. For each of the two parts must be in a different sense.
It is, then, clearly impossible for Being to be one in this sense.
The first set make the underlying body one — either one of the three or something else which is denser than fire and rarer than air — then generate everything else from this, and obtain multiplicity by condensation and rarefaction. Now these are contraries, which may be generalized into “excess and defect”.
The second set assert that the contrarieties are contained in the one and emerge from it by segregation, for example Anaximander and also all those who assert that”‘what is” is one and many, like Empedocles and Anaxagoras; for they too produce other things from their mixture by segregation. These differ, however, from each other in that the former imagines a cycle of such changes, the latter a single series.
Lastly, in each of his infinite bodies there would be already present infinite flesh and blood and brain — having a distinct existence, however, from one another, and no less real than the infinite bodies, and each infinite: which is contrary to reason.
For the same things are not “knowable relatively to us” and “knowable” without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature.
