Complete Works (265 page)

Next, we should note that there are many varieties of fire that have come to be. For example, there is both flame and the effluence from flame which, while it doesn’t burn, gives light to the eyes. And then there is the residue of flame which is left in the embers when the flame has gone out. [d] The same goes for air. There is the brightest kind that we call “aether,” and also the murkiest, “mist” and “darkness.” Then there are other, nameless sorts which result from inequality among the triangles. The varieties of water can first of all be divided into two groups, the liquid and the liquifiable. Because the former possesses water parts that are not only unequal but also small, it turns out to be mobile, both in itself and when acted upon by something else. This is due to its non-uniformity and the configuration of its shape. The other type of water, composed of large and [e] uniform kinds, is rather more immobile and heavy, compacted as it is by its uniformity. But when fire penetrates it and begins to break it up, it loses its uniformity, and once that is lost it is more susceptible to motion. When it has become quite mobile it is spread out upon the ground under pressure from the air surrounding it. Each of these changes has its own name: “melting” for the disintegration of its bulk and “flowing” for the spreading on the ground. But when, conversely, the fire is expelled from
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it, then, since the fire does not pass into a void, pressure is exerted upon the surrounding air, which in turn compresses the still mobile liquid mass into the places previously occupied by the fire and mixes it with itself. As it is being compressed, the mass regains its uniformity now that fire, the agent of non-uniformity, has left the scene, and it resettles into its own former state. The departure of the fire is called “cooling,” and the compression that occurs when the fire is gone is called “jelling.” Of all these types of water that we have called liquifiable, the one that consists of the finest, [b] the most uniform parts and has proved to be the most dense, one that is unique in its kind and tinged with brilliant yellow, is gold, our most precious possession, filtered through rocks and thereby compacted. And gold’s offshoot, which because of its density is extremely hard and has a black color, is called adamant. Another has parts that approximate gold and comes in more than one variety. In terms of density, it is in one way denser than gold and includes a small, fine part of earth, so that it is harder. But it is actually lighter than gold, because it has large gaps inside [c] of it. This, it turns out, is copper, one variety of the bright, jelled kinds of water. Whenever the earth part of the mixture separates off again from the rest in the passage of time, this part, called verdigris, becomes visible by itself.

As for going further and giving an account of other stuffs of this sort along the lines of the likely stories we have been following, that is no complicated matter. And should one take a break and lay aside accounts [d] about the things that always are, deriving instead a carefree pleasure from surveying the likely accounts about becoming, he would provide his life with a moderate and sensible diversion. So shall we, then, at this time give free rein to such a diversion and go right on to set out the next likelihoods on these subjects, as follows:

Take now the water that is mixed with fire. It is fine and liquid and on account of its mobility and the way it rolls over the ground it is called “liquid.” It is soft, moreover, in that its faces, being less firm than those [e] of earth, give way to it. When this water is separated from its fire and air and is isolated, it becomes more uniform, and it is pressed together into itself by the things that leave it. So compacted, the water above the earth which is most affected by this change turns to hail, while that on earth turns to ice. Some water is not affected quite so much, being still only half compacted. Such water above the earth becomes snow while that on the earth becomes what is called “frost,” from dew that is congealed.

Now most of the varieties of water which are mixed with one another
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are collectively called “saps,” because they have been filtered through plants that grow out of the earth. Because they are mixed, each of them has its own degree of non-uniformity. Many of these varieties are nameless, though four of them, all with fire in them, are particularly conspicuous and so have been given names. First, there is wine, which warms not only the body but the soul as well. Second, there are the various oils, which are smooth and divide the ray of sight and for that reason glisten, appearing bright and shiny to the eye: these include resin, castor oil, olive oil and [b] others that share their properties. And third, there is what is most commonly called honey, which includes all that relaxes the taste passages of the mouth back to their natural state, and which by virtue of this property conveys a sense of sweetness. Fourth, there is what has been named tart juice, quite distinct from all the other saps. It is a foamy stuff, and is caustic and hence hazardous to the flesh.

As for the varieties of earth, first, such earth as has been filtered through water turns into a stony body in something like the following way: When the water that is mixed with it disintegrates in the mixing process, it is [c] transformed into the form of air, and, once it has turned into air, it thrusts its way upwards toward its own region. And since there is no void above it, it pushes aside the air next to it. And when this air, heavy as it is, is pressed and poured around the mass of earth, it squeezes it hard and compresses it to fill the places vacated by the recently formed air. When so compressed by air, earth is insoluble in water and constitutes itself as stone. The more beautiful kind of stone is stone that is transparent and made up of equal and uniform parts; the uglier kind is just the opposite. [d] Second, there is the kind of earth from which moisture has been completely expelled by a swiftly burning fire and which thus comes to have a rather more brittle constitution than the first kind of earth. This is a kind to which the name “pottery” has been given. Sometimes, however, moisture gets left in and we get earth that is made liquifiable by fire. When it has cooled it turns to stone that is black in color (i.e., lava). Then, thirdly, there are the two varieties of earth that both alike are the residue of a mixture of a great quantity of water. They are briny, made up of the finest parts of earth, and turn out to be semi-solid and water soluble again. One of these is soda, a cleansing agent against oil and dirt; the other is salt, which is well suited to enhance various blends of flavor and has, not unreasonably, [e] proven itself to be a stuff pleasing to the gods.

There are also compounds of earth and water which are soluble by fire but not by water.
³³
These are compacted in this way for the following sort of reason: Neither air nor fire will dissolve masses of earth, because air and fire consist of parts that by nature are smaller than are the gaps within earth. They thus pass without constraint through the wide gaps of a mass of earth, leaving it intact and undissolved. But since the parts of water are naturally bigger, they must force their way through, and in so doing they undo and dissolve the earth. For water alone can in this way dissolve
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earth that isn’t forcibly compressed, but when earth is compressed nothing but fire can dissolve it. That is because fire is the only thing left that can penetrate it. So also, only fire can disperse water that has been compressed with the greatest force, whereas both fire and air can disperse water that is in a looser state. Air does it by entering the gaps, and fire by breaking up the triangles. The only way in which air that has been condensed under force can be broken up is into its elemental triangles, and even when it is not forcibly compressed only fire can dissolve it.

So as for these bodies that are mixtures of earth and water, as long as the gaps within a given mass of earth are occupied by its own water which [b] is tightly packed within the gaps, the water parts that come charging upon it from the outside have no way of getting into the mass and so flow around the whole of it, leaving it undissolved. The fire parts, however, do penetrate the gaps within the water parts and hence as fire they do to water
³⁴
what water did to earth. They alone, it turns out, cause this body, this partnership of earth and water to come apart and become fluid. These compounds of earth and water include not only bodies that have less water in them than earth, such as glass and generally all stone formations that can be called liquifiable, but also bodies that have more water than earth, namely all those that have the consistency of wax or of incense. [c]

We have now pretty much completed our presentation of the kinds of bodies that are distinguished by their multifarious shapes, their combinations and their intertransformations. Now we must try to shed some light on what has caused them to come to have the properties they do. First, we need at every step in our discourse to appeal to the existence of sense perception, but we have so far discussed neither the coming to be of flesh, or of what pertains to flesh, nor the part of the soul that is mortal. It so [d] happens, however, that we cannot give an adequate account of these matters without referring to perceptual properties, but neither can we give an account of the latter without referring to the former, and to treat them simultaneously is all but impossible. So we must start by assuming the one or the other, and later revisit what we have assumed. Let’s begin by taking for granted for now the existence of body and soul. This will allow our account of these properties to succeed the account we’ve just given of the elemental kinds.

First, then, let us see what we mean when we call fire
hot.
Let’s look at it in this way: We notice how fire acts on our bodies by dividing and [e] cutting them. We are all well aware that the experience is a sharp one. The fineness of fire’s edges, the sharpness of its angles, the minuteness of its parts and the swiftness of its motion—all of which make fire severely
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piercing so that it makes sharp cuts in whatever it encounters—must be taken into consideration as we recall how its shape came to be. It is this substance, more than any other, that divides our bodies throughout and cuts them up into small pieces, thereby giving us the property (as well as the name [
kermatizein
]) that we now naturally call
hot
[
thermon
].

What the opposite property is, is quite obvious; we should not, however, keep anything left out of our account. As the larger parts of the moisture surrounding our bodies penetrate our bodies and push out the smaller parts, but are unable to take up the places vacated by those smaller parts, [b] they compress the moisture within us and congeal it by rendering it in a state of motionlessness in place of a state of moving non-uniformity, by virtue of the uniformity and compression so introduced. But anything which is being unnaturally compressed has a natural tendency to resist such compression, and pushes itself outward, in the opposite direction. This resistance, this shaking is called “shivering” and “chill,” and the experience as a whole, as well as what brings it about, has come to have the name
cold.

Hard
we call whatever our flesh gives way to;
soft,
whatever gives way to our flesh. And this is how they are relative to each other. Whatever stands [c] upon a small base tends to give way. The form composed of quadrangles, however, is the least liable to being displaced because its bases are very secure, and that which is compacted to its maximum density is particularly resistant to being displaced.

Heavy
and
light
can be most clearly explained if we examine them in conjunction with what we call
above
and
below.
It is entirely wrong to hold that there are by nature two separate regions, divorced from and entirely opposite one another, the one the region “below,” toward which anything that has physical mass tends to move, and the other the region “above” toward which everything makes its way only under force. For given that [d] the whole heaven is spherical, all the points that are situated as extremes at an equal distance from the center must by their nature be extremes of just the same sort, and we must take it that the center, being equidistant from the extremes, is situated at the point that is the opposite to all the extremes. Now if this is the universe’s natural constitution, which of the points just mentioned could you posit as “above” or “below” without justly giving the appearance of using totally inappropriate language? There is no justification for describing the universe’s central region either as a natural “above” or a natural “below,” but just as “at the center.” And the region at the circumference is, to be sure, not the center, but neither is one of its parts so distinguished from any other that it is related to the center in a specific way more so than any of the parts opposite to it. What contrary terms could you apply to something that is by nature all alike in every direction? How could you think to use such terms appropriately? If, further, there is something solid and evenly balanced at the center of the universe,
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it could not move to any of the extreme points, because these are all alike in all directions. But if you could travel around it in a circle, you would repeatedly take a position at your own antipodes and call the very same part of it now the part “above,” and then the part “below.” For the whole universe, as we have just said, is spherical, and to say that some region of it is its “above,” and another its “below,” makes no sense. The origin of these terms and the subjects to which they really apply, which explain how we have become accustomed to using them in dividing the world as a whole in this way, we must resolve by adopting the following supposition: [b] Imagine a man stepping onto that region of the universe that is the particular province of fire, where the greatest mass of fire is gathered together, and toward which other fire moves. Imagine, further, that he has the power to remove some parts of the fire and place them on scales. When he raises the beam and drags the fire into the alien air, applying force to it, clearly [c] the lesser quantity of fire somehow gives way to his force more easily than the greater. For when two things are raised by one and the same exertion, the lesser quantity will invariably yield more readily and the greater (which offers more resistance) less readily, to the force applied. And so the large quantity will be described as
heavy
and moving
downward,
and the small one as
light
and moving
upward.
Now this is the very thing we must detect ourselves doing in our own region. When we stand on the earth and weigh out one earth-like thing against another, and sometimes some earth itself, we drag these things by force, contrary to their natural tendency, into the alien air. While both of them tend to cling to [d] what is akin to them, nevertheless the smaller one will yield sooner and more readily than the larger one to the force we apply that introduces it into the alien stuff. Now this is what we call
light,
and the region into which we force it to go we call
above
; their opposites we call
heavy
and
below.
Now the things [having any of these designations] necessarily differ relatively to one another, because the various masses of the elemental kinds of body occupy opposite regions: what in one region is light, heavy, below or above will all be found to become, or to be, directly opposite to, [e] or at an angle to, or in any and every different direction from, what is light, heavy, below or above in the opposite region. In fact, this is the one thing that should be understood to apply in all these cases: the path towards its own kind is what makes a thing moving along it “heavy” and the region into which it moves, “below,” whereas the other set of terms [“light” and “above”] are for things behaving the other way. This, then, concludes our account of what causes [things to have] these properties.