Cause Principle Unity

Cause, principle and unity
There was that, there is this? If we use our judgement wisely, we see clearly
that corruption is nothing but a generation, and generation is nothing
but a corruption; love is a hate and hate is a love, in the end. Hate of the
contrary is a love of the congruent, and the love of this is the hate of
that. Therefore, in substance and at the root, love and hate, amity and discord
are the same thing. Where does the physician find the antidote more
surely than in poison? Who delivers a better theriac than the viper? The
best remedies lie in the worst venoms. Is a potency not the potency of two
contrary objects? And how do you think that can be explained, if not
because the principle of the being of both the one and the other is one, as
is the principle of their conception, and if not because the contraries are
related to one and the same substratum, just as they are apprehended by
the same sense? Not to mention that the sphere rests on the plane, the concave
remains on and settles into the convex, the irascible lives in accord
with the patient, the prideful likes the humble the best and the bountiful
the miser.
In conclusion, he who wants to know the greatest secrets of nature
should observe and examine the minima and maxima of contraries and
opposites. There is a profound magic in knowing how to extract the contrary
from the contrary, after having discovered their point of union. Poor
Aristotle was tending to this in his thought when he posited privation (to
which a certain disposition is joined) as the progenitor, parent and mother
of form, but he could not get to it. He failed to attain it because, stopping
at the genus of opposition, he remained snared by it in such a way that, not
having descended to the species of contrariety, he did not reach or even
perceive the goal. He strayed completely away from it by claiming that
contraries cannot actually concur in the same substratum.
POLIINNIO. You have expatiated in an elevated, rare and exceptional
way about the whole, the maximum, about being, principle and the one.
But I would like to hear you speak more explicitly about unity, for I find
there a Vae soli [Woe to the solitary]! 9 Moreover, I feel a great anguish at
the idea that in my purse and in my wallet, there is but a single coin.
TEOFILO. The unity which is all is not unfolded, nor found in numeric
distribution and distinction. It is not a singularity such as you perhaps
conceived it, but a unity which is all-embracing and comprehensive.
POLIINNIO. Exemplum [An example]? To tell the truth, intendo, but
non capio [I am paying attention, but I do not understand].
9 Ecclesiastes 4, 10.
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