ARISTOTLE AND THE EARLIER PERIPATETICS vol.I by Eduard Zeller, B.F.C.Costelloe 1897

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METAPHYSICS 323
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quality— or, more exactly, a determination of measure.
This, however, presupposes something measured, and
even that is not necessarily anything substantial, but
may also be a magnitude, or a quality, or a relation, or
any of the most different kinds of things, and, according
as it is one or the other of these, ' the One ' will be
variously determined, as predicated of one or other of the
similar kinds of subjects. Whoever 1
seeks to deny this
will be driven to explain ' the One ' as the only Substance,
as did the Eleatics—a position which, apart
from other objections, would make Number itself impossible.
2 Again, if with Plato we are to say that the
One is the same as the Good, then there will arise other
intolerable difficulties, 3 not worse, however, than those
which would be raised if, with Speusippus, we attempt to
distinguish the One from the Good as a special principle
by itself. 4 As for ' the Great and Little,' this conception
indicates nothing but bare qualities, or rather,
bare relations—and these, indeed, of such a kind as
could least of all be taken for anything in the nature of
substance, since they manifestly require a substratum.
How can substances, he asks again, consist of that
which is not substantial, and how can constituent parts
be at the same time predicates ? 5
this second principle to be more closely
Or if we are to take
related to the
first, as not-being is to being, such a theory would be
altogether perverse.
Plato believed that he could only
escape the monism of Parmenides by assuming a prin-
• Metaph. x. 2 ; xiv. 1, 1087, b. 36 sqq., b, 13, 20 sqq.
33, and xi. 2, 1060, a, 36; of. * Metaph. 1091, b, 16, 22, c. 5
supra, p. 31 2, n. 2, add p. 272, n. 2. init.
2
Metaph. iii. 4, 1001, a, 29. s
Metaph. i. 9, 992, b, 1 ; xiv
324 ARISTOTLE
ciple of not-being. This assumption is not necessary
for the purpose, since Being itself is not of one kind
only ; ' and it would also fail of the purpose, since the
manifold character of Being cannot be explained by the
simple opposition of Being and not-Being. 2
According
to Aristotle, Plato has not sufficiently defined Being and
not-Being, and in his deduction of ' the manifold ' from
them he has been thinking of substance only, and not
either of qualities, magnitudes, &c., 3 or of movement
for if the ' Great and Little ' produced movement, then
must the Tdeas whose matter it is be likewise moved. 4
The main defect of the Platonic view lies in the position
that opposition as such is the first and original principle
of all things.
still it is
If all does arise out of an opposition,
not out of mere opposition as such, which is
negation, but out of relative
opposition out of the substratum
to which negation attaches.
Everything which
comes to be, presupposes a matter out of which it'
comes,- and this matter is not simply a kind of Not-
Being, but a kind of Being—which is not as yet that
which it is about to become. The nature of matter in
this regard was misunderstood by Plato. He had in
view merely the opposition of matter as against the
formative principle, and so he thinks of it as the Bad
and the Not-Being, and overlooks the other side of the
question—namely, that it
is the positive substratum of
all formative action and of all becoming. 5 By this
1
Metapli. xiv. 2, 1088, b, 35 5
Metaph. xiv. 1 init. c. 4,
sqq. cf. p. 223, supra. 1091, b, 30 sqq. ; xii. 10, 1075, a,
3 Jbid. 1089, a, 12. 32 sqq.; Phijs i. 9, cf. Zbllee,
3 Ibid. 1. 15, 31 sqq. Ph. d. Or. pt. i. p. 614.
' Ibid. i. 9, 992, b. 7.
3
Metaph. xiv. i, 1091, a, 29, 1, 1088, a, 15 sqq.
Y2