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

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3 ARISTOTLE
PHYSICS 455
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the other. 1 Action and passion, like all movement,
presuppose on the one hand the distinction of a movens
and a motum, on the other their direct or indirect
contact. Where one or other of these conditions fails,
no passion and no alteration is possible ; where both
are present, it is inevitable. 2 Again, this consequence
depends upon the agent being partly similar and partlyopposed
to the patient ; since of things which belong
to wholly different genera, as a figure and a colour, for
example, neither can produce any change in the other
and the same is true of such things as are completely
similar, since change is always a passage from one
condition into an opposite, and that which does not
stand in any opposition to another thing cannot produce
in it an opposite condition. Hence the agent and the
patient must be generically similar, but specifically
different ;
and so the old moot point as to whether likes
or unlikes influence each other is decided by the law
that neither the one nor the other do so
absolutely, but
both in certain relations. 3 The agent and patient are
opposed within the limits of the same genus
4
and
the change consists in the removal of this opposition,
in the agent's making the patient like itself. 5 Hence
e patient is in the position of the ' matter,' to which a
terminate 'form ' is communicated by the agent. 1 In
far as it has not yet received this form or has another
I'm, it is opposed to the agent ; inasmuch as it must
capable of receiving it, it is similar in kind. If the
ent is also a patient, so that the two mutually act upon
ch other, both must be of the same material, and
this respect belong to the same genus. 2 But this
ndition does not universally apply to agents : for as
e primum movens is unmoved, so the first active power
without passivity, and therefore without matter
lereas, on the contrary, the lowest force that acts
mediately upon another is material, and its operation
conditioned by a iraQos on its own part. 3 The
ison why all parts of the patient are affected by this
tive influence and by the alteration it occasions, is to
found in the nature of corporeity. Body, as potenil,
is subject in its whole extent to the transition
actuality, % e. to change, and being divisible at all
lints, nowhere offers an absolute resistance to the
tive force. 4
The question about the mixture of materials must
judged from the same points of view. A mixture 5
a combination of two or more materials, 6 in which
1
A relation obviously iden- n. 2, supra.
1
It has been already shown, n. 3, supra.
p. 386, n. 1, that all motion has
5
Gen. et Corr. Hid. 324, a, 9 :
its seat in the motum, not in the 5i6 Kal eihoyov