[990a]
[1]
and observe what happens in
respect of its parts and affections and activities, and they use up
their principles and causes in this connection, as though they agreed
with the others—the physicists—that reality is
just so much as is sensible and is contained in the so-called
"heavens."All the
same, as we have said,1 the causes and
principles which they describe are capable of application to the
remoter class of realities as well, and indeed are better fitted to
these than to their physical theories.But as to how there is to be motion, if all
that is premissed is Limit and the Unlimited, and Odd and Even, they
do not even hint; nor how, without motion and change, there can be
generation and destruction, or the activities of the bodies which
traverse the heavens.And
further, assuming that it be granted to them or proved by them that
magnitude2 is
composed of these factors, yet how is it to be explained that some
bodies are light, and others have weight? For in their premisses and
statements they are speaking just as much about sensible as about
mathematical objects; and this is why they have made no mention of
fire or earth or other similar bodies, because, I presume, they have
no separate explanation of sensible things.Again, how are we to understand that number
and the modifications of number are the causes
[20]
of all being and generation, both in
the beginning and now, and at the same time that there is no other
number than the number of which the universe is composed?3Because when they make out that Opinion
and Opportunity are in such and such a region, and a little above or
below them Injustice and Separation or Mixture, and when they state as
proof of this that each of these abstractions is a number; and that
also in this region there is already a plurality of the magnitudes
composed of number, inasmuch as these modifications of number
correspond to these several regions,—is the number which we
must understand each of these abstractions to be the same number which
is present in the sensible universe, or another kind of number?4Plato at least says that it is another. It is
true that he too supposes that numbers are both these magnitudes and
their causes; but in his view the causative numbers are intelligible
and the others sensible.The Pythagoreans, then, may be
dismissed for the present, for it is enough to touch upon them thus
briefly.
2 Aristotle uses the word μέγεθος both of magnitude in general and of spatial magnitude or extension. Here the meaning seems to be the former. Numbers obviously have magnitude, and might be regarded as causing it; but (except on the Number-Atomism theory,) they are no more the cause of extension than that of gravity.
3 i.e., how can number be both reality and the cause of reality?
4 The point seems to be this. The Pythagoreans say that Opinion is a number, 3 (or 2, according to another version), and is located in a certain region of the universe because that region is proper to a corporeal magnitude composed of the number 3 (air was so composed according to Syrianus). Are we to understand, says Aristotle, that the abstract number identified with Opinion is the same as the concrete number of which air consists? The difficulty is probably due to an attempt to combine two different Pythagorean views of number.
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18, translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989.
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