3
For the opposition of a negation to a positive quality is an irreconcilable hostility, since the existence of the one is the annihilation of the other. The other opposition, however, of positive forces, if it occurs in due measure, is often operative in the arts, and very often indeed in various phenomena of nature, especially in connexion with the weather and the seasons and those matters from which the god derives his title of harmonizer and musician, because he organizes and regulates them. He does not receive these names merely for bringing sounds of high and low pitch, or black and white colours, into harmonious fellowship, but because he has authority over the association and disunion of heat and cold in the universe, to see that they observe due measure in their combination and separation, and because, by eliminating the excess of either, he brings both into proper order.
4
Furthermore, we find that cold can be perceived as well as heat; but mere negation cannot be seen or heard or touched or recognized by the other senses. Perception, in fact, must be of something existent; but where nothing existent is observed, privation may be inferred, being the negation of existence, as blindness is of sight, silence of sound, void and emptiness of matter. We cannot perceive a void by touch; but where no matter can be touched, void is inferred. Nor can we hear silence; yet, even though we hear nothing, we infer silence. Nor, in the same way, is sense active when things are unseen or bareAs, when a hill has been stripped of timber, you cannot see the trees.; there is, rather, inference from the negation of perception. If, therefore, cold were a privation of warmth, we ought not to be able to feel it, but only to infer it from the deficiency in warmth; but if cold is perceived by the contraction and condensation of our flesh (just as heat is by the warming and loosening of it), clearly there is some special first principle and source of coldness, just as there is of heat.
