Book 1
11
It is surely not the substrate itself which causes itself to change. I mean, e.g., that neither wood nor bronze is responsible for changing itself; wood does not make a bed, nor bronze a statue, but something else is the cause of the change. Now to investigate this is to investigate the second type of cause: the source of motion, as we should say.
12
Those who were the very first to take up this inquiry, and who maintained that the substrate is one thing, had no misgivings on the subject; but some of thosei.e. the Eleatic school. who regard it as one thing, being baffled, as it were, by the inquiry, say that that one thing (and indeed the whole physical world) is immovable in respect not only of generation and destruction (this was a primitive belief and was generally admitted) but of all other change. This belief is peculiar to them.
13
None of those who maintained that the universe is a unity achieved any conception of this type of cause, except perhaps ParmenidesFounder of the above; fl. about 475.; and him only in so far as he admits, in a sense, not one cause only but two.i.e. in the Δόξα. Parmenides Fr. 8 (Diels); R.P. 121.
14
But those who recognize more than one entity, e.g. hot and cold, or fire and earth, are better able to give a systematic explanation, because they avail themselves of fire as being of a kinetic nature, and of water, earth, etc., as being the opposite.Aristotle is probably thinking of Empedocles. Cf. Aristot. Met. 4.8.
14
After these thinkers and the discovery of these causes, since they were insufficient to account for the generation of the actual world, men were again compelled (as we have said) by truth itself to investigate the next first principle.
15
For presumably it is unnatural that either fire or earth or any other such element should cause existing things to be or become well and beautifully disposed; or indeed that those thinkers should hold such a view. Nor again was it satisfactory to commit so important a matter to spontaneity and chance.
