Book 12
3
Everything is ordered together to one end; but the arrangement is like that in a household, where the free persons have the least liberty to act at random, and have all or most of their actions preordained for them, whereas the slaves and animals have little common responsibility and act for the most part at random; for the nature of each class is a principle such as we have described.The free persons correspond to the heavenly bodies, whose movements are fixed by necessity; the servile class to human beings. Each class acts in accordance with its nature, a principle which produces obedience to duty in the higher creatures, caprice in the lower ( Ross).
4
I mean, for example, that everything must at least come to dissolution; and similarly there are other respects in which everything contributes to the good of the whole.
4
We must not fail to observe how many impossibilities and absurdities are involved by other theories, and what views the more enlightened thinkers hold, and what views entail the fewest difficulties.
5
All thinkers maintain that all things come from contraries; but they are wrong both in saying all thingsBecause there is an eternal substance, which is not derived from contraries (Aristot. Met. 12.6.1). and in saying that they come from contraries,Things are derived from a substrate as well (Aristot. Met. 12.2.1). nor do they explain how things in which the contraries really are present come from the contraries; for the contraries cannot act upon each other. For us, however, this problem is satisfactorily solved by the fact that there is a third factor. Other thinkers make one of the two contraries matter; e.g., this is done by thoseSee on Aristot. Met. 14.1.4. who make the Unequal matter for the Equal, or the Many matter for the One.
