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| Sundry Quotations from Hermogenes. Now Uncertain and Vague are His Speculations Respecting Motion in Matter, and the Material Qualities of Good and Evil. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
XLI.—Sundry Quotations from Hermogenes. Now Uncertain and Vague
are His Speculations Respecting Motion in Matter, and the Material
Qualities of Good and Evil.
I come back to the point of
motion,6564
6564 From which he has
digressed since ch. xxxvi., p. 497. | that I may show how
slippery you are at every step. Motion in Matter was disordered, and
confused, and turbulent. This is why you apply to it the comparison of
a boiler of hot water surging over. Now how is it, that in another
passage another sort of motion is affirmed by you? For when you
want to represent Matter as neither good nor evil, you say:
“Matter, which is the substratum (of creation)6565 possessing as it does motion in an equable
impulse,6566
6566 Æqualis momenti
motum. | tends in no very
great degree either to good or to evil.” Now if it had this
equable impulse, it could not be turbulent, nor be like the boiling
water of the caldron; it would rather be even and regular, oscillating
indeed of its own accord between good and evil, but yet not prone or
tending to either side. It would swing, as the phrase is, in a just and
exact balance. Now this is not unrest; this is not turbulence or
inconstancy;6567 but rather the
regularity, and evenness, and exactitude of a motion, inclining to
neither side. If it oscillated this way and that way, and inclined
rather to one particular side, it would plainly in that case merit the
reproach of unevenness, and inequality, and turbulence. Moreover,
although the motion of Matter was not prone either to good or to
evil, it would still, of course, oscillate between good and evil; so
that from this circumstance too it is obvious that Matter is contained
within certain limits,6568 because its motion,
while prone to neither good nor evil, since it had no natural bent
either way, oscillated from either between both, and therefore was
contained within the limits of the two. But you, in fact, place
both good and evil in a local habitation,6569
6569 In loco facis:
“you localise.” |
when you assert that motion in Matter inclined to neither of them. For
Matter which was local,6570 when inclining
neither hither nor thither, inclined not to the places in which good
and evil were. But when you assign locality to good and evil, you make
them corporeal by making them local, since those things which have
local space must needs first have bodily substance. In fact,6571 incorporeal things could not have any
locality of their own except in a body, when they have access to a
body.6572
6572 Cum corpori accedunt:
or, “when they are added to a body.” | But when Matter inclined not to good and
evil, it was as corporeal or local essences that it did not
incline to them. You err, therefore, when you will have it that good
and evil are substances. For you make substances of the things to which
you assign locality;6573
6573 Loca:
“places;” one to each. | but you assign
locality when you keep motion in Matter poised equally distant from
both sides.6574
6574 Cum ab utraque regione
suspendis: equally far from good and evil. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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