Physics by Aristotle; Reeve C. D. C.;

Author:Aristotle; Reeve, C. D. C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Incorporated
Published: 2018-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

But if whatever exists without having previously existed must come to be, and if when it is coming to be, it does not exist, time cannot be divisible into indivisible times. For if D was coming to be white in time A, and has at once come to be white and is white in another indivisible but contiguous time B (if D was coming to be white in A, it was not white, |263b30| but it is white in B), there must be an intermediate coming to be, so that there must also be a time in which D was still coming to be white. The same argument does not apply, though, to those |264a1| who say that there are no indivisible times, but that D has come to be and is white at the extreme point, with which nothing is contiguous or successive. But indivisible times are successive.851 And it is evident that if D was coming to be white in the whole time A, there is no time in which |264a5| it has come to be white and was coming to be white that is greater than the whole time in which it only was coming to be white.852

By these and other such arguments, which properly belong to the subject, one may be convinced. But the result would seem to be the same if we investigate the issue logico-linguistically as follows.853 For everything that is in movement continuously, if it is not knocked aside by anything else, then the very point it arrived at by |264a10| its spatial movement is the one it was previously spatially moving toward—for example, if something arrived at B, it was spatially moving toward B, and not merely when it was in the neighborhood of B, but as soon as it started to move. For why would it be doing so now rather than previously? And similarly in the case of the other [sorts of movement and change]. Suppose, then, that what is in spatial movement away from A, when it arrives at C, will again return to A with a |264a15| continuous movement. At the time, therefore, that it is spatially moving from A toward C, it is also spatially moving to A with a movement that is from C, so that it will have contrary movements at the same time. For movements {166} in contrary directions along a straight line are contraries. At the same time, it will also be changing from what it is not at [namely, C]. If, then, this is impossible, it must come to a standstill at C. Its movement, therefore, is not one movement, since a movement that is interrupted |264a20| by a stop is not one movement.

Further, this is also evident, as a more universal point about all sorts of movement, from the following considerations. For if everything that is in movement is moved with one of the sorts of movement already mentioned and is at rest with the opposite sort of rest (for we

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