Timaeus and Critias by Plato

Author:Plato
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141920498
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

23. The process of transformation further explained. The main bulk of each body tends to collect in a particular region.

From all we have so far said about the four kinds their dbehaviour is most likely to be as follows.45 When earth meets fire it will be dissolved by its sharpness, and, whether dissolution takes place in fire itself or in a mass of air or water, will drift about until its parts meet somewhere, fit together and become earth again; for they can never be transformed into another figure. But when water is broken up by fire or again by air, its parts can combine to make one of fire and two of eair; and the fragments of a single particle of air can make two of fire.46 Again, when a little fire is enveloped in a large mass of air or water or earth and continues its motion in the moving mass, its resistance is overcome and it is broken up, then two particles of fire combine to make a single figure of air; and when air is forcibly broken up two and a half of its figures will unite to make up a single figure of water. In fact we may restate the matter as follows. When one of the other bodies is 57asurrounded by fire and cut up by the sharpness of its angles and edges, the process is halted if it is reconstituted into fire as none of them can effect any change in or suffer any change from what is similar to and identical in character with itself; but the process of dissolution continues so long as in the process of transformation a weaker mass offers opposition to a stronger one. On the other hand, a few smaller particles when bsurrounded by a mass of larger ones are broken up and extinguished, and the process of extinction ceases if they are prepared to merge into the figure of the predominant mass, when fire turns into air, air into water; but if while they are so merging one of the other basic constituents comes in conflict with them,47 dissolution goes on until they are either dispersed to their like after complete dissolution under pressure or else mastered and forced to unite with the predominant mass, take con its character and reside with it. It should be added that while undergoing these changes they all exchange places; for owing to the motion of the receptacle the main bulk of each constituent collects in its own separate place, while any part of it which loses its own form and takes on another’s is drawn by the shaking to the place of the one whose form it has taken.

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