CONTRARINESS IS NOT THE GREATEST POSSIBLE DIFFERENCE.
20. Does every quality have an opposite?[410] As to vice and virtue, there is, between the extremes, an intermediary quality which is the opposite of both,[411] but, with colors, the intermediaries are not contraries. This might be explained away on the ground that the intermediary colors are blends of the extreme colors. However, we ought not to have divided colors in extremes and intermediaries, and opposed them to each other; but rather have divided the genus of color into black and white, and then have shown that other colors are composed of these two, or differentiated another color that would be intermediate, even though composite. If it be said that intermediary colors are not opposite to the extremes because opposition is not composed of a simple difference, but of a maximal difference,[413] it will have to be answered that this maximal difference results from having interposed intermediaries; if these were removed, the maximal difference would have no scale of comparison. To the objection that yellow approximates white more than black, and that the sense of sight supports this contention; that it is the same with liquids where there is no intermediary between cold and hot; it must be answered that white and yellow and other colors compared to each other similarly likewise differ completely; and, because of this their difference, constitute contrary qualities; they are contrary, not because they have intermediaries, but because of their characteristic nature. Thus health and sickness are contraries, though they have no intermediaries. Could it be said that they are contraries because their effects differ maximally? But how could this difference be recognized as maximal since there are no intermediaries which show the same characteristics at a less degree? The difference between health and sickness could not therefore be demonstrated to be maximal. Consequently, oppositeness will have to be analyzed as something else than maximal difference. Does this mean only a great difference? Then we must in return ask whether this "great" mean "greater by opposition to something smaller," or "great absolutely"? In the first case, the things which have no intermediary could not be opposites; in the second, as it is easily granted that there is a great difference between one nature and another, and as we have nothing greater to serve as measure for this distance, we shall have to examine by what characteristics oppositeness might be recognized.