“Water is formed from air, and air from water, and fire from air, because they all have one common substratum, matter.”[312]
The next two extracts will show the opinions entertained by Aristotle’s successor in the Peripatetic school of philosophy.
“Of the simple substances, fire has peculiar powers. For air, water, and earth, admit only of changes into one another, but none of them can produce itself.”[313]
“The nature of those substances called simple is mixed, and existing in one another.”[314]
“The Peripatetics divided Nature into two things, the one of which is efficient, and the other that which furnishes it with the materials from which anything is made. Power exists in the one, and matter is the essence of the other.”[315]
“The first principles are air, fire, water, and earth, for from them are formed all living things and the productions of the earth: they are therefore called elements; of these, air and fire have the power of moving and forming the others (I mean water and earth), of receiving or suffering. Besides these, Aristotle thought that there is a fifth element, from which the stars and the souls of individuals are made; but that all these had for a substratum a certain matter devoid of form and quality, from which all things are framed, a substance which has a capacity for all things, and admits of all changes, that when it perishes it is not reduced to nothing, but into its parts, which can be cut and divided infinitely, since there is nothing in Nature that is not divisible.”[316]
THE STOICS.
“They are of opinion that the first principles of all things are two—the active and the passive: that the passive is matter, a being devoid of all qualities; the active, or efficient, is the reason (λόγος) residing in it, that is, God. That he, being eternal, fabricates all things from it all (all matter?). That there is a difference between the first principles and the elements—that the former are increate and indestructible, whilst the elements are destructible by burning (ἐκπύρωσιν).—That the first principles are bodies devoid of form, whereas the elements are possessed of form. That God and Mind, Fate and Jupiter, are one and the same being under different appellations; that he formed the four elements, fire, air, water, earth.”[317]
“Our Stoics say, that there are two principles in Nature from which all things are formed, namely, cause and matter. That matter lies inert, a being prepared for all things, but inactive, unless some one move it.—That cause, that is, reason, forms matter, and changes it at will. There must be something by which everything is made and of which it is made: the former is the cause, the latter the matter.”[318]
“Some of our sect are of opinion that air, being changeable into fire and water, etc.”[319]