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Book One, Chapter Five

24 September, 2015 - 13:02

Our first presupposition must be that in nature nothing acts on, or is acted on by, any other thing at random, nor may anything come from just anything else, unless we mean that it does so in virtue of a concomitant attribute …

Nor again do things pass into just any old thing; ‘white’ does not pass into ‘musical’ (except, it may be, in virtue of a concomitant attribute), but into ‘not-white’—and not into any chance thing which is not white, but into black or an intermediate colour; ‘musical’ passes into ‘not-musical’—and not into any chance thing other than musical, but into ‘unmusical’ or any intermediate state there may be …

It does not matter whether we take attunement, order, or composition for our illustration; the principle is obviously the same in all, and in fact applies equally to the production of a house, a statue, or any other complex …