Message #168478

[Bathos]

We have seen that the opposite of boiling is imperfect boiling: now
there is something correspondingly opposed to the species of concoction
called broiling, but it is more difficult to find a name for it. It
would be the kind of thing that would happen if there were imperfect
broiling instead of broiling proper through lack of heat due to deficiency
in the external fire or to the quantity of water in the thing undergoing
the process. For then we should get too much heat for no effect to
be produced, but too little for concoction to take place.

We have now explained concoction and inconcoction, ripening and rawness,
boiling and broiling, and their opposites.

Part 4

We must now describe the forms taken by the passive qualities the
moist and the dry. The elements of bodies, that is, the passive ones,
are the moist and the dry; the bodies themselves are compounded of
them and whichever predominates determines the nature of the body;
thus some bodies partake more of the dry, others of the moist. All
the forms to be described will exist either actually, or potentially
and in their opposite: for instance, there is actual melting and on
the other hand that which admits of being melted.

Since the moist is easily determined and the dry determined with difficulty,
their relation to one another is like that of a dish and its condiments.
The moist is what makes the dry determinable, and each serves as a
sort of glue to the other-as Empedocles said in his poem on Nature,
'glueing meal together by means of water.' Thus the determined body
involves them both. Of the elements earth is especially representative
of the dry, water of the moist, and therefore all determinate bodies
in our world involve earth and water. Every body shows the quality
of that element which predominates in it. It is because earth and
water are the material elements of all bodies that animals live in
them alone and not in air or fire.