Page:Metaphysics by Aristotle Ross 1908 (deannotated).djvu/42

989b objects of mathematics, except those of astronomy, are of the class of things without movement); yet their discussions and investigations are all about nature; for they generate the heavens, and with regard to their parts and attributes and functions they observe the phenomena, and use up the principles and the causes in explaining these, which implies that they agree with the others, the physical philosophers, that the real is just all that which is perceptible and contained by the so-called 'heavens'. But the causes and the principles which they mention are, as we said, sufficient to act as steps even up to the higher realms of reality, and are more suited to these than to theories about nature.  They do not tell us at all, however, how there can be movement if limit and unlimited and odd and even are the only things assumed, or how without process and change there can be generation and destruction, or how the bodies that move through the heavens can do what they do. Further, if we either granted them that spatial magnitude consists of these elements, or this were proved, still how would some bodies be light and others have weight? To judge from what they assume and maintain, they speak no more of mathematical bodies than of perceptible; hence they have said nothing whatever about fire or earth or the other bodies of this sort, I suppose because they have nothing to say which applies peculiarly to perceptible things.

Further, how are we to combine the beliefs that the modifications of number, and number itself, are causes of what exists and happens in the heavens both from the beginning and now, and that there is no other number than this number out of which the world is composed? When in one particular region they place opinion and opportunity, and, a little above or below, injustice and sifting or mixture, and allege as proof of this that each one of these is a number, but when there happens to be already in each place a plurality of the extended bodies composed of numbers, because these modifications of number attach to the various groups of places,—this being so, is this number, which we must