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ON THE NATURAL FACULTIES Book I
PART 2
[p. 9] are unchangeable and immutable from eternity to eternity, and that these apparent alterations are brought about by separation and combination.
Now, if I were to go out of my way to confute these people, my subsidiary task would be greater than my main one. Thus, if they do not know all that has been written, "On Complete Alteration of Substance"
"De ea alteratione quae per totam fi substantiam"(Linacre).
by Aristotle, and after him by Chrysippus,
The systematizer of Stoicism and successor of Zeno.
I must beg of them to make themselves familiar with these men's writings. If, however, they know these, and yet willingly prefer the worse views to the better, they will doubtless consider my arguments foolish also. I have shown elsewhere that these opinions were shared by Hippocrates, who lived much earlier than Aristotle. In fact, all those known to us who have been both physicians and philosophers Hippocrates was the first who took in hand to demonstrate that there are, in all, four mutually interacting qualities, and that to the operation of these is due the genesis and destruction of all things that come into and pass out of being. Nay, more; Hippocrates was also the first to recognise that all these qualities undergo an intimate mingling with one another; and at least the beginnings of the proofs to which Aristotle later set his hand are to be found first in the writings of Hippocrates.
As to whether we are to suppose that the substances as well as their qualities undergo this intimate mingling, as Zeno of Citium afterwards declared, I do not think it necessary to go further into this question in the present treatise;
Note characteristic impatience with metaphysics. To Galen, as to Hippocrates and Aristotle, it sufficed to look on the qualitative differences apprehended by the senses as fundamental. Zeno of Citium was the founder of the Stoic school; on the further analysis by this school of the qualities into bodies cf. p. 144, note 3.
