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fire indeed heat and dryness; to air, heat and moisture; to 

 water, moisture and coldness ; and to earth, coldness and 

 dryness. And these things are written by this man in his 

 treatise On Nature. In what, therefore, do these err who 

 thus speak? In the first place, indeed, wishing to dis- 

 cover the common powers in the elements, in order that 

 they may preserve the co-arrangement of them with each 

 other, they no more assign communion than separation to 

 them, but equally honour their hostility and their harmony. 

 What kind of world, therefore, will subsist from these ; what 

 order will there be of things which are without arrangement 

 and most foreign, and of things which are most allied and 

 co-arranged ? For things which in an equal degree are hos- 

 tile and peaceful, will in an equal mode dissolve and consti- 

 tute communion. But this communion being similarly dis- 

 solved, and similarly implanted, the universe will no more 

 exist than not exist. In the second place, they do not assign 

 the greatest contrariety to the extremes, but to things most 

 remote from the extremes ; though we everywhere see, that 

 of homogeneous natures, those which are most distant have 

 the nature of contraries, and not those which are less di- 

 stant. How likewise did nature arrange them, since they are 

 most remote in their situation from each other ? Was it not 

 by perceiving their contrariety, and that the third was more 

 allied than the last to the first ? How, also, did she arrange 

 the motions of them, since fire is most light and tends up- 

 ward, but earth is most heavy and tends downward ? But 

 whence were the motions of them which are most contrary 

 derived, if not from nature? If, therefore, nature distributed 

 to them most contrary motions, it is evident that they are 

 themselves most contrary. For as the motions of simple 

 beings are simple, and those things are simple of which the 

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