ii " VERIFICATIONS " OF COINCIDENCE 177 



and both in the maximum and in the minimum, con- 

 traries are one and indifferent. 



These geometrical illustrations are " signs " of the 

 identity of contraries, those which follow are called by 

 Bruno " verifications/' l the first of which is taken from 

 the primary qualities of bodies. The element of heat, its 

 " principle," must be indivisible it cannot have differ- 

 ences within itself, and can be neither hot nor cold, 

 therefore it is an identity of hot and cold. " One con- 

 trary is the ' principle ' or starting-point of the other, 

 and therefore transmutations are circular, because there 

 is a substrate, principle, term, continuation and con- 

 currence of both. So minimal warmth and minimal 

 cold are the same. The movement towards cold takes 

 its beginning from the limit of greatest heat (its " prin- 

 ciple " in another sense). Thus not only do the two 

 maxima sometimes concur in resistance, the two minima 

 in concordance, but even the maximum and the minimum 

 concur through the succession of transmutations. Doctors 

 fear when one is in the best of health ; it is in the height 

 of happiness that the foreseeing are most timid. So also 

 the "principle" of corruption and of generation is one and 

 the same. The end of decay is the beginning of genera- 

 tion ; corruption is nothing but a generation, generation 

 a corruption. Love is hate, hate is love in the end ; 

 hatred of the unfitting is love of the fitting, the love 

 of this the hatred of that. In substance and in root, 

 therefore, love and hate, friendship and strife, are one and 

 the same thing. Poison gives its own antidote, and the 

 greatest poisons are the best medicines. There is but 

 one potency of two contraries, because contraries are 

 apprehended by one and the same sense, therefore belong 

 to the same subject or substrate ; where the principle (i.e. 



1 Lag. 288. 5. 

 N 





