על השיכרות מ״הOn Drunkenness 45
א׳
1[184] What again of quantities in prepared mixtures? Their powers of benefiting or injuring depend on the relative quantity of the various ingredients, as we see in numberless cases and particularly in the drugs used by medical science.
ב׳
2[185] For quantity in compounds is measured by regular standards, and we cannot with safety stop short of or go beyond what they prescribe; for anything smaller or greater than this respectively overweakens or overstrains the force of the preparation. In both cases harm is done. In the former case the medicine is incapable through its weakness of producing any effect, while in the latter its high degree of potency makes it a force of active mischief. And again according to its roughness or smoothness, and its density and compactness on the one hand, or its sponginess and dilatation on the other, it exhibits clearly the means of testing its power of helping or harming.
ג׳
3[186] Again, everyone knows that practically nothing at all which exists is intelligible by itself and in itself, but everything is appreciated only by comparison with its opposite; as small by comparison with great, dry with wet, hot with cold, light with heavy, black with white, weak with strong, few with many. The same rule holds with all that concerns virtue and vice.
ד׳
4[187] We only know the profitable through the hurtful, the noble by contrast with the base, the just and the good in general by comparison with the unjust and evil. And indeed if we consider we shall see that everything else in the world is judged on the same pattern. For in itself each thing is beyond our apprehension, and it is only by bringing it into relation with something else that it seems to be known.
ה׳
5[188] Now that which is incapable of attesting itself and needs to be vouched for by something else, gives no sure ground for belief. And it follows that on this principle we can estimate at their true value lightly-made affirmations and negations on any subject whatever.
ו׳
6[189] Nor is this strange. For anyone who penetrates deeper into things and views them in a purer light, will recognize that no single thing presents itself to us in its own absolute nature but all contain interlacings and intermixtures of the most complicated kind.