מי יורש קנייני אלוה מ״גWho is the Heir of Divine Things 43
א׳
1[207] Having taught us the lesson of equal division the Scripture leads us on to the knowledge of opposites, by telling us that “He placed the sections facing opposite each other” (Gen. 15:10). For in truth we may take it that everything in the world is by nature opposite to something else. Let us begin with what comes first.
ב׳
2[208] Hot is opposite to cold, dry to wet, light to heavy, darkness to light, night to day. In heaven we have the course of the fixed stars opposite to the course of the planets, in the air cloudless to cloudy, calm to wind, summer to winter, spring when earth’s growths bloom to autumn when they decay, again in water, sweet to bitter, and in land, barren to fruitful.
ג׳
3[209] And the other opposites are obvious: corporeal, incorporeal; living, lifeless; mortal, immortal; sensible, intelligible; comprehensible, incomprehensible; elementary, completed; beginning, end; becoming, extinction; life, death; disease, health; white, black; right, left; justice, injustice; prudence, folly; courage, cowardice; continence, incontinence; virtue, vice; and all the species of virtue are opposite to all the species of vice.
ד׳
4[210] Again we have the opposite conditions of the literary and the illiterate, the cultured and the uncultured, the educated and the uneducated, and in general the scientific and the unscientific, and in the subject matter of the arts or sciences there are vocal sounds or vowels and non-vocal sounds or consonants, high notes and low notes, straight lines and curved lines.
ה׳
5[211] In animals and plants there are barren and productive, prolific and unprolific, viviparous and oviparous, soft-skinned and shell-skinned, wild and tame, solitary and gregarious.
ו׳
6[212] In another class there are poverty and riches; eminence and obscurity; high birth and low birth; want and abundance; war, peace; law, lawlessness; gifted nature, ungifted nature; labour, inaction; youth, age; impotence, power; weakness, strength. Why attempt to ennumerate all and each of them, when their number is infinite and illimitable?
ז׳
7[213] How excellent then is this lesson, which the interpreter of Nature’s facts in his pity for our sluggishness and carelessness lavishes on us always and everywhere, as he does in this passage, that in every case it is not where things exist as wholes, but where they exist as divisions or sections, that they must be “set facing opposite each other.” For the two opposites together form a single whole, by the division of which the opposites are known.
ח׳
8[214] Is not this the truth which according to the Greeks Heracleitus, whose greatness they celebrate so loudly, put in the fore front of his philosophy and vaunted it as a new discovery? Actually, as has been clearly shewn, it was Moses who long ago discovered the truth that opposites are formed from the same whole, to which they stand in the relation of sections or divisions.
