Observations placeholder

Giordano Bruno – from Cause, principle and unity

What explains that a contrary is the principle of its opposite, and that, therefore, the transmutations are circular, if not the existence of a subject, of a principle, of a term, and a continuity and a coincidence between the one and its contrary?

Are not maximum heat and minimum cold wholly one? Is it not from the limit of maximum heat that we obtain the point of departure in the movement toward cold? It is evident, therefore, that not only do the two maxima sometimes coincide in their opposition and that the two minima coincide in their agreement, but etiam [also] that the maximum and the minimum coincide through the vicissitude of transmutation.

Therefore, it is not without cause that physicians are often concerned when faced with the best of health, or that those with foresight grow doubly prudent in periods of greatest happiness.

Who does not see that corruption and generation derive from the same principle? Is not the end of the corrupt thing the beginning of the thing generated?

Do we not similarly say: to take that, is to posit this?

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…………..If we use our judgement wisely, we see clearly that corruption is nothing but a generation, and generation is nothing but a corruption; love is a hate and hate is a love, in the end. Hate of the contrary is a love of the congruent, and the love of this is the hate of that. Therefore, in substance and at the root, love and hate, amity and discord are the same thing. Where does the physician find the antidote more surely than in poison? Who delivers a better theriac than the viper?

The best remedies lie in the worst venoms. Is a potency not the potency of two contrary objects? And how do you think that can be explained, if not because the principle of the being of both the one and the other is one, as is the principle of their conception, and if not because the contraries are related to one and the same substratum, just as they are apprehended by the same sense?