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Besides man, as we have seen, cannot have a complete knowledge of the sublunar order, and hence it is not likely that he can control its laws to the extent of changing them.
All minerals, plants and animals are formed from these four elements by various combinations, all together forming the sublunar world, or the world of generation and decay. No individual thing in this world is permanent. All are subject to change and to ultimate destruction, though the destruction of one thing is the genesis of another. There is no annihilation.
After citing these five opinions on the nature of Providence, Maimonides formulates his own to the following effect: My own belief in the matter, not as a result of demonstration, but based upon what seems to me to be the meaning of Scripture is that in the sublunar world man alone enjoys individual Providence. All other individual things besides are ruled by chance, as Aristotle says.
This last argument led Aristotle to the concept of an eternal matter, the basis of becoming for all else besides, itself not subject to any such process. It is an ultimate, to ask for the origin of which would signify to misunderstand the meaning of origin. All things of the sublunar world originate in matter, hence matter itself is the unoriginated, the eternal.
We shall try to simplify it as much as possible. The numbers in parentheses in the sequel refer to the preliminary propositions above given. We start with something that is known, namely, the motion we see in the sublunar world, the motion which is involved in all the processes of genesis and decay and change generally.
This is evidently due to the fact that Israeli is unwittingly combining Aristotelian physics with Neo-Platonic emanationism. For Aristotle matter and form stand at the head of sublunar change and are ultimate. There is no derivation of matter or form from anything. The celestial world has a matter of its own, and is not the cause of the being of this one except as influencing its changes.
Not only the sublunar things, subject to generation and decay, but the higher incorporeal things, also, are in essence two, i. e., are composed of two elements, subject and predicate. God alone is One; he is subject only and not predicate. And Ibn Ezra also has some allusion to the divine Will as taught by Gabirol.
"The odor di femina in the nostrils of the scholar," said I. "Famina? Woman?" he cried, scandalised. "Yes, my friend," said I. "All things sublunar can be translated into terms of woman. St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn't a wife; Simon Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and devoted his existence to reproducing himself instead of St. Fliscus."
Whatever moves in a circle must move around a body at rest; for if it moves around another moving body, this second body must have another body around which it moves, and this third body another, and so on ad infinitum, which is impossible. Hence the sphere moves around a body at rest. This is the earth. The four elements of the sublunar world are, fire, air, water, earth.
The surface of the moon had once been peopled, as we supposed, but as the day of decay and death approached the outside of the globe became too inhospitable to longer support life. The interior had cooled and contracted, and as the solid crust was rigid enough to keep its place, great, sublunar caverns had been formed.
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