The Motion which acts upon Sensible objects enters from without, and so shakes, drives, rouses and thrusts its participants that they may neither rest nor preserve their identity- and all to the end that they may be caught into that restlessness, that flustering excitability which is but an image of Life. We must avoid identifying Motion with the objects moved: by walking we do not mean the feet but the activity springing from a potentiality in the feet. Since the potentiality is invisible, we see of necessity only the active feet- that is to say, not feet simply, as would be the case if they were at rest, but something besides feet, something invisible but indirectly seen as an accompaniment by the fact that we observe the feet to be in ever-changing positions and no longer at rest. We infer alteration, on the other hand, from the qualitative change in the thing altered. Where, then, does Motion reside, when there is one thing that moves and another that passes from an inherent potentiality to actuality? In the mover? How then will the moved, the patient, participate in the motion? In the moved? Then why does not Motion remain in it, once having come? It would seem that Motion must neither be separated from the active principle nor allowed to reside in it; it must proceed from agent to patient without so inhering in the latter as to be severed from the former, passing from one to the other like a breath of wind. Now, when the potentiality of Motion consists in an ability to walk, it may be imagined as thrusting a man forward and causing him to be continually adopting a different position; when it lies in the capacity to heat, it heats; when the potentiality takes hold of Matter and builds up the organism, we have growth; and when another potentiality demolishes the structure, the result is decay, that which has the potentiality of demolition experiencing the decay. Where the birth-giving principle is active, we find birth; where it is impotent and the power to destroy prevails, destruction takes place- not the destruction of what already exists, but that which intervenes upon the road to existence. Health comes about in the same way- when the power which produces health is active and predominant; sickness is the result of the opposite power working in the opposite direction. Thus, Motion is conditioned, not only by the objects in which it occurs, but also by its origins and its course, and it is a distinctive mark of Motion to be always qualified and to take its quality from the moved.

Timaeus: Further, as concerns the motions, the best motion of a body is that caused by itself in itself; for this is most nearly akin to the motion...

And if all things in motion desire, not repose, but ever to make known their own proper movement, even this is an aspiration after the Divine Peace of...

Of this I'll give thee here on earth an instance, which the eye can see. Regard the animals down here - a man, for instance, swimming! The water...

Timaeus: is inflamed or chilled within by the particles that enter it, and again is dried or moistened by those without, and suffers the affections...

As long as the heart has not attained complete peace, it cannot move itself. One moves the movement and forgets the movement; this is not movement in...

Motion or Active Energy . The ancient occult teaching that "Everything moves" seems to be fully corroborated by all subsequent investigation. Motion,...

Hence you inquire concerning the difference in the last things pertaining to them; but you leave uninvestigated such things as are first, and most hon...

Timaeus: our subsequent argument will be greatly hampered. The facts about them have already been stated in part; but in addition thereto we must...