Concerning the First Principle of Cold (3-4)

Besides, no privation is capable of more and less. Neither can any man say, that one among those that cannot see is more blind than another, or that one among those that cannot speak is more silent than another, or that any thing is more dead than another among those things that never had life. But in cold things there is more and less, and excess and diminution to several degrees; in a word, there is both intensity and remission as well as in hot things; because the matter suffers in some things more violently, in others more languidly, and therefore some things are hotter, some things colder than others, according to the nature of the matter. For there is no mixture of habit with privation. Neither does any power admit of privation opposite to it, nor associate with it in the same subject, but it withstands it altogether. Hot things allow themselves to be mixed

with cold things to a certain degree, as black with white, heavy with light, and sour with sweet,—this community and harmony of colors, sounds, medicaments, and sauces generating several tastes and pleasures grateful to the senses. But the opposition of privation and habit is an antipathy never to be reconciled; the being of the one enforcing the destruction of the other. Which destruction, if it fall out seasonably, according to the opposition of contrary powers, the arts make great use of, but chiefly Nature, not only in her other creations, but especially in the alterations of the air, and in all other things of which the Deity being the adorner and dispenser obtains the attribute of harmonical and musical. Not that those attributes are given him for the disposal of deep and shrill, black and white, so as to make them agree together; but for his governing in the world the sympathies and antipathies of cold and heat in such a manner that they may unite and separate again, and for reducing both to a decent order, by taking that which we called the overmuch from both.

Then again, we find that there is the same sense and feeling of cold as of heat; but privation is neither to be seen, heard, or felt, neither is it known to any of the other senses. For the object of sense is substance; but where no substance appears, there we understand privation to be,—which is a negation of substance, as blindness of sight, silence of voice, and vacuity of corporeal substance. For there is no sense or perception of vacuity by feeling; but where there is no body to be felt, there a vacuity is implied. Neither do we hear silence; but where we do not hear any thing at all, there we imply silence. In like manner we have no perception of blindness, nakedness, or being unarmed; but we know them from the negation of our sense. Therefore if cold were a privation of heat, there would be no being sensible of cold; but

only where heat ceased to be, there cold would be implied. But if, as heat is perceptible by the warmth and laxative softness of the flesh, so cold is no less perceptible by the contraction and condensation of it, it is from thence apparent, that there is some peculiar original and fountain of cold as well as heat.