If Water, Air, and the like are a 'matter' of which the natural bodies consist, as some thinkers in fact believe, these 'clements'
must be either one, or two, or more. Now they cannot all of them be one-they cannot, e.g. all be Air or Water or Fire or Earth-because 'Change is into contraries'. For if they all were Air, then (assuming Air to persist) there will be 'alteration' instead of coming-to-be. Besides, nobody supposes a single 'element' to persist, as the basis of all, in such a way that it is Water as well as Air (or any other 'element') at the same time. So there will be a certain contrariety, i.e. a differentiating quality: and the other member of this contrariety, e.g. heat, will belong to some other 'element', e.g. to Fire. But Fire will certainly not be 'hot Air'. For a change of that kind (a) is 'alteration', and (b) is not what is observed. Moreover (c) if Air is again to result out of the Fire, it will do so by the conversion of the hot into its contrary: this contrary, therefore, will belong to Air, and Air will be a cold something: hence it is impossible for Fire to be 'hot Air', since in that case the same thing will be simultaneously hot and cold. Both Fire and Air, therefore, will be something else which is the same;i.e. there will be some 'matter', other than either, common to both.
The same argument applies to all the 'elements', proving that there is no single one of them out of which they all originate. But neither is there, beside these four, some other body from which they originate-a something intermediate, e.g. between Air and Water (coarser than Air, but finer than Water), or between Air and Fire (coarser than Fire, but finer than Air). For the supposed 'intermediate' will be Air and Fire when a pair of contrasted qualities is added to it: but, since one of every two contrary qualities is a 'privation', the 'intermediate' never can exist-as some thinkers assert the 'Boundless' or the 'Environing' exists-in isolation. It is, therefore, equally and indifferently any one of the 'elements', or else it is nothing.
Since, then, there is nothing-at least, nothing perceptible-prior to these, they must be all. That being so, either they must always persist and not be transformable into one another: or they must undergo transformation-either all of them, or some only (as Plato wrote in the Timacus).' Now it has been proved before that they must undergo reciprocal transformation. It has also been proved that the speed with which they come-to-be, one out of another, is not uniform-since the process of reciprocal transformation is relatively quick between the 'elements' with a 'complementary factor', but relatively slow between those which possess no such factor.
Assuming, then, that the contrariety, in respect to which they are transformed, is one, the elements' will inevitably be two: for it is 'matter' that is the 'mean' between the two contraries, and matter is imperceptible and inseparable from them. Since, however, the 'elements' are seen to be more than two, the contrarieties must at the least be two. But the contrarieties being two, the 'elements' must be four (as they evidently are) and cannot be three: for the couplings' are four, since, though six are possible, the two in which the qualities are contrary to one another cannot occur.