Fitting

Use in the book

In Theophrastus's exposition fit has a sharply delimited sensory task. A thing too small may pass straight through without contact; a thing too large cannot enter. Only an appropriate entrant produces the relevant perception. Plato's Meno presents the same alternatives in a dialogue about defining colour. The account is thus more specific than a general claim that bodies influence one another.

But fit and resemblance are not automatically the same condition. Theophrastus presses this at §§14–15: non-kindred material may occupy and obstruct a passage, while a smaller like might make contact without filling it. He consequently asks what additional work likeness does. His objections help separate accommodation to a channel, contact with its sides, and elemental affinity.

Alexander's magnetic report applies fitting to effluences from iron and passages in the stone. The recurrence supports the breadth of the reported mechanism, but is also the basis of Alexander's question why other fitting bodies do not attract one another. Fitting is a shared explanatory resource whose specificity the witnesses test, rather than an all-purpose explanation they endorse.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 7–8 (testimony)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 7. Makes fitting into each sense’s passages the general condition of perception.
2. A 86 §§ 14–15 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 15. Separates fitting from mere contact and likeness.
3. A 92 (reception)Plato, Meno. Stages fit, excessive smallness, and excessive size as premises of a definition of colour.
4. A 89 (testimony)2Alexander of Aphrodisias, Questions. Applies fitting to iron effluences and passages in the Heraclean stone.

Translation in this edition

The different printed spellings belong to different witnesses. Preserve them as attested forms, without using the prose vocabulary to reconstruct the wording of a lost Empedoclean verse.