Aristotle · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| Book 17. Problems Concerning Living Things. Why do things of disproportionate size look larger when viewed next to each other than when viewed each by itself alone? Is it because what is proportionate is one thing, and proportion above all makes for oneness, and what is one tends to be undivided, and what is undivided is smaller, while disproportion, through its difference, makes many things? So when things are viewed by themselves, what their sizes actually are more easily escapes notice, but not when they are viewed side by side. What is undivided appears as one thing, and the viewing of it is single, because of its proportion; but what is disproportionate, being as it were many things, produces a viewing that is manifold, and it appears larger because, though one, it appears as many. For it has both the nature of magnitude, by virtue of its continuity, and the nature of number, by virtue of the unevenness of its parts; that is why, reasonably enough, having the increase that comes from both, it appears larger than what is simple and one. Why do animals and plants grow more in length? Is it because length increases three ways, breadth two ways, and depth one way? For length is the first dimension from the starting point, so that it increases both by itself alone, and again together with breadth when that comes to be, and a third time together with depth. But breadth increases twice, both by itself and together with magnitude.
2| How should we understand "earlier" and "later"? Is it as with us — the men who fought at Troy being earlier than us, and those before them earlier still, and always those further back being the earlier ones? Or, if there is some starting point and middle and end of the whole, and when someone grows old and comes to the end and turns back again to the starting point, and the things nearer the starting point are earlier — what stops us from being nearer the starting point? And if this is so, we would be the earlier ones. Just as with the heaven and the movement of each of the stars there is a kind of circle, what stops the coming-to-be and passing-away of perishable things from being of the same kind, so that these same things come to be and pass away again? This is just as they say human affairs too are a circle. Now to claim that the very same individuals, numerically, always come to be again is silly, but one might rather accept it said of the form; so that we too might be the earlier ones, and one might suppose that the order of the sequence is such as to turn back again to the starting point and make it continuous and always keep to the same pattern. For Alcmaeon says that human beings perish for this reason, that they cannot join the beginning to the end — a clever remark, if one accepts it as him speaking in outline and does not wish to press the statement for precision. If then it is a circle, and a circle has neither beginning nor end, then no one would be earlier by being nearer the starting point, neither we than they nor they than we.