t the contact or the
apprehension of the same quality nor were all parts affected in the same
way by what was influencing them. But those only coalesced with anything
to which they had a characteristic, symmetrical in a corresponding
proportion; so that they are in error so obstinately to insist that a
thing is either good or bad, white or not white, thinking to establish
their own senses by destroying those of others; whereas they ought
neither to combat the senses,--because they all touch some quality,
each one drawing from this confused mixture, as from a living and large
fountain, what is suitable and convenient,--nor to pronounce of the
whole, by touching only the parts, nor to think that all ought to be
affected after one and the same manner by the same thing, seeing
that one is affected by one quality and faculty of it, and another
by another. Let us investigate who those men are which bring in this
opinion that things are not more of one quality than another, if they
are not those who affirm that every sensible object is a mixture,
compounded of all sorts of qualities, like a mixture of new wine
fermenting, and who confess that all their rules are lost and their
faculty of judging quite gone, if they admit any sensible object that is
pure and simple, and do not make each one thing to be many?

See now to this purpose, what discourse and debate Epicurus makes
Polyaenus to have with him in his Banquet concerning the heat of wine.
For when he asked, "Do you, Epicurus, say, that wine does not heat?"
some one answered, "It is not universally to be affirmed that wine
heats." And a little after: "For wine seems not to be universally a
heater; but such a quantity may be said to heat such a person." And
again subjoining the cause, to wit, the compressions and disseminations
of the atoms, and having alleged their commixtures and conjunctions
with others when the wine comes to be mingled in the body, he adds this
conclusion: "It is not universally to be said that wine is endued with a
faculty of heating; but that such a quantity may heat such a nature and
one so disposed, while such a quantity to such a nature is cooling.
For in such a mass there are such natures and complexions of which cold
might be composed, and which, united with others in proper measure,
would yield a refrigerative virtue. Wherefore some are deceived, who
say that wine is universally a heater; and others, who say that it is
universally a cooler." He t