27. Let us now study stability or stillness, which is the contrary of
movement.[425] Are we to consider it itself a genus, or to reduce it
to some one of the known genera? First, stability rather suits the
intelligible world, and stillness the sense-world. Let us now examine
stillness. If it be identical with stability, it is useless to look for
it here below where nothing is stable, and where apparent stability
is in reality only a slower movement. If stillness be different from
stability, because the latter refers to what is completely immovable,
and stillness to what is actually fixed, but is naturally movable
even when it does not actually move, the following distinction should
be established. If stillness here below be considered, this rest is
a movement which has not yet ceased, but which is imminent; if by
stillness is understood the complete cessation of movement in the
moved, it will be necessary to examine whether there be anything here
below that is absolutely without movement. As it is impossible for one
thing to possess simultaneously all the species of movement, and as
there are necessarily movements that are not realized in it--since it
is usual to say that some particular movement is in something--when
something undergoes no displacement, and seems still in respect to
this movement, should one not say about it that in this respect it is
not moving? Stillness is therefore the negation of movement. Now no
negation constitutes a genus. The thing we are considering is at rest
only in respect to local movement; stillness expresses therefore only
the negation of this movement.