the prophets; this is the closest of their analogies, and its falsity is already evident. Even more remote and still more corrupt is their comparison of the matter to fire and iron.
It is common knowledge to anyone with practical experience that when fire comes into contact with any animal, plant, or mineral body—for example, the human body and the like, or wood, reeds, cotton, and their ilk, or iron, gold, and silver—it alters that body and changes its properties from what they were: it may burn it, melt it, or soften it. Nor does the fire that mingles with it remain pure fire; it too undergoes transformation and change.
Thus the assertion of these people, “Just as fire and iron mix and fuse together until they become a single live coal, without the fire’s having changed into a heavy bar of iron that splits and cuts, nor the iron’s having changed and turned into a fire that burns,” is false and misleading speech. For the live coal is neither pure iron nor pure fire; it is a third thing altogether.
Likewise, their statement, “The fire has not changed so as to become iron, nor the iron so as to become fire,” is mere sophistry. Mixture does not of itself entail transmutation and change, as in the blending of two dense substances—a point he himself concedes—such as water and wine, water and honey, clarified butter and honey, gold and silver, or copper and lead.
He has already said about such a mixture that after their combination “neither the wine remains wine, nor the water water; rather, both have entirely left their original essence and become something altered that is neither of them in itself, with neither of them free from the corruption and transformation of its former state.”
So we say to him: This very case in which you concede corruption and transformation has not turned