The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics) (113 page)

  
1.
   Distinction of ‘theology’, the science of being as such, from the other theoretical sciences, mathematics and physics.

  
2.
   Four senses of ‘being’. Of these (i) accidental being is the object of no science.

  
3.
   The nature and origin of accident.

  
4.
   (ii) Being as truth is not primary being.

  
1.
   The study of being is primarily the study of substance.

  
2.
   Various opinions on the question, what things are substances?

  
3.
   Four things are commonly held to be substantial—the essence, the universal, the genus, the substratum. The last may be conceived as matter, form, or the concrete individual. Reasons why
matter
and the
concrete individual
cannot be primary substance.
Form
to be studied first in sensible things.

  
4.
   What is essence and to what does it belong, i. e. what things can be defined? Primarily substance.

  
5.
   Combinations of a subject with one of its proper attributes have no definition nor essence.

  
6.
   Is a thing the same as its essence? Yes, if it is a substance.

  
7.
   Analysis of generation, whether by nature, art, or spontaneity.

  
8.
   Form is not generated, but put into matter; yet it did not previously exist apart—the agent in generation is form embodied in another individual of the same species.

  
9.
   Why spontaneous generation sometimes takes place. The conditions of generation in the categories other than substance.)

10.
   When are definitions of the parts included in the definition of the whole? When the parts are parts of the form.

11.
   Which parts are parts of the form, which of the concrete individual?

12.
   Wherein consists the unity of an object of definition? In the appropriateness of the differentia to the genus.

13.
   A universal cannot be either the substance or an element in the substance of anything (yet how else can a thing be defined ?).

14.
   Hence it is fatal to make Ideas substances and yet hold that they are composed of other Ideas.

15.
   No individual can be defined, whether sensible or, like the Ideas, intelligible.

16.
   The parts of sensible things are only potencies. Unity and being are not the substance of things.

17.
   Substance is the cause or form which puts matter into a determinate state; it is that in a thing which is distinct from its material elements.

  
1.
   The discussion of sensible substances continued. Their matter is itself substance.

  
2.
   The main types of form or actuality. Definitions of matter, of form, and of the concrete individual distinguished.

  
3.
   Form distinguished from the material elements; Antisthenes’ attack on definition; definition analogous to number.

  
4.
   Remote and proximate matter; the substratum of
attributes
not matter but the concrete individual.

  
5.
   The relation of matter to its contrary states.

  
6.
   What gives unity to a definition? The fact that the genus is simply the potency of the differentia, the differentia the actuality of the genus.

  
1.
   Being as potency and actuality. Potency in the strict sense, as potency of motion, active or passive.

  
2.
   Non-rational potencies are single, rational potencies twofold.

  
3.
   Potency defended against the attack of the Megaric school.

  
4.
   Potency as possibility.

  
5.
   How potency is acquired, and the conditions of its actualization.

  
6.
   Actuality distinguished from potency; a special type of potency described; actuality distinguished from movement.

  
7.
   When one thing may be called the potency or matter of another; how things are described by names derived from their matter or their accidents.

  
8.
   Actuality prior to potency in definition, time, and substantiality; nothing eternal or necessary is a mere potency.

  
9.
   Good actuality better than potency, and bad actuality worse; therefore no separate evil principle in the universe. Geometrical truths found by actualization of potencies.

10.
   Being as truth, with regard to both composite and simple objects.

  
1.
   Four kinds of unit; the essence of a unit is to be a measure of quantity or of quality; various types of measure.

  
2.
   Unity not a substance but a universal predicate; its denotation the same as that of being.

  
3.
   Unity and plurality; identity; likeness; otherness; difference.

  
4.
   Contrariety is complete difference; how related to privation and contradiction.

  
5.
   The opposition of the equal to the great and the small.

  
6.
   The opposition of the one to the many.

  
7.
   Intermediates are homogeneous with each other and with the extremes, stand between contraries, and are compounded out of these contraries.

  
8.
   Otherness
in
species is otherness
of
the genus and is contrariety; its nature further described.

  
9.
   What contrarieties constitute otherness in species.

10.
   The perishable and the imperishable differ in kind.

  
1.
   Shorter form of B. 2, 3,

  
2.
               “            B. 4–6.

  
3.
               “            Γ. 1, 2.

  
4
,
5.
           “            Γ. 3, 4.

  
6.
               “            Γ. 5–8.

  
7.
               “            E. 1.

  
8.
               “            E. 2–4.

          Extracts from
Physics
:

  
8.
     II. 5, 6, on luck.

  
9.
   III. 1–3, on potency, actuality, and movement.

10.
   III. 4, 5, 7, on the infinite; there is no actual infinite, and especially no infinite body.

11.
   V. 1, on change and movement.

12.
   V. 2, on the three kinds of movement.

       V. 3, definitions of ‘together in place’, ‘apart’, ‘touch’, ‘between’, ‘contrary in place’, ‘successive’, ‘contiguous’, ‘continuous’.

  
1.
   Substance the primary subject of inquiry. Three kinds of substance—perishable sensible, eternal sensible, and unmovable (non-sensible).

  
2.
   Change implies not only form and privation but matter.

  
3.
   Neither matter nor form comes into being. Whatever comes into being comes from a substance of the same kind. If form ever exists apart from the concrete individual, it is in the case of natural objects.

  
4.
   Different things have elements numerically different but the same in kind; they all have form, privation, and matter. They also have a proximate and an ultimate moving cause.

  
5.
   Again actuality and potency are principles common to all things, though they apply differently in different cases. The principles of all things are only analogous, not identical.

  
6.
   Since movement must be eternal, there must be an eternal mover, and one whose essence is actuality (actuality being prior to potency). To account for the uniform change in the universe, there must be one principle which acts always alike, and one whose action varies.

  
7.
   The eternal mover originates motion by being the primary object of desire (as it is of thought); being thoroughly actual, it cannot change or move; it is a living being, perfect, separate from sensible things, and without parts.

  
8.
   Besides the first mover there must be as many unmoved movers as there are simple motions involved in the motions of the planets. The number is probably either 55 or 47. As there is but one prime mover, there must be but one heaven.

  
9.
   The divine thought must be concerned with the most divine object, which is itself. Thought and the object of thought are never different when the object is immaterial.

10.
   How the good is present in the universe both as the order of the parts and (more primarily) as their ruler. Difficulties which attend the views of other philosophers.

  
1.
   We pass to immaterial substance. Two kinds of immaterial substances have been believed in, mathematical objects and Ideas. We shall discuss first the former, then the latter, then the view that numbers and Ideas are the substance of sensible things.

  
2.
   (i) Mathematical objects cannot exist as distinct substances either in or apart from sensible things.

  
3.
   They can be separated only in thought. Mathematics is not entirely divorced from consideration of the beautiful, as is sometimes alleged.

  
4.
   (ii) Arguments which led to the belief in Ideas. Some prove too little, others too much.

  
5.
   Even if there were Ideas, they would not explain the changes in the sensible world.

  
6.
   (iii) Various ways in which numbers may be conceived as the substance of things.

  
7.
   (
a
) If all units are associable, this gives only mathematical, not ideal number, (
b
) If all units are inassociable, this gives neither mathematical nor ideal number. (
c
) If only the units in the same number are associable, this leads to equal difficulties; units must have no difference of kind.

  
8.
   The views of Platonists who disagree with Plato, and those of the Pythagoreans, lead to equal difficulties. Further objections to ideal numbers: (
a
) How are the units derived from the indefinite dyad? (
b
) Is the series of numbers infinite or finite; and if finite, what is its limit? (
c
) What sort of principle is the One?

  
9.
   Discussion of the principles of geometrical objects. Criticism of the generation of numbers from unity and plurality, and of spatial magnitudes from similar principles. The criticism of ideal numbers summed up. The upholders of Ideas make them at once universal and individual.

10.
   Are the first principles of substances individual or universal?

  
1.
   The principles cannot be contraries. The Platonists in making them contraries treated one of the contraries as matter. Various forms of this theory. The nature of unity and plurality expounded.

  
2.
   Eternal substances cannot be compounded out of elements. The object of the Platonists is to explain the presence of plurality in the world, but in this they do not succeed. What justifies the belief in the separate existence of numbers?

  
3.
   Difficulties in the various theories of number. The Pythagoreans ascribe generation to numbers, which are eternal.

  
4.
   The relation between the first principles and the good.

  
5.
   How is number supposed to be derived from its elements? How is it the cause of substances?

  
6.
   The causal agency ascribed to numbers is purely fanciful.

1
     All men by nature desire to know.
[980a]
An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything,
(25)
we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.

By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced in some of them, though not in others. And therefore the former are more intelligent and apt at learning than those which cannot remember; those which are incapable of hearing sounds are intelligent though they cannot be taught, e. g. the bee, and any other race of animals that may be like it; and those which besides memory have this sense of hearing can be taught.
[980b]

The animals other than man live by appearances and memories,
(25)
and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings. Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience.
[981a]
And experience seems pretty much like science and art, but really science and art come to men
through
experience; for ‘experience made art’, as Polus says,
¹
‘but inexperience luck’. Now art arises when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgement about a class of objects is produced.
(5)
For to have a judgement that when Callias was ill of this disease this did him good, and similarly in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution,
(10)
marked off in one class, when they were ill of this disease, e. g. to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fever—this is a matter of art.

With a view to action experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and men of experience succeed even better than those who have
theory without experience.
(15)
(The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure
man
, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man.
(20)
If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.) But yet we think that
knowledge
and
understanding
belong to art rather than to experience,
(25)
and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men of experience know that the thing is so,
(30)
but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause.
[981b]
Hence we think also that the master-workers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers, because they know the causes of the things that are done (we think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire burns—but while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural tendency,
(5)
the labourers perform them through habit); thus we view them as being wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes. And in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot.

Again,
(10)
we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything—e. g. why fire is hot; they only say
that
it is hot.

At first he who invented any art whatever that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men,
(15)
not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.
(20)
Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why
the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure.

We have said in the
Ethics
²
what the difference is between art and science and the other kindred faculties; but the point of our present discussion is this,
(25)
that all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever,
(30)
the artist wiser than the men of experience, the master-worker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive.
[982a]
Clearly then Wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes.