Physique (I)

material world reaches our consciousness, are themselves material. So, though mind and matter cannot be resolved into each other either way, there are nevertheless close and intimate reactions between them. Experience makes us familiar with these reactions themselves; but (unless we are content with facile and unconvincing ‘ explanations’) it leaves them unexplainedand permanently mysterious, though it reveals some kind of kinship and correspondence between the worlds of matter and of mind. The fact, at least, remains that material things announce themselves to our consciousness xxi through our senses, and consciousness can act upon matter, immediately by causing the limbs of the conscious organism to move, or mediately by directing those limbs to move other things. So far Aristotle is quite content to accompany the plain man and to adopt his assumptions in their entirety. But he is very far from being content to leave these assumptions in the vague and undeveloped state in which the plain man holds them. For as soon as we begin to reflect upon them and try to connect and systematize them, they seem to reveal confusions and contradictions; and the plain man who has not been accustomed to hard thinking can easily be misled by thinkers who have themselves gone astray or by sophists who take pleasure in bewildering him. So Aristotle attempts to give precision to the plain man’s conceptions, to release him from confusions into which the ambiguities and imperfections of language may have betrayed him, to teach him to hold the thread of a continuous argument, to grapple with familiar but baffling concepts such as ‘ time,’ ‘cause,’ ‘ infinity,’ until he sees them steadily, and to detect the underlying agreements that are sometimes concealed under the mutual hostilities of rival schools of thought.…