LITT.D, (LEEDN), LITE, Ὁ, (MANCUESI ER) AND FRANCIS M. CORNFORD FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE AND BRERRBTON LAURENCE READREI IN ANOILNT PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSIiY OF CAMBRIDGE IN TWO VOLUMES LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD NEW YORK: σα. P. PUTNAM’S SONS MCMXXIX PREFACE A cuaractenistic of the work of Philip Henry Wick- steed was his deep interest in the sources of any literature he sought to understand, and his long study of the Middle Ages, represented by such minds as those of Aquinas and Dante, constantly led him back to the classics and eventually to a serious study of Aristotle as the great master of Mediaeval Philosophy.
But though he considered Aristotle was for various reasons more intelligible to the mediaeval scholar than to us, he did not believe that his importance to the world had decreased. His own thought ranged from man’s urgent material needs, represented by Economies, to his deepest spiritual necds, represented by Religion. He would not have considered it an exaggerated claim that Aristotle’s practical genius working upon the Greek love of thought for its own sake, made his mind and method of vital importance in almost all our modern problems: a touchstone clear of the structure and débris of ages we stand on, and of the utilitarian element so difficult, if not im- possible, to escape to-day, and yet so practical a danger to the value we call truth.
When he left London to live in the country some thirty years ago, he conceived the project of trans- lating the Physics, and after a severe illness in 1918 Vv PREFACE which compelled him to give up his lecturing, it be- came more and more his principal literary occupation. In 1924 the work was sufficiently advanced to be sub- mitted to the directors of the Loeb Classies, who accepted it for publication in their series, Both the scholarly and the popular character of this series made a strong appeal to him, and one of its features—the inclusion of the Greek text—seemed of particular importance in a work intended to be an in- terpretative paraphrase. With Aristotle’s text at hand for reference 1t would seem justifiable to express the same Greck word by different English ones and different Greek words by the same English one, when- ever Aristotle’s intention seemed subtly different or subtly akin, In these gencral principles and in the whole con- ception and purpose of the work, he was supported by the sympathy of Professor Gilbert Murray, who, in the midst of his many activities, never failed 10 show a practical and enlightening interest in the work. Grateful acknowledgements have at the same time to be made to Professor E. H. Neville for criticisms and suggestions on certain points submitted to him at the translator's request, and on others which have arisen in course of preparation for the press; also to Sir Thomas Heath and to several others for generous help and advice.
When the first draft of the paraphrase was finished, the writing of the Arguments and expository notes and of the various introductions was begun, while at the same time a careful and systematic revision of the translation was proceeding. Of this the only part brought to something like its present form was the first few chapters of Book IV.
vi PREFACE It was at this critical stage of the work and with only a few months’ warning that Philip Wicksteed received the final summons to cease labour. Rapidly increasing infirmity made it impossible for hiin to do without secretarial assistance, and one of his grand- children (the grandchild also of his friend and master, the late Abraham Kuenen of Leiden) suspended her own studies in order to come and help him. Shortly before his death he dictated the following for inclusion in the preface of the book: “T should not have been able to carry on the work at all when I became unable to manipulate my books and find references, without the help of my granddaughter, Emily Kuenen. She was a highly intelligent amanuensis, capable of finding all the relevant passages in the Greek, Mediaeval and Renaissance commentaries, with complete understanding of my purpose, and submitting them to my judgement with the utmost economy of effort on my part.”
It soon became evident that it was a question of weeks, not of months, and when he saw that there was no possibility of being able to get the book ready for the press himself he sent an urgent call to his old friend, Mr. J. V. Saunders: ‘‘ Saunders,” he said, “ will know when I have made a mistake, and when I have said it on purpose.” Mr. Saunders came im- mediately, and, with much diffidence, agreed to shoulder the responsibility, and they conferred to- gether whenever it was possible to do so.
But as every writer knows, the last stages of a work tend to lengthen out, and the labourer’s tale of days was progressively drawing in. It was my privilege to vii PREFACE vii PREFACE be with him for several days in his last week and for a few hours at the very end. His spirit never flagged, and he greeted me on my arrival one evening with radiant delight at having completed an exceptionally good day’s work, that had taken him to within a few pages of that part of the revision which he still hoped to complete. Later in the evening Mr. Francis Cornford, who was intimate with some members of the family and whom my father had expressed a desire to see, arrived from Cambridge. My father saw him for a few moments and explained his plan of acuion. ‘They had only once met, many years before, but the two now passed from the status of fellow scholars to that of intimate friends. The next day a few more pages of the revision were done, but there remained some five or six which he was never able to attempt. Tor two or three days it was still occasion- ἈΠ possible to dictate notes, and Mr. Cornford was able to get some valuable points clearly set forth. But from the hour of his arrival the future of the book could no longer be a_ matter of anxiety to my father himself, to Mr. Saunders, or to any other. Mr. Corn- ford has shown himself continuously anxious not only to spare no pains in perfecting the work, but, in con- stant consultation with Mr. Saunders and with my sister, Rebecca, to preserve everything possible of my father’s spirit in it.
During my father’s last years my sister was probably more intimate than anyone else with his mind and work, and has therefore been able to supply many links between his written and spoken word. She has prepared from ms. notes left by my father the section, in the General In- troduction, on the principles of translation adopted viii PRETACE in the work, and she is mainly responsible for the Note on Mathematical Conceptions.
Mr. Cornford sends the following for inclusion in the Preface: “ It is due to Dr. Wicksteed’s memory and to the yeader that I should explain, as exactly as I can, what I have done towards the preparation of this book for the press.
“ Although I had looked forward to the appear- ance of this translation, I had never seen any part of it when, within a week of Dr. Wicksteed’s death, I was summoned to Childrey. I came without any idea that it would be my privilege to share in the inheritance of his work. He was still able, by an heroie effort of will, to dictate notes bearing upon certain points that were on his mind; but, not having read the translation, I could not ask those questions to which we have since had to find an answer. Mr, Saunders welcomed my help with the generosity of a brother in scholarship, and it was agreed that he and I, in collaboration with Miss Rebecca Wicksteed, should do what remained to be done. Since each of us lives at a long distance from the others, it became obvious that one of us should revise the text and translation and submit the result to his colleagues. As I had some special knowledge of Greek philosophy, this task fell to me.
‘“When I had taken the manuscript away and examined it, I found that, while some parts had been re-written several times, others had not been thoroughly revised. Only a part of Book IV (the Introduction and Chapters I-V) had gone to the ix PREFACE press and been corrected in proof by Dr. Wicksteed. The rest of the translation still contained such in- accuracies, and even positive mis-renderings, as any scholar, translating so difficult a work, would be likely to leave uncorrected in his earlier drafts. I conceived it to be my task to bring the translation closer to the Greek, in so far as this could be done without spoiling its intended character.
“ It was a delicate matter to retouch the work of a master whose approach to any subject was marked by a singular independence. My diff- culties were the greater because the translator had not prepared a Greek text beyond Book I, and I was not seldom in doubt as to the reading he had adopted. He seems to have worked sometimes with the Berlin edition, sometimes with the Tauch- nitz text of 1881, whose obsolete readings and grotesque punctuation here and there misled him. He did not, so far as I know, possess Prantl’s edition of 1879 (Teubner), which is out of print and hard to obtain. M. Carteron’s text and trans- lation (Paris, 1926) appeared too late to be of much use.
“Tt was not my business to re-edit the text of the Physics; on the other hand, I was bound to print what seemed, upon the evidence available, most likely to have been written by Aristotle. I have no knowledge of the mss. beyond what can be learnt from the critical apparatus of the above- named editions, from Diels, Zur Tertgeschichte der aristotelischen Physik (Abhandl, ἃ, k. pr. Ak. der Wiss., Berlin, 1882), and from Torstrik (Phzlologus, xii, 494 ff.). I have constantly consulted the com- mentaries of Themistius, Philoponus, and Simplicius.
PREFACE PREFACE Apart from Book IV. Chapters I-V, the text I have printed is the best I could construct with these materials. It differs from the current texts chiefly in paragraphing, in the accentuation of enclitics, and in punctuation. No two editors will ever agree upon the punctuation of Aristotle, and my only guide has been the desire to make the structure and meaning of each sentence, as | understood st, as clear as possible to an eye accustomed to the punctuation of contemporary Mnghsh (rather than German) books. Where the reading and interpre- tation are doubtful, I have sometimes been unable to find out how the translator arrived at his para- phrase, which at such points naturally tends to be freer than elsewhere; and I have printed what appears to me to be the best authenticated text, adding a literal translation ma note. Asa rule, I have given a critical note only where the reading has not the authority of any of Bekker'’s mss., but is exther found in the Greek commentaries or duc to conjecture. Professor Ross of Oriel College has kindly helped me with his judgement upon a few very difficult passages.
“ The additions I have made to the Arguments and notes are enclosed in square brackets with my initial [C.]. The large number of minor changes and corrections in the translation could not be marked in any way without making the book unreadable. For these alterations, though they have been sub- mitted to Miss Wicksteed and Mr. Saunders, I must bear the responsibility. The editors of the Series were good enough to allow me an entirely free hand.
“The final result might be described as an un- VoL. I b xl PREFACE principled compromise. I must have made many changes which Dr. Wicksteed would have rejected with characteristic vehemence. On the other hand, I have let some interpretations stand, which strike me as doubtful, only m some cases offering an alter- native rendering in a note. So I may claim that, if I should not have satisfied him, neither have I satisfied myself.
“T cannot end without looking back to the ex- perience of that last week at Childrey. It was as if we were witnessing a conflict between the spirit of aman entirely fearless and Death himself. With a force of will that touched the limit of human power, he seemed to be holding the phantom at arm’s length until he was assured that his work would be finished, He left us hke Heracles refusing to linger with Admetus and the restored Alcestis because he was bent upon some new labour that lay beyond his defeat of Death.
TI. M. Cornrorp.”
TI. M. Cornrorp.”
Mr. Cornford left Childrey only when the master’s mind at last began to flag, holding still undimmed its courage. Then, on the second evening following, as the sunset faded and the stars shone in through the open window, Philip Wicksteed, conscious to the last and in deep peace of spirit, joined the company of his masters.
Josep WIcKSTEED.
Childrey, January 1929.
xil CONTENTS OF VOLUME I PAGE GenenaL Inrropucrion— I, What to expect from the Physics.. ΧΥ 11, Aristotle’s Philosophy: 1, Mind and Matter, and their meeting- ground.:: ες ΧΧ 2. The Seale of Life and Conselnusiiess xxix 3. The Categories ἢ; 1 4, Abstract thinking ena Selt- con- sciousness.. ἢν 5. Cosmography and Theology:. Ix III. Note on the Meteorologica.:. Ixxiv IV. Note on the Principles of Translation lxxv V. Note on certain Mathematical Con- CONTENTS xiv GENERAL INTRODUCTION’ I, Wuatr ΤῸ Expect FROM THE Puysics Tue title ‘Physics’ is misleading, and the reader must expect to find little or nothing that it suggests in this treatise. ‘ Lectures on Nature,’ the alterna- tive title found in editions of the Greek text, is more enlightening. But ‘Principles of Natural Philo- sophy ’ (as the term would have been understood in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries) would be better still.
The realm of Nature, for Aristotle, includes all things that move or change, or that come and go, either in the sense of passing from ‘ here ’ to ‘ there,’ or in the more extended sense of passing from ‘ this’ to ‘ that,’ which latter phrase is equivalent to ‘ be- coming something that it was not ᾿---ἃ solid becoming a liquid, or a hot thing becoming cold, for instance.
Thus anything that ‘ becomes’ this or that (sub- stantively or qualitatively), any concrete thing to which, as such, an inception of being or a cessation from being can be assigned, belongs to the realm of Nature; but so also do things eternal if, and in so fay as, they move or otherwise change. Thus the ultimate ‘matter’ which, according to Aristotle, underlies all the elementary substances must be xv INTRODUCTION xv INTRODUCTION studied, in its changes at least, by the Natural Philo- sopher. And so must the eternal heavenly spheres of the Aristotelian philosophy, in so far as they them- selves move or are the causes of motion in the sublunary woyrld.
Thus all things of which motion, change, or be-~ coming (ze. the inception of, and cessation from, ‘being this or that’) can be predicated are the subject matter of the study of Nature.
What is excluded, then? Not Psychology. For although it may be a disputable point whether the ‘being’ of the (human) psyche (or ‘ soul’) had any inception or will have any cessation, it is at least certain that it passes from one state or act of con- sciousness to another, whereas if there are (as Aristotle believed there were) immaterial beings, and one supreme being, not subject to conditions of time, place, matter, dimension, or change of con- sciousness, the study of them, if possible at all, must lie outside the realm of Nature. But yet the study of Nature may point beyond itself to the necessity and possibility of such a Theology?; and it is one of Aristotle’s directive purposes throughout the Physics to prove that it actually does so, For the purposes of this Introduction it is un- necessary to pursue the subject of the division of studies any further. Enough has been said to show that the domain of Aristotle’s Natural Philosopher extends beyond what we call (or used to call) Natural Philosophy.
But the Physics only covers the principia or funda- mental and elementary problems of Natural Philo- * One of the titles given by Aristotle to the work called by us, but never by him, the Metaphysics.
xvi INTRODUCTION sophy. It was actually known to Dante and the Schoolmen as the ‘ First Book’ on ‘ Nature,’ and in Avicenna’s paraphrase of Aristotle’s works the Psychology was enumerated as the ‘ Sixth Book ’ of the ‘ Things of Nature.’
What, then, are the elements or principles of the study of Nature? Hardly a trace of what we under- stand by Physics will be found amongst them. They are concerned with the analysis of the conceptions of change, becoming, and so forth. What is ‘ motion’? What, if anything, are we to say to those who deny that there is such a thing? If motion means change of place, what does ‘ place’ mean? If movements take time, what does ‘time’ mean? What is the meaning of an acorn being potentially but not actually an oak, or of cold water being potentially hot water? What, indeed, is the difference between the potentiality of anything ‘becoming’ one of several things and the actuality of its being the one thing it is? And why are potentialities at once so varied and so strictly limited? Or again, when things change, why do they change? And what do I mean by the cause or causes of change? Are the changes, so far as they are natural, purposeful? Have they an aim? And if so, do they always hit the mark they aim at?
These, and such as ihese, are the fundamental questions and concepts with which Aristotle deals in the Physics, and since he was neither an experi- menter nor a close observer of falling, moving, floating, rising or sinking, expanding or contracting bodies, and does not know anything of what we understand by Chemistry, we shall not find in the Physics anything analogous to the close observation xvii INTRODUCTION of sea animals, for instance, or the insight into comparative anatomy and embryology, which excite the admiration of biologists in Aristotle’s biological treatises, Nor again shall we find anything corresponding to the insight into the processes of the human mind and principles of human conduct which make some direct or indirect acquaintance with Aristotle’s logical treatises, his Psychology, his Ethics, his Politics, or his aesthetical treatises, the common property of all students and the still living inspiration or direction of so much of their thinking.
Nor, yet again, shall we find in the Physics what we might more reasonably expect, namely a sheaf of those inspired guesses that students of the ‘ Pre- Soeratics’ delight in culling and that cause such wonder and delight in the mind of the general reader—a heliocentric cosmos, for instance, or an elaborated atomic theory of matter, or the belief that life on the dry land was developed out of life in the sea.
Indeed, in the most important of these matters Aristotle was on what is generally called the ‘ wrong side,’ though it does not follow that he was not on the ‘right path.’ For he generally had good reasons for his wrong opinions.* Aristotle himself did not undervalue the ‘ sagacity ’ that foresees a conclusion that it has not reached, but he also very well knew the difference between shooting at a mark though you miss it, and shooting at a venture though you make a valuable hit; and * Even for his (admittedly erroneous) belief that the heart was the seat of mental function, which Plato (rightly) assigned to the brain, XVili INTRODUCTION it has been said of the ‘ Ancients ’ at large that ‘ they said everything, but proved nothing,’ What, then, are we to expect from the Physics? Something that is still of philosophical interest; very much that is of historic interest and that has entered deeply into the texture of our language; much of purely intellectual interest and bracing gymnastic; but also much that is of vital significance in relation to that borderland between physical and metaphysical thought where mathematics and philosophy meet.
The present translation has been inspired by a conviction that contemporary philosophic thought and discussion is seriously handicapped by the fact that Aristotle’s Physics is practically unread, and without such help as is here attempted must remain unreadable except to a few special students.
It must be in the progress of the work itself, if at all, that this conviction must be justified; but this section of the Introduction may be concluded by a bare indication of the way in which the elementary philosophy of mathematics enters into the tissue of the Physics, and of the points on which Aristotle insists, Many of the Catholic theologians insist on the services rendered by heretics in compelling the Church to bring out points that gave precision and support to the faith but could hardly have been understood except when the fatal effects of over- looking them had been developed by the heretics. So Aristotle found that the metaphysicians who denied that motion or change could possibly exist— the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, by which Zeno tried to prove that the quicker could never overtake the slower, being the stock instance— xix INTRODUCTION compelled him to go outside his domain of Nature in order to rid his readers of a bewildered obsession by the thought that, after all, the study of moving and changmng things must he all in vain, since great thinkers had proved that there was no such thing as change or motion.
This led him to such conclusions as the following, the bearing of which upon thought it will be our task to develop. Time is the non-spatial dimension of movement. The infinite is not an ‘ all-embracing ’ totality, but ‘that of which there is always more.’ ‘Infinity,’ therefore, is adjectival or adverbial rather than substantival. A line is infinitely divisible, but it cannot be infinitely divided. A potentiality may be infinite, for it may be inexhaustible; an actuality cannot be infinite, for it would be the totality of that of which there is more. A point is not a component of a line, nor a ‘ now’ a component of a ‘ period of time.’ There can be no ‘ next point’ to agiven point. ‘ Motion ’is not made up of” stations,’ nor a ‘line’ of ‘ points,’ nor a ‘lapse of time’ of ‘nows.’
The bearing upon philosophical discussions of to-day of the refutation of the paradoxes of Zeno based upon such considerations as these will be obvious enough to the reader.
II. Anisrotie’s PaiLosopiiy 1. Mind and Matter, and their meeting-ground Aristotle will never satisfy the metaphysicians, for he ignores, or rules out, many of the most funda- mental problems on which they are engaged.
xX INTRODUCTION On the other hand, he is often claimed as the philosopher of common sense, for his fundamental assumptions are frequently the very ones that underlie such thinking as the plain man cares to indulge in and excuse him from thinking metaphysically at all.
For instance, Aristotle never questions the reality and objectivity of the material world revealed to us by the senses. Our senses seem to assure us that this world has an existence of its own, independently of our consciousness of it, and Aristotle accepts this assurance at its face value. The material world is to him neither an illusion nor a mere creation or mani- festation of mind.
Further, he regards iL as evident, upon reflection, that our mind, consciousness, or awareness of things (whatever name or names we give it) is not itself of a material or tangible nature. Body, colour, or warmth can be touched, seen, or felt. Thought, or that in us which thinks, can be neither touched, seen, nor felt, Matter, then, is not mind, nor is mind matter. But the organs of sense, through which news of the material world reaches our consciousness, are them- selves 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 corre- spondence between the worlds of matter and of mind. The fact, at least, remains that material things announce themselves to our consciousness xxi INTRODUCTION 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 some- times concealed under the mutual hostilities of rival schools of thought.
The Physics is full of examples and illustrations of all this; and we shall find that Aristotle, when revealing the plain man to himself and justifying him—sometimes against the philosophers—in’ his fundamental convictions, always keeps him, the plain man himself, in control of the ultimate court of appeal, as judge of the final conclusions to be accepted. He must by no means be outraged, and xxii INTRODUCTION Aristotle is always anxious to show that his con- clusions are just what the plain man has always been feeling after and can now rest in and adopt as his own.
And yet, after all, it is one of the main purposes of the Physics to lead the plain man beyond his own range into a region bordering upon that of the mystic, by showing him that natural science points beyond itself to a ᾿ divine’ world, for which the very savage already has a dim and instinctive sense, though the sage in his highest moments can but touch upon its borders and can never make it his own, In his sense of a divine mode of being that transcends human experience (though it is by contact with it that nian becomes most human) Aristotle betrays the overmastering influence of his great teacher, Plato; and the question arises how far he succeeds in showing that his own characteristic line of thought—sharply contrasted as it is in so many ways with Plato’s—really leads him, on its own principles, to retain and confirm as much of the Platonic outlook upon the world of conclusive truth and reality as he tries to justify by it. On this question the careful student of the Physics and of portions of the De caelo and the Metaphysics will form his own conclusions, and we shall touch upon il again in dealing with Aristotle’s Cosmography and Theology in this Introduction. But meanwhile we must return to the fundamenta] problems of the nature of mind and matter and of the connexion between them.
Aristotle accepts the teaching of Empedocles that earth, watcr, air, and fire are the four elementary substances with which the physicist has to deal; xxii INTRODUCTION but he differs from him in two respects, for he adds to these four a fifth element of an essentially different character (of which more hereafter), and he holds that the four generally acknowledged elements are capable of changing into each other, which implies that there must be a common something underlying them all and preserving its own individuality while assuming, for instance, now the watery and now the aeyial forms and qualities, though never manifesting itself nakedly.
This common underlying something is what Aristotle means by ‘ matter,’ the ultumate ‘ material ’ out of which all tangible substances are built. He never gives us an express account of the nature of matter, and indeed tells us that we can only get at it at all by inference and analogy, not by direct access through the senses; but nevertheless he incidentally reveals to us that in his own mind, as in that of Locke, matter must have certain primary attributes of its own which it retains under all its metamorphoses, in addition to the attributes which distinguish the elements from each other. Can we say what they are ἢ To begin with, Aristotle constantly falls back upon the axiom that ‘ two bodies cannot occupy the same place.’ He never defends or examines this belief, or seems to think that anyone can question it. This, then, gives us at once Locke’s ‘ extension ’ (dimen- sionality) and ‘impenetrability ’ as primary attributes of matter.
We shall be able, as we go along, to add more to our conception of matter, but we have enough already to show us that to Anstotle it is matter that constitutes the ‘thingness’ of things. ‘ Things’ xxiv INTRODUCTION ‘have’ such qualities as weight, colour, shape, density; but they ‘ are’ something more and other than aggregates of distinguishable and distinguish- ing qualities—and that in virtue of their objective ‘ materiality.’
Now all this is profoundly unsatisfactory to the metaphysician, who will allow no privileged position to the supposed ‘ primary attributcs’ of matter; but the plain man ἐπ spite of the daily shocks he now receives from Science herself) still stubbornly continues to hold that things ‘ have’ attributes but that the attributes do not constitute the ‘ thingness ’ of the things that ‘ have ’ them, since attributes must be the attributes of something and cannot them- selves be the basis that they presuppose. And this is precisely Aristotle’s position.
Passing now from ‘matter’ itself to the four elements, which are the simplest forms under which it manifests itself, we find Aristotle thinking of them as characterized and differentiated by two ‘couples’ giving four combinations: Earth is dry and cold, Water cold and moist, Air moist and warm, [Fire warm and dry. Add to these expansion produced by heat and contraction produced by cold and we have a rough conception of Aristotle's analysis of the objective transformations that the elements them- selves (and their mixtures and combinations) undergo, independently of the states of consciousness they produce in us. But note that we are now adding another attribute of matter: it can be contracted or expanded. This, unlike ‘ dimensionality ’ and ‘ im- penetrability,’ 1s not tacitly assumed but deliberately claimed, and defended against a rival opinion, by Aristotle, to whose system, as we shall see, it is ΧΧΡ INTRODUCTION integral, Note also that it is not one of Locke's ‘ primary attributes.’
The careful reader of Aristotle, however, will soon notice an uncertainty, and at least an incipient un- easiness, in his treatment of fire. He sometimes seems to be on the very verge of discovering that it is not a substance or element at all, but the extreme manifestation of the quality or state of ‘heat.’ And he certainly does not regard fire as the sole cause of heat. Of this more under the heading of Cosmo- graphy. But meanwhile we can trace something analogous to this uncertamty or absence of ‘ defini- tion’ (in the photographic sense) in the conception of the other elements also.
Jf we were to say that Aristotle and his con- temporaries meant by ‘ air ’ anything that is gaseous, by ‘ water’ anything that is liquid, and by ‘ earth’ anything that is solid, much of what startles us now would become quile natural. We should see why Aristotle is so confident that air and water can pass into each other, for instance, and why he regards metals as prevailingly ‘aqueous’ (for they can be almost completely liquefied), but partially ἡ earthy,’ perhaps because, as well as being solid at ordinary temperatures, they always seem to leave a slag. But to substitute ‘ gas,’ ‘ liquid,’ and ‘solid,’ for ‘air,’ ‘water,’ and ‘ earth,’ would be to make the ancients too definitely modern. We can only say that they regard the ‘ elements’ as types or norms, to the ‘ nature ’ of which (pure or mingled) all other material substances approximate.
We have next to observe that there are members of our own bodies by which we feel things to be hot or cold to the touch, and these members themselves xxvi INTRODUCTION become hotter or colder to the touch in the process of feeling the things they touch to be so; but neverthe- less, inasmuch as inorganic nature is not conecived by Aristotle or by the plain man as having any consciousness at all, the hot water, for instance, does not itself ‘ feel hot.” The physical condition of water or iron that we call ‘being hot’ is. therefore, a different thing from the state of consciousness which we call ‘ feeling hot.’
As we pass from the sense of touch through those of taste, smell, hearing, and sight, the distinction between the physical cause and the mental effect hecomcs more and more obvious, even to the thought- less, though it can hardly become more real to the thoughtful; and Aristotle keeps vigilant guard against vague and fanciful analogics—such as, that ‘smoath’ things will naturally taste sweet, and ’ * sharp-cornered ’ things bitter—which profess to give ‘explanations’ of the correspondences between states of sense-consciousness and the physical pro- perties of the things that provoke them. We shall meet with this problem again when we come to speak of the emotions and the intellect; but, so far as the senses are concerned, we may note at once that Aristotle accepts, registers, and examines these correspondences between states of matter and states of consciousness rather than tries to ‘ explain’ them, But this is nol to say that he has nothing enlighten- ing to say about them, On the contrary, an examina- tion of his conceptions on this subject will lead us straight to the heart of one of the most fundamental and luminous of his philosophical principles. He is perpetually referring to the distmetion between potentiality and actuality, and he often assures us VOL, I δ xxvii INTRODUCTION