1. Dr. Whewell’s remarks show how Aristotle’s method necessarily got in the way of true observation and interpretation of nature. They matter to us mainly because people have always felt a connection between the physical treatises and those that Aristotle, or a disciple, classed as Metaphysical. These latter writings have been much disputed. Some suppose they got their name from an accident of placement beside the books on Physics, since they could not conveniently be filed among them. Others suppose it came from Aristotle’s own feeling that he was rising into a region above and beyond the one he had been living in.
2. One of his early commentators seems to adopt both explanations. He says the object of this treatise is theological: here Aristotle “theologises.” Our order of learning begins with what is last by nature, because that is better known to us. So Aristotle spoke first of physical matters, which are last by nature but first to us. The present subject is first by nature but last to us, since imperishable things are older than perishable, and the ungenerated older than the generated. Therefore he spoke first of things moved without order (in his book on Meteors), then of things moved according to an order or system (in the work on the Heavens, concerning stars and spheres), and finally, in this treatise, of things that are wholly immovable. That is theology, a study that befits the gods. So the work is entitled After-the-Physics: it is to be read after the physical treatises, and the title shows this. Another scholiast is more decisive: the title refers not to the character of the book but to the order of reading, since the book treats of physical principles. Taken together with the books themselves, these hints will, I think, explain how the two theories arose and largely reconcile them. As we proceed we shall see in what sense Aristotle “theologises,” in what sense he treats of “unmoved” and therefore non-physical things, and in what sense he treats of physical “principles.”
3. The first Book of the Metaphysics (the one we reasonably suppose to be first, from its style and method) starts from an investigation of the words Art and Experience, which we shall meet again in the Ethics, and rises to an examination of the word Wisdom, or σοφία. Wisdom is knowledge of certain causes and principles. The obvious next question is what kinds of causes and principles, but Aristotle thinks he has already answered it implicitly. Sense and experience take note of individual cases. Wisdom rises to the first causes and principles, the most universal, those furthest from casual observation. I must give his own striking words. Through Wonder men have always begun to philosophise. At first they wondered at the difficult things close at hand, then little by little asked about greater things: the changes of the moon, the sun and stars, the origin of the universe. But whoever is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant. So the philosopher is in a way a lover of fables, for fables are made of wonders. Since men philosophised to escape ignorance, they evidently pursued knowledge for its own sake and not for any advantage. The facts support this: this wisdom began to be sought only when the necessities of life and leisure were already supplied. Just as a man is free who exists for his own sake and not another’s, so this is the one wholly free knowledge, because it alone exists purely for itself. So its possession may fairly be thought not to belong to man, since human nature is often servile. According to Simonides, “God alone would have this prize,” and it is unworthy of us not to seek the knowledge that is proper to him. “If the poets speak truly that the Divine Nature is envious, Simonides must be right, and all over-learned people must be unhappy. But the Divine Nature cannot be envious; rather, as the proverb says, ‘the poets lie.’ No study is more honourable than this, for what is most godlike is most honourable. Now a science may be godlike in two ways: because it is what God has above all others, or because it is itself the knowledge of the Divine. This one is both, for God seems to be a kind of beginning of causes, and God alone or chiefly will possess this knowledge. All other kinds of knowledge are more needful for common purposes, but none is better.”
4. The wise man presented here is not the old Greek sage who could outwit his fellows and found a tyranny. He is not the anxious questioner asking in every direction, “Where is wisdom found?” He is not the Sophist who brings every kind of knowledge to market and sells it to the highest bidder, pledging that it will bring power and its fruits. He is not the Socratic philosopher asking everything he sees for the meaning or truth hidden in it, nor the Platonic philosopher seeking what holds knowledge, society, and nature together. He must be carefully distinguished from, and set against, the man of business or practice (a man highly to be prized in his way). He has a function entirely his own, one that raises him almost to a Divine level and makes him the one fit beholder of what is Divine. And what is the Divine? The answer is that it is the Cause: what lies beneath all other causes, is not subject to accident, movement, or the law of growth, and is the original root of all things. Here we have the Aristotelian theology.
5. But by this definition the theology is Metaphysics. It comes after physics in the order of discovery: after because it is implied in physics, and after because it is beyond them. For that very reason it cannot be separated from them, since you cannot know what it is except by its relation to them. I have been careful until now to use the name as little as possible, at least in sketching the Greek inquirers; it is dangerous to anticipate a name. The time will surely come when it is imposed if it is wanted, and a definer of boundaries will appear and say, “This is Morals,” “This is Physics,” “This is Metaphysics.” If he shows he has a right to be heard, we must listen. But we shall understand his exact limits far less well if we have not first let earlier students take their own course and explain themselves. However grateful we may be to a teacher for telling us what to call each thing, we must be careful not to take him as the interpreter of his predecessors. He has a service of his own to render, but it is in the nature of that service that he be an over-strict disciplinarian. He insists that guerilla troops, whose worth lies in their sudden and irregular appearance, follow the rules of regular warfare. He compels men whose order is as strict as his own but wholly different to adopt his signs and divisions, on pain of being treated as disobedient and lawless.
6. This applies especially to the able review of earlier Greek philosophers in the first book of the Metaphysics. Causes, Aristotle says, are fourfold: (1) the substance of a thing, what constitutes it; (2) its matter, the needful condition of it; (3) the source from which its motion comes; (4) the reason, purpose, or good of its existence. No one can deny the value of this classification for Aristotle’s purposes, or that, used with moderation, it can help a student clear his mind about his own aims. But Aristotle believes each school of Greek thinkers followed one of these courses of inquiry and took it as the only and sufficient method. So the Ionic philosophers studied the matter of things, hoping to find a primary element to which all else could be referred. Those who chose fire were led by its effects to speculate on the mystery of Motion. That started a new kind of inquiry, pursued much in the spirit of the inquiries about elements, until Anaxagoras discovered the need for an Intelligence to set physical agents moving. But he turned to this ultimate principle only when other instruments failed him, so the Atomic theory, which explained nature’s facts more plausibly than his Homœomeriæ, easily replaced them. Between this theory and the one that made Numbers the first principles of things, Aristotle seems to detect a connection, not well supported by chronology. The doctrine of numbers he takes as the first form of the inquiry into the essence or substance of things, and the archetypal ideas of the Platonists, who regarded numbers as intervening powers between sensible things and pure essences, as the second and higher form. The inquiry about the purpose of things, he imagines, was not pursued distinctly by any class of predecessors but entered confusedly into the speculations of them all.
7. Now if Socrates was, as I have maintained, the keystone of Greek speculation (an opinion supported by many passages in Aristotle himself), this historical sketch, however ingenious, cannot be correct. In it Socrates is an interloper, rightly mentioned only in a parenthesis as devoting himself chiefly to ethical inquiries, and Plato’s intellectual descent is traced, not through him, but to the Ionian and Heraclitan schools. Throughout this treatise Aristotle shows a lack of sympathy with his predecessors. It must have made it impossible for him to understand their complicated thoughts and anxieties, even had he not been set on arranging them, and so he was needlessly irritated with those whose vagrant habits defied arrangement. Yet his hints about other men help us greatly to know him. The Metaphysics are troublesome reading, partly from frequent repetitions and partly from the difficulty of finding a sequence in the books. Still, any student who wants to investigate the questions that have occupied later men should read them. To illustrate my earlier remarks I shall trace a very rough outline of the subjects discussed and record some of the solutions Aristotle gives to the difficulties he raises.
8. A kind of appendix after the first book proves that causes are not infinite, so that the inquiry earlier philosophers engaged in can be carried on. This same short book contains important remarks on how the search is to be conducted; on the contributions each school may have made; on the advantage a philosopher may draw from attending even to popular notions; on some men’s dislike of exact mathematical reasoning and others’ insistence on nothing else; and on limiting mathematical accuracy to things without matter. It also clearly announces a principle the student of Aristotle must always keep in mind: the end of theoretical science is truth, of practical science, work. He adds an explanation that further shows how he differs from his master: the practical man has nothing to do with the eternal or the absolute, only with the relative. This book ends with a promise to inquire into the meaning of the word Nature, which the book commonly placed next does not fulfil.
9. This second book is a collection of doubts or questions to be resolved later. The first is whether it is the business of one science or of several to inquire into all kinds of causes or principles. That question involves the subject of the whole treatise. The province called σοφία seems to include so many different things (matters purely of sense, causes of motion, the nature of Being, the reason and purpose of things) that it is hard to suppose one science dealing with principles that apparently admit neither analogy nor contrast. Second: are the Principles of things the most comprehensive Genera to which individual things can be referred, or the atoms of which they consist? Third, connected with it: is there anything besides individual things? If not, how can they be known, since individual things are infinite and knowledge is of what is one and universal? Fourth: are the principles of perishable and imperishable things the same? Fifth, the great question of all: are Being and Unity the essences of things that are, not distinguishable from them, or must we seek τὸ ὄν and τὸ ἕν as if each had a distinct nature? Sixth: are numbers, bodies, planes, and points substances or not? These are the general controversies we hope to see settled in the following books.
10. The third book may be taken as an answer to the first question. There is a science that contemplates Existence as Existence, and whatever belongs to it in that respect, unlike other sciences, which treat only attributes of particular existences. There are things peculiar to Being as Being, and the philosopher’s function is to investigate the truth about them. The dialectician and the sophist resemble the philosopher; Being is the common subject-matter of all three. But they only discourse about the subjects that are in a peculiar sense his property. Dialectical power differs from the philosophical in its nature, the sophistical in the intention of the user: dialectic is tentative about what philosophy knows, and sophistry is apparent knowledge that is not real. This passage shows the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian dialectics. For Plato dialectics was the human science, the philosopher’s science as such, and σοφία in its essence belongs to God. Aristotle finds a difference between dialectics and the highest philosophy, and inevitably: since his dialectic treats only the forms of human thought and deals with knowledge as the powers and means of knowing that we possess, there must be another science about the objects of knowledge as such. But in this science too the objects cease to be objects and become subjects for man’s contemplation; they become Metaphysics or Ontology. The hint about the Sophist here should also be compared with the elaborate portrait of his character and functions in the dialogue between the Eleatic stranger and Theætetus. It connects with the question whether mathematical axioms are matters for the Ontologist or highest philosopher. The answer is yes. The mathematician assumes these axioms; the student of physics sometimes meddles with them, rashly and presumptuously; as first principles they can be known only by the person whose office we are defining. Since the Sophist especially delighted in denying axioms, saying the same thing can be and not be, this is the natural place to settle his pretensions. True to their difference, Aristotle shows him not, as Plato does, as an inventor of counterfeit images of what is, but as one who attributes accidents to accidents instead of to substances. We can hardly imagine two portraits of the same person so correct and so felicitous, yet so thoroughly expressing the manner and principle of their respective artists.
11. The fourth book is a book of definitions. I can convey its importance only by listing the words defined: Principle (ἀρχή), Cause, Element, Nature, Necessity, Unity, Being, Substance, Sameness, Opposition, First and Last, Power, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Perfection, Limitation, “in respect of which” (secundum quid), whose meaning is easily seen in Touchstone’s words in As You Like It: “In respect that it is of the country it is a good life, but in respect that it is not of the court it is a vile life”; Disposition, Habit, Passion, Privation, Inclusion, Derivation, Part, Whole, the mutilated, Kind, Falsehood, Accident. Some of these explanations are evidently repeated from the Categories and the Analytics. Some are better understood from the arguments in later books than from any formal definition. Still they are worth reading and reflecting on. The one on “Nature” is perhaps the most important, but the only satisfactory clue to his notions of it is the whole treatise.
12. The fifth book explains Aristotle’s view of the difference between physical and ontological science. They agree in being theoretic, not practical or productive. They differ in that the physical deals with what is capable of change or movement and is embedded in matter, while the primary philosophy deals with the unchangeable and what is separate from matter. Mathematical science lies between: like ontology in the first respect, like physics in the second. If there is such a science as Theology, it must be a part, and the highest part, of the primary Philosophy. The Divine Nature must pre-eminently be outside the circle of composite and movable things. The things physical science treats are subject to accidents. There cannot be a science of accidents, since as such they exclude science altogether. But there may be, and are, principles and causes of things that admit accidents. In seeking these, physical science keeps its formal distinction from the higher science that deals with beings and essences as such. There is another sense of “Being,” used especially by the Platonists, that must be distinguished from ours: Being had been confounded with truth, and Not-being with falsehood. Now truth, according to Aristotle, is in the mind, not in things. Affirmation combines, negation separates; falsehood separates what should be combined and combines what should be separate. But the existences we are dealing with are simple or uncompounded. Here again is a capital and vital point of difference between the two philosophies.
13. The sixth book contains some of the most important distinctions in the whole treatise. Ontology is concerned with Substance. What is to be counted a substance? Are walking, sitting, being in health substances? No: all these imply a subject to which they refer. In this way we get rid of the notion of a substantial good, and of a substantial warmth or whiteness. All these are qualities of some subject, and what that subject is must be sought in each individual that presents itself to our observation.
14. But does not substance, so considered, necessarily connect itself with body? Here is one of our great puzzles. Some would make the boundaries of body substances; some would have substances not cognizable by the senses at all; some would make the One the primary substance and suppose other sets of substances, such as numbers, magnitudes, souls, generated from it. Aristotle’s opinion is this. Every subject has, first, ὕλη, which we must translate matter, and second, μορφή, form. The matter of a thing is its necessary condition. But matter is not its essence; something else is implied in it, something it presents or makes manifest. Applying this to the questions that occupied the third class of philosophers in the introductory book, the Platonists and Pythagoreans, this form is the true εἶδος they dreamed of. It is the essential thing in each thing, that by which substance is possible and without which it is inconceivable. But it does not exist apart from each particular subject. It enters into the definition of every subject, and without it the definition would be none; so it must be viewed in that subject and cannot be contemplated as a distinct, peculiar essence. By this rule, all notions of an ideal form of hollowness or of pugnosedness (Aristotle’s favourite illustration) are out of the question. These cannot primarily be subjects of a definition; they presuppose something whose properties they are, and only in that can you look for an εἶδος. Every notion of Being as distinct from the particular person or thing that is, falls to the ground. Socrates and the being of Socrates are identical, and the αὐτοέκαστον (“each thing itself”) of which Plato talked is nothing but this εἶδος, or form, inherent in the thing.
15. The way this same principle applies to another class of inquiries, those about the origin of things, needs closer examination.
In any production we find, first, something from which it has been generated; second, something by which it has been generated; third, the result, the thing itself. There are three modes of production: natural, artificial, automatic. In natural productions we see a matter at once; indeed Nature itself, in the largest sense, may be defined as that out of which things are produced. Everything that becomes has a nature, which is another way of saying it has a ὕλη, and that in each thing which might not have been is this ὕλη. The result formed from this matter is some substance: a vegetable, a beast, a man. But what is the producing cause in each case? Clearly something of like kind with the result: a man generates a man. So the resulting thing implies a productive force distinct from the matter it works on, and this is our εἶδος. The combination of εἶδος with ὕλη both produces a substance and constitutes it. Now look at artificial productions. Here too the εἶδος is the producing power, and it is in the soul. The physician’s art, the architect’s plan, is the εἶδος that produces actual health or an actual house. But here a distinction arises: these productions involve a νόησις and a ποίησις. The νόησις is the perception and inner holding of the form; the ποίησις is the making out of the given matter. The third mode, neither strictly natural nor artificial, works by the action of the thing itself. For instance, a cure may come by applying warmth; a body may become warm by rubbing; this warmth in the body is either itself a portion of health or leads to something like itself that is. Evidently this implies the earlier presence of either nature or an artificer. And this kind of generative influence must combine with another: there must be a productive power and something out of which it is produced. In every case, then, there is an ὕλη and an εἶδος. What is generated is the whole substance, of matter and form. But the form, properly speaking, is not generated. It is reproduced in each particular subject in combination with a certain matter, and becomes a new and peculiar form by that combination. Every production therefore needs a certain form and a certain matter. All the qualities of the produced substance must inhere (potentially, not actually) in the substance producing, and may belong to the form when they are produced.
16. It remains to consider how this doctrine bears on the philosophers who busied themselves with a primary element. The inquiries of those who sought the τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα (that for the sake of which) are reserved for another discussion. But first several doubts of the second book must be resolved. First, the meaning of Part and Whole. The most obvious sense of part concerns quantity, but that has nothing to do with our subject. We want the connection of the idea of Part with substance. Granting the division of substance into ὕλη and εἶδος, we should say that in a brass statue the brass is part of the statue as the complex of form and matter, but not of the statue considered as a Form. Now since Form is the proper subject of a definition (it can be described in itself, while the material cannot), in some cases we necessarily speak of parts as constituting the whole and in others not. We define a circle without reference to its parts, and a syllable by the letters that compose it. The parts of the circle are material parts; the parts of the syllable are formal, logical parts. If you regard a syllable as composed of letters in wax, or of sounds in the air, its divisions become material and fall outside a logical definition. Again, in a material division the whole precedes the part. Logically and formally, the part precedes the whole. If you define the life of an animal, you will describe it by some of its functions; none of its other functions can be performed without sensation, so sensation will be assumed in the existence of the whole animal. This holds equally for matter of the senses (æsthetic) and for matter of the mind (noetic: the figures of mathematics). Generally, then, the question of priority between “part” and “whole” depends on the distinction between matter and form, and cannot be settled if that distinction is disregarded. Aristotle admits, however, the difficulty of defining by form alone, and not by the complex substance of form and matter together. He acknowledges that the attempt to divide matter from substance and treat sensible things as not sensible led to all the Pythagorean and Platonic inventions he so dislikes.
17. Another question, involving the same philosophers, follows at once. How are substances connected with kinds? If there are types after which all sensible things are formed, these types would seem to be universals, and what the senses deal with, particulars. On this view all differences and properties found in the most marked individual of a kind would have to be included in those primitive universal forms; but by logic the opposite is the case. The genus is stripped of the difference that goes to make up the species, and of the properties that go to make up the individual. Your genera can never be types of the individual; by their nature they lack all that characterises him. So the εἶδος, which is the essential in each thing and makes it what it is, must be seen as individualised by the ὕλη it is joined to. Apart from that modification it is only a logical existence, the highest genus to which it is finally referred being pre-eminently what can be contemplated only by and in the mind. This I take to be Aristotle’s meaning, and from it follows closely the doctrine with which he winds up this book, applying it to those who dealt mainly with ὕλη. Given any fact or thing, I have no further need to trouble myself about the fact, the ὅτι; the sense, or something like sense, supplies that. When I see a musical man I am not to ask what the musical man is; he is what I behold and nothing else. My business is with the διότι, the cause: why is he this or that? The answer is in the εἶδος, the form or constitution, the ultimate reason of what each thing is. So I get no nearer the cause of things by reducing them to natural elements. The analysis may be physically proper or useful, but it does not lead to what I seek. Whatever is, and whatever I can behold with senses or mind, is not the A or the B of which it is composed but something else. The synthesis of A and B involves the presence of a form or existence that cannot be found in either separately. So find as many primary elements as you will, you have not found an ἀρχή.
18. Our main business, then, is to find the meaning of this εἶδος and its relation to the ὕλη. The seventh book takes up the subject and carries forward a hint from the last, perhaps the most pregnant in Aristotle’s writings and the one with most effect on his whole philosophy. The εἶδος or μορφή is an energy; the ὕλη is a δύναμις, a capacity that needs the action of the energy to produce a result. Οὐσία, as I said, is the synthesis of these. If you leave out the ἐνέργεια you come only to material elements and combinations that do not give you the actual things you are examining. The difficulty is about things that seem to have no ἐνέργεια in themselves, such as a house. Must their substances be something distinct from and external to them? The answer: do you ask whether the material house, the stones and cement, is a substance? Certainly not; you have excluded the notion of substance by the way you put the question. But do you ask whether that house is actually something? Your question assumes it. You cannot define anything without treating it as a substance, however you satisfy yourself about why it is so. So there is something, not distinct from the house but implied in it, which is a form or εἶδος. The test that it exists is your own attempt to define it.
19. On this principle of an energy and a δύναμις in each substance, he shows how necessary it is in any inquiry after causes to keep three questions in view. By cause do you mean capacity, δύναμις? Moving power? The form? (The last two may always be the same, but the inquiry into the constitution of each thing is distinct from the inquiry into its productive force.) Or lastly, do you mean the οὗ ἕνεκα? (This too may be the same question as the last, differently stated: the constitution of each thing may determine its purpose.)
20. But this use of “capacity” (δύναμις) raises another doubt. Has not every subject a capacity for contraries? Must we not say that every healthy body is potentially sick, and water potentially both wine and vinegar? The answer is that this absence or deprivation of qualities is an accident of those qualities and not itself a quality. For a dead body to become alive it must pass into a certain ὕλη that has the potentiality of life; for vinegar to become wine it must pass into water; nothing similar happens in the opposite case. Finally he applies this principle to the difficulty about unity, which he had often hinted at and on which he had already spoken plainly. If a man is defined as a biped animal, why does each of these, “animal” and “biped,” not constitute a separate entity? What, in short, grounds our conception of each thing and person as one? Aristotle suggests that the question is hopeless if put in this form, since each variation of your definition creates a new puzzle. He would rather assume the unity of each thing as a fact or datum of the understanding and account for its being reduced to different constituent elements. This is accounted for by the necessary co-presence of matter and form in each thing, matter being merely a potentiality and form an energy. In this way the dream of a unity distinct from the individual thing is got rid of, as the dream of a substance distinct from each particular thing was before.
21. The eighth book is still occupied with capacities and energies. Aristotle inquires into the different senses of δύναμις: what we mean when we say a thing can or cannot be. There is a use of this language in geometry that is metaphorical and not to our purpose. We say a thing can or cannot be, meaning that it is or is not. But all δυνάμεις in the proper sense refer to some primary δύναμις, which is the cause or beginning of a change in some other thing as another thing. Warmth, for instance, is a δύναμις, equally in what warms and in what is warmed. The δύναμις in the thing warmed refers to the corresponding primary δύναμις in the thing warming, and this necessary implication of what answers to itself in something else is its characteristic nature. To every capacity there corresponds an incapacity, which may mean the absence of a faculty of communication, the absence of a faculty of reception, or merely a negative want, or a positive state involving that want.
22. Δυνάμεις are divided into rational and irrational: the rational subsist in the reasonable soul, the irrational are merely physical. All art and knowledge are of the first class. A radical distinction between them can be found thus. Warmth, an irrational δύναμις, can only produce warmth; the physician’s art can produce either health or sickness. In general, one kind of power can produce contrary changes, the other only one change; and the contrary changes are wrought by the rational powers with and upon the irrational.
23. This description of δυνάμεις might seem in some points to trench on the notion of energies given in the last book, so Aristotle goes on to distinguish them. The Megarian sect, following their general rule of reducing every idea to that of Being and excluding any distinct notion of production and becoming, had identified Power or Capacity with energy. Where there is no building, they said, there is no builder. Apply this to arts, says Aristotle, and the man who has studied longest ceases to have the art as soon as he stops exercising it. Apply it to things without reason or life, and nothing is sweet, warm, or cold except at the moment it is tasted or felt. In our minds this is perhaps not very destructive of their proposition, but it was very effective against the Megarians, who had a great horror of the Protagorean doctrine. So a thing may have the capacity of being and not be, and the capacity of not being and be; what it is the capacity of takes place when something is added, which is Energy. Energy is analogous to motion. You cannot predicate motion or energy of things that are not; the moment energy or motion is added, they are. But many things that are not have a possible or potential existence. (As a note: this passage determines as clearly as any the meaning of ἐντελέχεια, the opposite of potentiality yet ill translated by “actuality.” Εἶδος expresses the substance of each thing at rest, its form or constitution; ἐνέργεια its substance as active and generative; ἐντελέχεια seems the synthesis of the two. Cicero’s effectio gives its most important side but not the whole.) Yet Energy is not to be confounded with Motion. The difference is not where we might suspect, that motion belongs to the irrational and energy to the rational, for Learning falls under Motion and sight under Energy. The difference is that every motion is incomplete, tending toward an end without including it, while energy has its end in itself and involves no pause or termination. Learning, building, walking all imply a termination. Seeing, thinking, being happy imply none; these are Energies.
24. On this showing, energy precedes δύναμις in the order of reason and of substance, though not always in the order of time. It precedes in reason because the first of all capacities is the capacity of energising: a man who has the faculty of building has in him the capacity of using his energy in the art of building. In time it is otherwise. The primary energising power precedes, even in time, what receives its impression, Form being older than Matter. But in any particular person or thing, we say its capacity of being that person or thing precedes its being so actually. Yet even then there is always a prior energy presumed in some other thing to which it owes its existence. So we get a principle we shall find put to practical use in the Ethics: the exercise of any particular energy precedes the habitual use of the faculty, and it is by playing the harp that we become harp players. Several important ethical doctrines are developed in this inquiry, but I shall notice them later. One more pregnant notion bears directly on our present subject. Δύναμις was defined as the cause of change in another thing as another thing. But this notion needs a resting-place, unless there is some primary δύναμις presupposed in all others, which is the beginning of motion. This is φύσις, and so we have reached the most complete notion of it we can expect. Energy still precedes and surpasses this first and primary cause of all change.
Aristotle goes on to show how Energy is better and more glorious than δύναμις, for instance because δύναμις is the same for contraries. The capacity of health and sickness is the same; so for stillness and movement, rising and falling. But one of each pair must be good, so the energy that determines which contrary takes effect must be better than the Faculty or Capacity. Two consequences follow. First, Energy is what makes things be evil that have only the possibility of evil in them. Second, in things primary and eternal there is no evil, no fault, no decay; the capacity for evil lies in Nature. Every moral and theological student will feel the importance of these two axioms. Another proposition, widely applied in another direction, is added about discovery: it means bringing into Energy things that exist potentially, because Knowing is an Energy.
25. This book ends with another reference to the relation between truth and being, falsehood and not-being. Truth and falsehood are the accordance or discordance of our judgment with the actual state of things, and three cases fall under notice. First, things always united and inseparable, or always separable and never united. Here the judgment must be uniform: the same will be true in all cases, false in all cases. Second, things that may be separated or united. Here comes the possibility that something is true today and false tomorrow, or true in one aspect and false in another. Third, things perfectly simple, admitting neither division nor combination. To these the words true and false do not apply, only knowledge and ignorance: you either know such things or you do not. About them no mistake or deception is possible, only the presence or absence of knowledge. All sensible objects whose existence you ascertain by touch or sight are of this kind; the lack of touch or sight, not a false opinion, shuts them out from you.
26. In the ninth book we meet the question of unity again. The name One, he says, is used in four ways: for what is continuous by nature, for a whole, for an individual thing, and for what is predicated of a whole. The general sense of the Indivisible is common to all. Unity in any of these senses may be attributed to a substance that is inseparable in place, form, and thought, as well as to an actually indivisible whole. The fundamental notion of unity he takes to be that of a measure of quantities; without such a measure quantity is inconceivable. There may be something actually indivisible, or something indivisible to our senses; an actual unity in form and a supposed unity in matter. Each bears the name because each is used as a measure. He asserts the need for such a measure against the Protagorean notion that man is the measure of all things, which he treats as a silly truism that puts on the form of a paradox and has the effects of a falsehood.
27. A distinct absolute unity is denied on precisely the same ground as a distinct absolute substance. The One is always some one thing or nature. In colours, if you suppose them all to come from white, white is the one; in voices, the elementary vowel; and so in all cases. So the Ionic attempt to find some matter, such as air or fire, to be unity is as unreasonable as the Parmenidean, Pythagorean, and Platonic attempts to give unity itself a formal and separate character.
28. “The One” is the undivided or indivisible; this is its primary notion, to which all others reduce. “The many” will then mean the divided or divisible, from which, as more cognizable by the senses, the One will be inferred. Next: how are the one and the many opposed? Are not the “many” and the “few” equally opposed, and if so, is unity not merely an element of plurality? This brings in a discussion of the different modes of opposition: contradiction, relation, privation, strict contrariety. Possibly there is some confusion here of different lectures or reports, for in the lengthy explanation we seem to lose sight of the original subject. My readers will have noticed how much the idea of a “law of opposition” in things entered all Greek speculation, so as to seem to many its foundation. Aristotle approaches it from the logical side: the forms of opposition he finds in our minds determine his view of the actual opposition in nature. So his remarks, though apparently irrelevant, throw considerable light on his doctrine of unity. What our understanding needs in order to explain to itself the existence of multitude, he called “the One.” In his mind, unity was therefore identical with Singleness.
29. The next book is mostly a recapitulation of puzzles and solutions already given. It is not to be passed over on that account, for Aristotle’s repetitions of himself, or the reports of his different pupils, generally clear away difficulties. Here especially the remarks on the nature and limits of the primary philosophy, and his refutation of Protagoras’s two cardinal sophisms, are in many respects fuller than in the third book. I shall notice only his analysis of Motion and his remarks on the Infinite. Motion is neither an energy nor merely a potency; it must be contemplated alternately as each. A lump of brass is potentially a statue; the energy that will make it one is in the sculptor’s mind. The motion, the transition from brass to statue, is found neither in the brass nor in the mind; it is what gives the brass’s potentiality its meaning and connects it with the energy. In a formula: “Motion is the entelechy (the perfecting power or principle) of the potential as potential.” He admits the difficulty of finding an expression for this idea, but shows by examining earlier attempts that his own, however awkward, is the only satisfactory one.
30. On the Infinite, which had so exercised earlier Greek speculators and had been resorted to as the ultimate solution of so many difficulties, he aims at no precision of language, because by its nature it excludes precision. To fit it into a scheme, or treat it as a helpful definition of nature or the universe, is in his judgment absurd. It can only mark the ne plus ultra to which human thought and inquiry can reach, or already have reached. By its very name it excludes the limitations by which alone you can deal with subjects within human cognizance. His opinion here is characteristic of his mind and bears importantly on the history of metaphysics. Scarcely any question interested the Greek mind more than the one at issue between the schools of Pythagoras and Xenophanes: whether it is truer and more reverent to speak of God as the Limit or as the Infinite. Aristotle’s concluding remark on the Infinite should be quoted for the incidental light its latter clause throws on his idea of Time, an idea modern students of philosophy need to reflect on. The infinite is not the same in magnitude, motion, and time, as if it were one nature; rather the later is spoken of in terms of the earlier, as motion in terms of the magnitude over which it moves or changes or grows, and time by means of the motion.
31. Book eleven opens with an attempt to fix the number of causes or first principles. Every sensible substance has a capacity of change, and the changes are four: in substance, quality, quantity, and place. Generation and corruption name the first, growth and decay the second, alteration (ἀλλοίωσις) the third, transference (φορά) the fourth. These are changes into contraries. But contraries themselves do not change; something must undergo the change from one to the other, and this something must be Matter. Being does not arise from not-being; being in potency is changed into being in energy, and being in potency is matter. Granting this, there are three ἀρχαί or first principles: the two contraries Form and Privation (στέρησις), and the Matter that passes from one to the other.
32. But Aristotle says this statement strictly applies only to material things, where the element (στοιχεῖον) and the principle (ἀρχή) are the same. You have heat, the εἶδος; cold, the στέρησις; what has the potency of being either, the ὕλη; and the resulting substance, the flesh, bone, or whatever it may be. But in things apprehended by the mind another idea intrudes. Besides the two opposites, health and sickness, and the matter susceptible of both, you have the health-making art of the physician. The principle, so used, acquires a double meaning that the element does not have: it must be contemplated both as the stationary Form and the moving Power. There must in a sense be four ἀρχαί, though only three elements. The reader will see that these conclusions were partly anticipated, but they need repeating here, for here is the link between Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his Theology; this is the road, or one step of the road, by which he reaches the conception of a First Moving Cause. Most of this remarkable book is devoted to unfolding that conception. I can only give the results of an argument that Aristotle clearly felt to be the summing-up of his metaphysical series. There must be an eternal, immovable Substance that is at the same time the source of all movement. Its primary notion is that it is an Energy. Potentiality is excluded from it, for the highest form of Being is incompatible with mere capacity of Being. And since Matter and Potentiality are convertible terms, it must be immaterial. There is no refuge from the notion that all things proceeded from darkness and nothingness except in this belief. Energy being prior to mere potency, eternity must be affirmed of the chaos or night out of which things are supposed to be formed in a different sense from that in which it is affirmed of the Primeval Being.
33. We must attribute a continual negative existence to this potency, but a continual operative existence only to the First Cause. We need the one to account for Corruption and Decay, the other to account for actual Existence and Life. Matter is in no sense a cause, either to itself or to anything else, while to a First Cause we necessarily attribute self-causation. Other things impart motion after first receiving it; this must be its own Mover. The next step toward apprehending this Being comes from considering our own intellect and will. There is an object of cognition, something to be known, and an object of volition, something to be desired, and these set intellect and will in us in motion. What appears good to each Understanding or Will actuates it; what primarily actuates must be what is good. In this we find the union of the faculty of knowledge with what is to be known, and of the faculty of will with what is to be desired. So self-contemplation and self-delight must be the essentials of Deity. By other processes of reasoning he concludes that the Being must be without parts (ἀμερής), without passions (ἀπαθές: the reader will notice the change of gender and will easily believe that τὸ θεῖον is a more common antecedent than ὁ θεός), and subject to no vicissitude (ἀναλλοίωτον).
34. We then approach the grand question: is there one such cause or many? Nowhere is the difference between Aristotle and his master more remarkable. We have seen how tenderly Plato treated his countrymen’s mythology, not from cowardice but because he felt it held a latent truth for which no philosophical abstractions or generalities could substitute. Aristotle, having satisfied himself that the argument favours one cause, sweeps away every notion that interferes with it. He considers the gods his country worshipped as derived from certain astrological notions, and merely as setting forth the secondary sensible substances that proceed from the first immaterial Cause.
35. With equal decision, on this new ground, he denounces the philosophical schemes that had been substituted for the old cosmogonies. He charges them with two common vices: they acknowledged an antithesis and contradiction in things but did not take account of the third element, matter, which is the only explanation of the evil and disorder in the universe; and they substituted many original principles for the one.
36. In the last two books the doctrines of the Platonists and Pythagoreans (on ideas and numbers) are discussed again at great length and with Aristotle’s usual ingenuity. I cannot be expected to go over arguments I have so often mentioned, and I am less anxious to present them fully than to prepare my readers to study them where they occur. But I may remark that the continual renewal of these discussions is important for determining the nature and connection of these treatises, and the character of Aristotle’s whole mind and system. Evidently he felt the refutation of these opinions, and the substitution of something else, to be in a manner the business of his life. At all events it was the needed preliminary to his more positive work: while his mind was haunted with these notions, the system he proposed to build, whether physical, metaphysical, or moral, seemed to him to rest on a dubious and infirm foundation. So I regard the metaphysical treatises (whether or not they can be reduced to formal sequence and unity) as having this subject at their centre. His aims are these: to show what ideas are not and what they are; to establish that the εἶδος is not distinct from the particular individual substance, existing apart and connecting it with some higher substance, but is merely its inherent form; to connect the εἶδος, the constituent principle of each thing, with the ἐνέργεια that calls it into existence, and so to give the same satisfactory answer to the two Greek inquiries about the nature of being and the origin of matter; to explain the nature and conditions of the ὕλη, and by depriving it of all intrinsic substantial properties and reducing it to a mere potency, practically to get rid of the old Ionic investigations; and finally to hint at a principle his moral writings fully expound, that the final Cause, the οὗ ἕνεκα, is also connected with the εἶδος and ἐνέργεια, so that the good or purpose of each class of substances is known when we know its nature and proper energy. This is the object he pursues most consistently through all his windings and recapitulations in the books of Metaphysics.
37. But this object connects on one side with Logic and on the other (as the scholiast is so anxious to tell us) with Theology. I have not seen my way to adopt Ritter’s method of identifying the logical treatises with the metaphysical, a plan inconsistent with the very words of the third book. By such a course, it seems to me, we would lose much insight into the philosopher’s habits of mind and the growth of his opinions, which we gain by studying the treatises distinctly while acknowledging their closest connection. I believe Aristotle to be primarily and at heart a logician, who became thoroughly enamoured of the forms of logic and convinced they gave a satisfactory account of the facts of the world, and then gradually worked out in his mind an Ontological system that gave the rationale of those forms and interpreted their relation to different phenomena. Now if it is true, as I have maintained, that the mathematician has another set of laws, discovered in the course of his inquiries, from those the logician knows, we need not be surprised that Aristotle’s arguments against Ideas are so constantly mixed with allusions to the Pythagorean study of Lines or Numbers, or that this study was actually the base of the principle he is trying to overthrow.
38. It is on all accounts a more important inquiry how Theology became interwoven with either set of speculations. I think it cannot be denied that the recognition of an absolute Being, an absolute Good, gave life to the whole doctrine of Plato and without it the doctrine is meaningless, while for Aristotle it is merely the crowning result, or at least the necessary postulate, of his philosophy. Consistent with this difference, it was a Being to satisfy the wants of Man that Plato sighed for, and a first Cause of Things that Aristotle did homage to. The first would part with no indication or symbol of the truth that God has held intercourse with men and made himself known to them; the second was content to seek in nature and logic for demonstrations of his attributes and his unity. When we use personal language to describe the God Plato speaks of, we feel it suits best with his feelings and principles, even when, through reverence or ignorance, he refrains from it himself. When we use personal language to describe the Deity of Aristotle, we feel it improper and unsuitable, even if, through deference to ordinary notions or the difficulty of inventing any other, he uses it himself. Theology, then, can have no connection with the ethics of Aristotle.