A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (the false prince series .txt) 📕

It was not Aristotle's habit to propound his theories as if they were something absolutely new, sprung for the first time out of his own brain. In attacking any problem, his custom was to begin by enumerating current and past opinions, to criticise them, to reject what was valueless in them, to retain the residue of truth, and to add to it his own suggestions and original ideas. The resultant of this process was his own theory, which he thus represented, not as absolutely new, but as a development of the views of his predecessors. This course he follows also in the present instance. The first book of the "Metaphysics" is a history of all previous philosophy, from Thales to Plato, undertaken with the object of investigating how far the four causes had been recognized by his predecessors. The material cause, he says, had been recognized from the first. The Ionics believed in this and no other cause. They sought to explain everything by matter, though they differed among themselves as to the nature of the material cause, Thales describing it as water, Anaximenes as air. Later philosophers also gave different accounts of it, Heracleitus thinking it was fire, Empedocles the four elements, Anaxagoras an indefinite number of kinds of matter. But the point is that they all recognized the necessity for a material cause of some sort to explain the universe.

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The earliest thinkers, then, the Ionics, assumed only this one cause. But as thought advanced, says Aristotle, and other philosophers came upon the scene, "the thing itself guided them." It was seen that a second cause was necessary to explain the motion and becoming of things. For matter itself does not produce its motion. Wood is not the cause of its becoming a bed, nor is brass the cause of its becoming a statue. Hence arose the idea of the efficient cause. The Eleatics did not recognize it, for they denied motion, and for them, therefore, no cause of motion could be assumed. But Parmenides, Aristotle thinks, wavered on this point, somehow allowing vaguely the existence of a second cause, which he denominated the hot and the cold. The reference is, of course, to the second part of the poem of Parmenides. Other philosophers clearly assumed an efficient cause, for they thought that one element, for example, fire, is more active, that is, more productive of motion, than others. Empedocles certainly attained to the idea of an efficient cause, for he named as moving forces, harmony and discord, love and hate. Anaxagoras also, used Nous as a moving force.

Formal causes had, perhaps, been recognized by the Pythagoreans, for numbers are forms. But they straightway degraded the formal cause to the level of a material cause by declaring that number is the stuff or matter of which things are made. Plato alone clearly saw the necessity for the formal cause, for formal causes are, as we have seen, the same as Plato's Ideas. But Plato's philosophy contains only two of the four causes, namely the material and the formal, for Plato made all things out of matter and the Ideas. Since the Ideas have in them {273} no principle of motion, Plato's system contains no efficient cause. As for final causes, Plato had indeed the vague idea that everything is for the sake of the Good, but he makes no use of this conception and does not develop it. Final causes were introduced into philosophy by Anaxagoras, whose doctrine of the world forming mind was assumed to explain the design and purpose which the universe exhibits. But as his system developed he forgot about this, and used the Nous merely as a piece of mechanism to explain motion, thus letting it sink into nothing more than an efficient cause.

In the result, Aristotle finds that all four causes have been recognized in greater or lesser degrees by his predecessors, and this, in his opinion, greatly reinforces his own doctrine. But whereas material and efficient causes have been clearly understood, his predecessors had only vaguely foreshadowed and dimly perceived the value of formal and final causes.

The next step in Aristotle's metaphysics is to reduce these four principles to two, which he calls matter and form. This reduction takes place by showing that formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause, all melt into the single conception of form. In the first place, the formal cause and the final cause are the same. For the formal cause is the essence, the concept, the Idea, of the thing. Now the final cause, or the end, is simply the realisation of the Idea of the thing in actuality. What the thing aims at is the definite expression of its form. It thus aims at its form. Its end, final cause, is thus the same as its formal cause. Secondly, the efficient cause is the same as the final cause. For the efficient cause is the cause of becoming. The final cause is the end of {274} the becoming, it is what it becomes. And, in Aristotle's opinion, what causes the becoming is just that it aims at the end. The striving of all things is towards the end, and exists because of the end. The end is thus itself the cause of becoming or motion. That is to say, the final cause is the real efficient cause. We may see this better by an example. The end or final cause of the acorn is the oak. And it is the oak which is the cause of the acorn's growth, which consists essentially in a movement by which the acorn is drawn towards its end, the oak. We may see this even more definitely in the case of human productions, because here the striving towards an end is conscious, whereas in nature it is unconscious or instinctive. The efficient cause of the statue is the sculptor. It is he that moves the brass. But what moves the sculptor, and causes him to act upon the brass, is the idea of the completed statue in his mind. The idea of the end, the final cause, is thus the real ultimate cause of the movement. Only, in the case of human production, the idea of the end is actually present in the sculptor's mind as a motive. In nature there is no mind in which the end is conscious of itself, but nevertheless nature moves towards the end, and the end is the cause of the movement. Thus the three causes named all melt into a single notion, which Aristotle calls the form of the thing. And this leaves only the material cause unreduced to any other. So we are left with the single antithesis of matter and form.

Now as matter and form are the fundamental categories of Aristotle's philosophy, by means of which he seeks to explain the entire universe, it is essential that we should thoroughly understand their characteristics. {275} First of all, matter and form are inseparable. We think of them as separate in order to understand them clearly. And this is quite right, because they are opposite principles, and therefore they are separable in thought. But they are never separable in fact. There is no such thing as form without matter, or matter without form. Every existent thing, that is, every individual object, is a compound of matter and form. We may compare them in this respect to the material and the shape of a thing, though we must be careful not to think that form is merely shape. Geometry considers shapes as if they existed by themselves. But, in fact, we know that there are no such things as squares, circles, and triangles. There are only square objects, circular objects, etc. And as there are no shapes without objects, so there are no objects without shapes. We talk of things being "shapeless," but this only means that their shape is irregular or unusual. Some shape an object must have. Yet, though shape and matter are inseparable in fact, they are opposite principles, and are separable in thought. Geometry is quite right to treat shapes as if they existed by themselves, but it is nevertheless dealing with mere abstractions. Just in the same way, matter and form are never apart, and to think of form by itself or matter by itself is a mere abstraction. No such thing exists. In fact, to imagine that forms can exist by themselves was just the mistake of which, as we have seen, Aristotle accuses Plato. For the form is the Idea, and Plato imagined that Ideas exist in a world of their own.

From this, too, we can see that the form is the universal, the matter the particular. For the form is the Idea, and the Idea is the universal. To say that form and {276} matter cannot exist apart is thus the same as saying that the universal only exists in the particular, which, as we have seen, is the fundamental note of Aristotle's philosophy. But if we thus identify matter with the particular element in things, we must be careful that we do not confuse the particular with the individual. We often use these two words as practically synonymous, and there is no harm in this, but here we must be careful to separate them. For every individual is, according to Aristotle, a compound of matter and form, of the particular and the universal. And when we say that matter is the particular, we mean, not that it is such a compound, but that it is the absolutely particular which has no universal in it. But the absolutely particular and isolated does not exist. A piece of gold, for instance, only exists by virtue of its properties, yellowness, heaviness, etc., and these qualities are just what it has in common with other things. So that the particular, as such, has no existence, but this is only the same as saying, what we have already said, that matter has no existence apart from form.

A very natural mistake would be to suppose that by matter Aristotle meant the same as we do, namely, physical substance, such as wood or iron, and that by form he meant simply shape. Now although there is a kinship in the ideas, these two pairs of ideas are far from identical. Let us begin with matter. Our ordinary idea of matter as physical substance is an absolute conception. That is to say, a thing which we call material is absolutely, once and for all, matter. It is not material from one point of view, and immaterial from another. In every possible relation it is, and {277} remains, matter. Nor does it in process of time cease to be matter. Brass never becomes anything but matter. No doubt there are in nature changes of one sort of matter into another, for example, radium into helium. And for all we know, brass may become lead. But even so, it does not cease to be matter. But Aristotle's conception of matter is a relative conception. Matter and form are fluid. They flow into one another. The same thing, from one point of view, is matter, from another, form. In all change, matter is that which becomes, that upon which the change is wrought. That is form towards which the change operates. What becomes is matter. What it becomes is form. Thus wood is matter if considered in relation to the bed. For it is what becomes the bed. But wood is form if considered in relation to the growing plant. For it is what the plant becomes. The oak is the form of the