Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 12: Law, Equivocation, and the Analogy of Terms

Transcript
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See, man is by nature a political animal, a social animal. And a sign of this is that he has language, huh? And of course we have names of the things then that are in our common life. And one of the things we need in the city is a law. And if you go out here on the street and you see people driving on the right side of the street, and in England you see them driving on the left side of the street, you realize it's a different law in these two different countries, huh? But the law produces a certain regularity in the way people drive. And so when they turned their minds to the natural world, and they found certain regularities in the natural world, they had no name for that. So they borrowed the word law and spoke of a law of nature. But still that's not the first meaning of the word law. And that's why although the biologist or the chemist or the physicist is always talking about laws, not the laws of physics, the laws of this, we don't call these men lawyers, huh? We don't say they're in the legal profession, see? Because you're still thinking about the original meaning of law. And you even find the modern scientist speaking of obey, huh? You see the scientist saying that the electron obeys the laws in Newtonian physics when it's out in open space, so to speak. But when the electron's inside the atom, it obeys a different set of laws. The quantum laws, right? But obviously the word obedience, you don't stop and think about it. It's obviously borrowed from human, what, society and applied to something different, but that in some way resembles that. And we also use sometimes the word debt, huh? So if I'm running up the stairs and the biologist might say you built up a, what, oxygen debt, huh? And if I haven't gotten enough sleep for the last couple of nights, I built up a, what, sleep debt, huh? But death is originally a word taken from, what, justice and injustice and so on in human society, huh? So he says, so they render justice and give up injustice to one another according to the order of time. He's using words like we do, right? We just don't stop and think about the fact that we do this, huh? We used to kid the physicist out at St. Mary's College. Now what do you mean by quantum jumps, huh? A quantum electron doesn't have any legs, how can he jump and get so angry about it? But they're always borrowing these words, huh? Jump, huh? That's taken from the legs, huh? So we're no different than the Greeks, right? We just don't stop and recognize that we carry words over like that. So that's an axiomender, huh? So what does that mean, the last, the third sentence, for the render of justice? Well, it would be something like, as they say, what we talk about when we talk about paying a debt, right, huh? Compensate. Compensation, right? Your body will compensate for one thing, right? That's paying your debt, huh? So it's justice and injustice, right? So I don't get my breath, right? You know, there's injustice there, right? Because they have a debt that should be paid there, huh? Apparently I don't got enough sleep the last few nights. I got up to sleep debt, huh? I owe myself some sleep tonight. Not a legal obligation, but it's like that, huh? Okay. Now, maybe we should stop here now, huh? Before we go into an axiomones, huh? Okay, because you want to start around five, right? Okay, so we'll start with an axiomones next time, huh? Now, we've had a little illusions, but we'll do again here. Some of the scientists, when they talk about unity or fewness or simplicity and conservation, and they don't want to talk about the mover. So you want ten copies? Is that what you need, or what? Yeah. Okay. You might, you know, kind of look these over, and then we'll make some references to them. As Torres say, I am as true as truth's simplicity. It's simpler than infancy of truth. What I do here under unity, fetus, and simplicity, I give some references to the great scientists of the 17th century at the beginning of modern science, Gale, Leo, and then Kepler, and then Sir Isaac Newton are the three biggest names in science in the beginning. Of course, Newton is so important that the physicists of the 20th century called the physics of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Newtonian physics. Not that he did it at all, but he was kind of the model. And then I jumped to the physicists of the 20th century, starting with Max Planck, who's the father of modern physics. He has that title. I guess he proposed a quantum hypothesis in December of 1900, right? And that began the great changes in physics. And then I have other men like Max Born, who got the Nobel Prize in the 20th century for explaining what the waves really mean, the wave mechanics. And then Einstein, whom, of course, you need no introduction to. And Sir James Jeans, the British astrophysicist. Schrodinger, the guy who perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics. And Heisenberg, who formulated the greatest change in physics since Galileo Kepianutana, but the man who worked in quantum theory with Bohr. And Weizsacher was the physicist who explained why the sun doesn't burn out quickly. And then a couple of references to conservation there, one from Heisenberg and one from the American physicist Rothman. And then a little thing from Weizsacher talking about energy in particular. Later on, we'll look at those little references to the moderns on the mover, because later on we'll meet what the Greeks had to say about the mover, right? And we'll make some comparisons to what, there's two things that Heraclitus says, one that Empedically says and one that Anxiety says, and we'll compare the four things, huh? But you don't have to look at that right now if you don't want to, but look at those first five pages anyway, right? Because that's very relevant to the first men that we come. And as we get into the movers later on with Heraclitus, we'll eventually look at what the moderns say about the movers a bit, right? Okay. These are kind of like, you know, the secondary things. The main thing is the Greeks, huh? But I like to make these comparisons, huh? They say that Niels Bohr, right, the scientist who worked with him, that he had an attitude towards nature like that of the first Greeks, huh? Einstein said, what, we reverence ancient Greece as the cradle of Western science, right? And Schrodinger there says that in his book Nature and the Greeks, science is the Greek way of looking at things. That's not a definition of science, but it's a great complement to the Greeks, huh? And he says, no one has had science who has not come into contact with the Greeks. So they have a great respect for the Greeks, huh? And Heisenberg especially, huh? My friend Warren Murray was talking to Heisenberg one time, and Warren Murray referred to one of these, you know, fragments of the first Greek philosophers, and Heisenberg says, oh, yeah, and he quotes it in Greek, you know? I couldn't quote these in the Greek, I looked at the Greek, but I mean, I couldn't just come out like the Greek like that, you know? So it's kind of amazing to see the scientists, huh? Knowing these things that well, huh? Okay. Sometimes you get people, you know, now you think these guys are outdated and you know, interested, and you find the greatest mind 20th century interested in these guys. You can see it's a reason to consider that. Just a quick question, by the way. Sure. You mentioned Poetius being, you know, between Agustin and Thomas. What was his time and place? Just for... About 480 to 525, something like that. And was he... Agustin's a little bit... He's supposed to be Agustin in time. Yeah, but what about the place? Was he Roman? No, he was... Yeah, he was associated with Rome and then later the Ostrogoths and so on. But you see, he was a just man making enemies. Because he was stopped. people from doing unjust things, and so they said, let's get rid of this pain in the arse. And so they ganged up on him and falsely charged him and had him thrown in prison and eventually killed without even a... Was he a layman, I assume? He was a layman, yeah. There was a local cult of his sanctity, you know, but he'd never been officially... But he wasn't a cleric or... No, no, no, no, no, he had sons... Or a religious... Yeah, yeah, no, he had sons who reached eminent office too in the later Roman Empire, but he's quite a man. He tried to make it available to Greek philosophy, you know, but he got translated, you know, Aristotle's logical works, but he didn't get through all Aristotle's works, but he translated a lot of these dirty things. He studied philosophy at Alexandria there with the... Oh. ...the Greek schools there in Alexandria. But he wrote in Latin, of course. Yeah, he wrote in Latin, yeah. Okay, yeah. And he wrote both philosophical and theological works on them. The definition of prison is taken from Boethius. Mm-hmm. When Thomas is going to discuss the... The prisons of Batsubiniti, you go back to the definition of prison in... Mm-hmm. And, you know, he's very important. Thomas' commentary on the De Trinitati, you know, one word of Boethius and Thomas will have a whole article on it, you know, on a page or two, you know. So, I mean, it's really, you know. I mean, Thomas takes Boethius, you know, very seriously, you know. He takes his conclusions, basically, but give the reasons for the... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's learning from Boethius, too, I mean. Yeah, yeah. And Boethius, uh, he's really, uh, an interesting thinker. Um, he, you know, when Thomas goes through, at the end of the first book, and he's showing the happiness, the blessedness of God, huh, and, uh, then he, uh, recalls even, you know, the false happiness, which has only a shadow, you know, of, to happiness. And even if you consider God's happiness in the point of view of false happiness, he excels, right? It's really beautiful that he does it now, you know. It's interesting, in that book, Thomas quotes a lot of, uh, Dionysius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He, he, he thought Dionysius was the Dionysius that St. Paul converted at Athens, right? So, um, uh, not that I'm so sure that's the same Dionysius, huh? But, so Dionysius, you know, was brought back from, uh, his works were brought back from, uh, Constantinople by Gregory the Great, I think it was, when he was, you know, diplomatic. I think especially the book one deals with God, right? And it's the via negativa, the apophatic. So, yeah, that's... Yeah, yeah. And Thomas has a commentary on the, on the divine names of, of, uh, Dionysius, huh? Mm. I guess, um, he often refers to Dionysius as a work on that, on the angels, huh? Yeah. But he didn't comment on that directly, but... I, I wonder... Albert the Great Thomas, huh? I wonder whom he considered him to be. Thomas? No, uh, Thomas. He, he thought that Dionysius was, was, was, was the one... Disciple of Paul, yeah. Paul, yeah, so that, so... Yeah. He had a great respect for Dionysius because of that, right? But, uh, but in his own right, Dionysius is, you know, very, very wise, but Dionysius writes more in the, in the botanic style of writing, you know. Thomas says it's more difficult for him to expound that, you know, and someone writes more, like if he's Italian, but he has a great good respect for him. Okay, thank you. Okay. So, all you beasts, wild and tame, praise the Lord, now, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, I used to own the whole block, you know, and we'd always cut through the wooded areas, you know, and we'd be playing with his kids, and so on. And I remember one time going through there, and it was kind of a place where there was like an old steps going up like a sidewalk down, and it was all overgrown, and so on. And I went up there one time, just kind of playing, and I could do it with a kid. And there at the end of it, underneath the tree, was a mother cat with her whole litter of kittens. And I never seen it before, you know, and I'm kind of, you know, amazed. And I think the mother cat there was, you know, apprehensive of my presence there, you know, and you could see her getting up, you know, and kind of, you know, arching her back, you know, a little bit, you know, ready to protect her little one. And then I kind of felt the menace of her, you know. And so I, well, I was kind of in the same class again, and then I turned away and ran away, you know, but I mean, I just remember the impression they made upon me. And then my grandmother, you know, up to her grandmother, she had an old cat up there, you know, we used to, to the old cat, you know, so. But for some reason, the cat kind of, you know, practically as an animal, but kind of interesting. But they're really nice when they're kittens, you know, so playful when they're kittens, you know, and they kind of, you know, punch up their back, you know, and kind of play with each other. Really kind of fun to watch them play, but they don't be so. One writer, a Dominican fellow, he says, spiritual writers, he says, he thinks the differences between them originate in the different philosophies that give rise to different spiritualities, even the Christian writers. He mentions Plato and Aristotle, leading to different, even practical conclusions about spiritual life, the approach. Have you thought about this question, you know, as far as theological or spiritual writers, some that, you know, how that would affect her? Some writers, like Bonaventure, seems to say in some places, in his journey of the mind to God, he seems to talk about as if that being, the general one, is God. Yeah. It's easy to confuse those two, right? Confuse what is said of all, with what is a, what, cause of all, right? And that's behind, you know, all this pantheism, too, that you have in human thought, huh? If you identify God with what is said of all, you're going to be, in a way, identifying God with, what, all things, huh? And that's kind of, almost like I need a tendency to even mind to do that sort of a thing, huh? But, you'll see in the passage from Einstein here, right, that his notion of God is, what, pantheistic, huh? Yeah. And, uh, when I compare Einstein later on, as we will, with Anaxagoras, huh? You see, uh, at the end of page seven there, huh? It's one of the texts of Einstein, huh? He says, It's certain it is that a conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of higher order. That's very interesting, right? Because, um, he sees a similarity there, right? Because the, the religious, uh, believer, uh, he thinks that there's a superior mind, right? The divine mind, that is responsible for the world, and therefore the order of the world, right? And therefore its intelligibility, right? And the scientist who's doing higher work, he, he has to be convinced that the world is what, is ordered, that it's intelligible, understandable, right? And so on, huh? And he says, Now, that's something like what we'll see in Anaxagoras, because Anaxagoras says, hey, do you have a greater mind that's responsible for, um, the ordering of, of the natural world, huh? But then Anaxagoras goes on and, and gives a reason to say that this greater mind is, is separate from things, it's not mixed with them, right? Now, Einstein doesn't give any, any reason for what he goes on to say, right? But he says, in common parlance, it may be described as pantheistic, and he, he refers back to Spinoza, who has that same confusion. So, for Einstein, that greater mind is kind of mixed up with things, huh? He doesn't give any reason for saying that, huh? And so, in the absence of a reason, one attributes it in part, at least, to custom. In De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, in the chapter on the influence of democracy upon religion, right? That's the main point he makes, that it encourages pantheistic notions of God. And he remarks of how German, you know, philosophy is so pantheistic, and how French literature is so pantheistic, right? And you can suddenly see that, as I say, if you look at the Incritian symbolorum, you look at, you know, the correction of the Germans. And I don't know if you've ever seen that book by Cardinal Siri, the one where he takes up Rahner, but they're all, you know, very ambiguous passages from time to time, that they're pantheistic in the way they write. And there's other people, you know, if you follow the Pope Speaks and so on, you'll find him in time to time, and other people will be, you know, corrected for that. But, you know, to take a, be an example there, in Star Wars, which is so popular with everybody, right? The force be with you, which will become a part of the force after you die, right? Maybe the dark side, maybe the dark side. But the point is, this is a pantheistic notion of God, right? And it's not through solving your thinking, really, but just kind of the idea that people breathe in. That's basmosis, huh? And I think perhaps science, too, to some extent, the way it proceeds, huh, leads to pantheism, huh? And perhaps this idea that in science, at least in mathematical science, equality is a fundamental thing, too. This idea, you know, of a greater mind that's really separate from things is very undemocratic, huh? So, when I compare Einstein and Anxagoras, they both come to the idea of a greater mind as a natural philosopher, as a natural scientist, not as a believer of some religion, right? Because Anxagoras, as you know, was charged in piety for saying that the sun was a stone on fire, right? Of course, the sun is the god of hallows, you know, so it's impious, right? And Einstein, although he was Jewish in origin, he was not a believing Jew, nor was he, as he says here, to become a Catholic or anything else, right? Christian. He says denominational traditions I can only consider historic and psychologically. He had no significance for me, right? So he's like Anxagoras. He's arriving at the idea of a greater mind as a natural scientist, an natural philosopher. That in respect is similar, right? And both cases are coming to it from the order and the intelligibility of the world. But then they disagree that Anxagoras says that creative mind is not mixed with things. But he gives a very good reason for saying it isn't. Extremely interesting reason. Einstein in the passages like this, where I see him talk about this, never gives a reason. And therefore, in the absence of a reason, one is inclined to think that he's influenced by the customs of the modern world. Assuming by democratic customs lead to that, huh? But I think scientific lessons, to some extent, do too. But de Tocqueville is very clear about that, you know? There's really a danger in democratic times. And, you know, de Tocqueville is the greatest author on, you know, contrasting democratic and aristocratic customs, huh? Well, in the case of Anxagoras, which is the greatest customs, he has a reason for saying that the greater mind is separate, huh? Very profound reason. We'll meet that in the great fragment there, D.K. 12. You see, Hegel, in a sense, is pantheistic, huh? When he identifies the being that is sort of all things, the one who says, I am the one, he did it explicitly in the logic, huh? And kind of a funny thing reminded me of, you know, Hegel's notion of being there. You know, I tell you this story there, Warren Murray was telling me, he was at the American Catholic Philosophical Association one time, and they had some session on theology and philosophy, whatever it was, and Warren was giving a paper there. But anyway, he talked about the distinction between nature and art somewhere in his paper, huh? So I think the question period afterwards, you know, he's in the English, and some of the copies, he says, well, the philosopher doesn't distinguish between nature and art. And so Warren says, Why not? One, the philosopher considers being, and to level being there's no distinction between nature and art. Warren says, well that's the being of Hegel, right, that distinction, that's the being that passes into nothingness, you know, the system, that's into non-being, right? He's talking about the most confused notion of being, right, but there's no distinction at all, right? Sorry, that's a stupid question, right? But I mean, he reveals again what Hegel's doing, right? He's talking about the being that is so confused that it seems to say nothing, right? It's almost like saying, you know, this is something. Well, what have you said, Toby? It seems almost nothing because something is so vague, right? It could be anything. It could be more and more confused or indistinct in what you're saying than what's something. So something seems to be saying nothing, right, distinctly about the thing. So he kind of gives this illusion that something passes into nothing, right? Being passes into non-being, and then you get becoming, right? There's a mixture of being and non-being, you know, and a contradiction. He makes the old mistake there that Aristotle refutes in the sixth book of the physics, that ran away through the Middle Ages there, that apparent contradiction of becoming a... It kind of gives you a bit of an article on that in La Valle Théologique. It's in French. The paradox to divinér par la contradiction, where he goes back and shows all the physics of Aristotle, right? And then Hegel makes the same mistake again. He makes the same mistake, yeah? And Aristotle's solution is very subtle, right? But very profound. But anyway, when I go back to Hegel, I mean, his notion is definitely pantheistic, huh? And Thomas, you know, has said, you know, that God is not the essay for Male Omnium. And there's, you know, many reasons for this, huh? But essentially you're confusing what is said of all with what is a cause of all. There's some similarity, said of all, cause of all, because what is said of all in some way refers to all things, and what is the cause of all, so you can mix up the two, right? But I enjoy putting out that Shakespeare, huh, sees the difference between these two, and therefore he's wiser than Hegel, right? And Shakespeare actually puns in the two meanings. I think I mentioned that to you before. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, it's in the play Troyes and Cressida, and it's when Cressida comes over to the Greek camp, huh? And she's kind of a, you know, good-looking girl, see? And Agamemnon, who's the general of the Greek army, kisses her. And then Ulysses walks again in the act, right? So she's been kissed by the general, but she hasn't been kissed in general yet. So he kisses, and then they all say, and he goes, this is the start of the downfall of Cressida. You know, she'd end up, you know, in the old story, you have a loose woman, right? A harlot, huh? But unfaithful to Troyes and so on. But very interesting play there, but it's Shakespeare's black satire in humanity, right? But anyway, it's not really a tragedy, it's a black satire. Shakespeare's a white satire and a black satire, huh? Love and Sleeve was lost in the white satire, and Troyes and Cressida's a black satire. I think it's the best comedies. We could mention comedies, you know, the comedy of eras, and Mary Way, someone was there, and gave her a shoe, right? I think it's better, kind of comedy, but anyway. A lot of fun in the Troyes and Cressida, huh? Shakespeare in there has given the best understanding of the foolishness, but the strong influence of fashion. There's such an amazing what he does there. There's such an amazing speech on fashion. Everybody sees this, apparently. A wise Shakespeare in there, right? But anyway, one of the things, I mean, he's partying with the beings of Jenna, right? She's been kissed by the Jenna, but he hasn't been kissed by the Jenna. So... Well, you know, if you take, you know, the example there of an army, and when a soldier is general, right? Because it's said of everybody, right? In general, everybody in the army is a soldier. In general, everybody is a soldier. But doesn't mean everybody is the general of the army, Douglas MacArthur or something like that, right? You see? So when I say, you know, that Douglas MacArthur, or whoever it might be, he's the, what, general of the army. He's general in a sense of a, what, cause health, right? He's the general of the army. He's command of the whole army, right? But soldiers not command of the whole army. It's not a cause at all. But it's said of everybody in the army, right? So Douglas MacArthur commands everybody, or Agamemnon commands everybody, right? So he tries to, anyway, he's got the problem with Achilles. And quite, soldier is what said of everybody, right? It's not a cause, you know? So I wouldn't confuse soldier with Douglas MacArthur there. Well, I mean, he's what a soldier question, you know? It's a rather basic mistake, right? That's what Abel is doing. But the Thomas recognizes that mistake as one that men make, right? And say that, you know, the chapter goes exactly to refuting that. It's amazing, you know, I mean, I remember more from Shakespeare than the modern philosophers. That's just kind of funny, you know, in a sense, you know, to see Shakespeare punning on these two meanings, that it was confusing, right? I mean, whatever you think of punning as a form of humor, right? I mean, apparently the Elizabeth is very fond of that, right? Of course, we tend to grow in puns on people nowadays. Well, everyone thinks of the pun as a form of humor, and somewhat out of fashion now. But here's something more intellectual about recognizing the different meanings of words. The same way with amphiboli, right? The Word of God is about the Word of God. Because you have to stop and think, right? Are there two meanings of the Word of God? And then, you know, you can even give a specific argument and say, well, the Bible is the Word of God, the Word of God is the Son of God, therefore the Bible is the Son of God. You have to stop and think about these two different meanings of the Word of God. So whether you want to make it, or the Wisdom of Nature is about the Wisdom of Nature, the Wisdom of Nature in the sense of the Flossy of Nature, it's about the Wisdom that Nature shows and what she does. It's sort of perfecting Divine Wisdom, really. So the Wisdom of Nature is about the Wisdom of Nature. You say the Word of God is about the Word of God. There's different meanings there, huh? Or I like to say, the Knowledge of Reason is the Knowledge of Reason. But not every Knowledge of Reason is a Knowledge of Reason. So the definition of Reason there in Shakespeare is a Knowledge of Reason has by itself, right? But not every Knowledge of Reason is a Knowledge of Reason. But not every Knowledge of Reason is a Knowledge of Reason. It's like a violation, right? Maybe it's kind of amusing, but at the same time you need to stop and kind of think. And so when Shakespeare puns upon these things, right? He sees that now. He puns upon the word ground, as I was mentioning earlier. He also puns upon the word understanding, which makes you stop and think that maybe there's a connection between the etymology of understand and what it means. And in English, you see, to understand something especially means to know its cause. But the English word for cause is ground, which is so, you know, it's in very good. So he puns both upon the word ground and upon the word understanding. He makes you stop and think about these things in the way that the moderns don't think. And mix up these things in the way that the moderns don't think. So, maybe Homer got Daly's thinking, because he said that they swear by the river Styx, huh? It's nice to teach you to do the Greeks, because you have one sentence, and you can kind of, you know, expand upon the one sentence, like a seed, huh? You start to see all the things from. You see, you'll find later on, Aristotle stating explicitly the principle of fewness, huh? That fewer causes are better if they're enough, huh? Sometimes they call the principle of simplicity, but it runs through modern science, huh? But, you know, the way Shakespeare has there, fewness and truth, it is us. He couples those things, right? Very conciseness there, huh? Brevity is so wet, and so on. I am as true as truth's simplicity, and simpler than the infinite truth. Nature allows simplicity and unity. That's in the beginning. Then you go to the 20th century and you say, the genuine physicist believes obstinately in the simplicity and unity of nature, despite any appearance of the contrary. But notice there, he's talking about the natural inclination, because despite any appearance of the contrary, that would be a reason against it, right? But he's convinced that there is, huh? The context where he says that in the book there is, he's talking about the periodic table, right? He says that 192, whatever it is, elements are just too many. It can't be 92 first matters, right? And then they, this is the scientists, right? They realize there had to be more unity than that. This is too many. And they begin to notice how, you know, the atoms seem to be multiples of the hydrogen atom, right? But not exactly, but they kind of suspected there must be some kind of, you know, unity. And if they reduce it to proton-neutron-electron, that makes more sense, see, you know, to them, huh? I mean, three, they could deal with three, but 100, or 92, or whatever it was originally, huh? Just too many, huh? Unless you say the same thing, right? The same thing you still have in, in, in Kepler in the 17th century, nature, law, simplicity, and unity. All those rules that, that our friend gives are based on the principle of humans. It's a very bad way of saying it is simplicity, but they often call it simplicity. When two hypotheses are possible, we provisionally choose that which our minds are judged to be the simpler, on the supposition that this is more likely to lead in the direction of truth. James Jean, the British, asked a physicist, or Schrodinger talking into both nature and the Greeks. Einstein's marvelous theory of gravitation, based on sound experimental evidence and firmly clinched by new observational facts, which he had predicted, could only be discovered by a genius with a strong feeling of the simplicity and beauty of ideas. The attempt to generalize his great successful conception so as to embrace electromagnetism and interaction in nuclear particles are informed by the hope of guessing to a large measure, the way in which nature really works, of getting the clue from the principle of simplicity and beauty. In fact, traces of the static human pervade the work of modern theoretical physics. You see something like that natural inclination of the mind there in these great scientists. But in a way, you see the mind is naturally inclined towards God because he's one simple, unlimited. It's kind of amazing that when Thomas takes up the substance of God, right, in the Summa, it's arranged around five attributes of God. And the order of the Summa is, he shows that he's what? Simple, perfect, unchanging, excuse me, unlimited, unchanging, and one. In these first philosophers, you'll see four of those five, right? Looking for something one, simple, unchanging, unlimited. Four of the five. Not perfect, because they're thinking in terms of matter, which is basically imperfect, right? But the mind, you know, Thomas, when he talks about God being unlimited, in the Summa Gentius, at the end of that chapter, he says that the Greeks, using Aristotle's phrase in their first book of the Physics, coerced by the truth itself to think that the beginning The beginning of things was in some way unlimited, right? But they were not understanding exactly the way in which God was unlimited, huh? But they were moving towards God, huh? It's amazing to see that, huh? The human mind is naturally looking for something one, simple, unchanging, unlimited. It's the beginning of things, huh? And they realize it's got to be all so perfect, right? But four of the five things that Thomas, you know, in both Sumas, right, he has those same five. It's a little different, the order in the two, but it's still the same five, huh? But four of the five appear at least in the same words, huh? Here, huh? And then the idea of that circle, right, is the rest of it, huh? You talk about God and himself. You talk about those things, these one simple, so on. And then you talk about God's beginning of things, God did the things, right? You know, those ways of speaking are not that far removed from the way we naturally think, huh? Interesting. My mind, speaking of, naturally tend to think certain things because of what the mind is. Yeah. You know, when I go back to the exhortation to use reason, right? And we talked about the five reasons that he gives for using your reason, right? And, you know, he had two reasons in reference to God, remember? Yeah. Okay? The reason is God-like, right? So when you use your reason well, you become in some way like God, huh? And then that you're obeying God's plan, right, huh? When you think about those two, they go together, right, huh? It's God's plan in giving us reason to use our reason, right? And it's God's plan that we become, what? God-like. Right? Everything comes together, right? It's a sign of the truth of that. It's kind of amazing to see that. Maybe not, you know, act or be a beast, huh? Other side, huh? What's marvelous about the Greeks is they can say so much in so few words. That's why wisdom stays alive with them, huh? The modernists can't say very much, and they take so many words to say what they want to say. They kill wisdom, right? It's all gone. What was it? Merchant of Venice, you know, I can't remember the exact words. There's, when they're talking about, what's his name there? That guy goes with him at Belmont. But he's kind of a joker, you know, and so on. You know, it's like, you know, a needle hit in a haystack, right, what they talk about, right? You know, the wit and, you know, the wisdom is what he says, right? It's, you know, all this verbiage, right? A little bit of wisdom. It's like searching all, you know, all day, you know, and then finding some little things that's not worth the searching and running it anyway, right? It's like some of the modern composers, you know, there's an old piece and there's one little nice thing in there. It's not pretty breathier anyway. You've got the top, you've got your own wooden junk, you know? That's the modernist. So what would be the reason why, or the real reason, that why philosophy began at that time in that place and not earlier on? Well, I mean, you can't really say that it had to appear, but, you know, the fact that these were originally colonial cities, right, meant that they had to break a little bit loose in their customs, right, and think about what kind of city they wanted and so on, right? So it would have that kind of an effect upon them, huh? I think each one there, who knows? Or another man, right? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Somebody's quoting Mother Teresa there that had taken me. I think I said, Mother Teresa, she said, you won't have peace until you stop killing your children. Why have we become so degenerate? I don't know. It's going to be hard to say. I suppose the seeds were there, you know, but we said it was degenerate in the 50s as we were in the 60s. Now we're just... I was saying to my colleagues, I was teaching ethics this semester, I think I came up with the paper, you know, who's worse, the abortionists or the terrorists, right? And basically I think there are four reasons for saying the abortionists are worse than the terrorists. The first and most obvious reason is, of course, they kill many more people than the terrorists are, right? They kill in one day as many of the terrorists killed in the, you know, trade buildings. So that's the most obvious reason why they're worse, right? The second reason is that it's worse to kill innocent people than those who aren't, so it isn't. And the abortionists are killing more innocent people than the terrorists are. The third reason why the abortionists are worse is that it's worse to kill those who are close to you, right? It'd be worse to me to kill my mother, let's say, right? Or my daughter or something like that than to kill a stranger woman, right? That'd be bad enough, obviously, but it's worse to kill your mother than to kill some other woman, right? And so the closer someone is to you, the worse it is, to kill your own brother and so on, right? Than a stranger. And, of course, abortionists are like they're killing their own, you know, they're killing their own children, their own offspring, right? So that's even worse, isn't it? And then the fourth reason is that the abortion is more corrupting the country morally than the terrorists, right? The terrorists are kind of uniting America and there's some good coming from this, right? You know, Americans are sacrificing themselves to each other and helping each other and, you know, and the patriotism, in a sense, is stirred up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So there are some good effects, but abortionists are not any good effects at all, not at all, right? I mean, it's just, I've crept in the whole moral order here, the whole understanding of what's right and wrong. I mean, just, you know, you can kill your own child, you can kill anybody, really. And so we, those are four, I think, very good reasons why the abortionists are worse than terrorists, right? You know, I could push me right into that, talk me right away, you know, rather than don't even ask who the abortion is wrong or just ask who's worse, you know, and get them thinking right about it that way, you know. So you get a chance to think, you know, that it's a physical way that abortion is okay, you know. It's a... I forget the exact phrase, but it was striking there. We talked about the justice will be executed on murders of innocence. Yeah. You know what that is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. It's like... Yeah. Who's more innocent than the baby, yeah? But, you know, I think the terrorists are there to kind of scourge us, you know, man. We're so, we're so dense, you know, so we're not going to, you know, see this, you know, the warning, huh? You think there is... That guy who's the Syrian Syrian to chastise the Jews or something, you know, and he's not, he's not, I heard that he's done this before, right? There was an article about, you know, talking about the reasons why the universe seems to be ordered to man in some way. And he quoted some modern scientist saying there's no evidence at all for intelligence in the universe. He said he couldn't see any evidence at all. He said he couldn't see any evidence at all. I think part of the problem with science is that it's so complicated to really compare it to this knowledge based on common experience, right? That you can't see the fundamental things, the simplest things in a way, huh? The thing is so many factors that have you infected in, right? I was talking to Warren Murray on the phone the other night there, but he was saying that the scientists are beginning to doubt whether there's any life anywhere else in the universe. For a while it's kind of a common thing, you know, there are planets, you know, and all kinds of planets, there must be life, you know, and, you know, and does that be something? But apparently the things that had to, you know, come together in order there to be life on this planet are astronomical, the odds, right? So, I mean, and he was quoting to me some guys, you know, who used to, you know, he was talking about, you know, we're going to find life sometime, and, you know, now they doubt themselves that they're going to find life, you know, the odds are kind of against it, apparently. That's kind of interesting, huh? Mother Earth is coming back to the universe again because it's a place where life is found, really, it's only life in any higher sense. It's kind of interesting, though, when the soul is separated from the body, right? Your soul is going to be in this immaterial world that you know very little about, really, huh? And we don't really know what the angels are, we know them kind of negatively, too, you know, the things about them, you know. But it's like, you know, we did all this time up to now in this material world, and then we're going to be living in a time entirely in the immaterial world. And then, you know, eventually we get back our bodies again, right? But we're going to be, you know, we'll be absorbed in God, right? And the body will be in a very subordinate position, I think. And so it's kind of interesting to see that we'll, you know, have been in the material world for a while, exclusively, so to speak, right? You know. It's funny, this couple last night there, you know, the influence that the rosary had upon them, you know, and, you know, how they, you know, they first thought that the Catholics are some kind of idolaters with their worship of Mary, you know, and so on. And they get to know this better, you know, and they realize that the rosary really, you know, like the Pope say, is kind of a companion of the Gospel right now. And it's kind of a contemplative prayer, and kind of interesting to come in sometimes. I used to work in the packing store there with Charlie Swisher, and kind of a nice, humble guy, you know, kind of a, kind of a laboring man in a way, but one guy who would come into the church, I guess, is one of these dominations, but they're some kind of communion service, but doesn't mean anything really. And he happened to come back in the, it was actually whatever it was, you know. The guy had the place of the Holy Spirit, you know, the minister, you know, to help me do this, you know, they don't have any, you know, that's a concept of anything really, you know. That's all it is, you know. I think I'll go someplace where the bread is something, you know. This guy did that, you know, kind of a simple thing, you know, but that was the true point for him, right? Just seeing the guy, you know, kind of throwing stuff into the wheelchair basket, you know, well, what the hell are we, you know, having this ceremony for, you know, if that's all it is, right? You know, but it's funny how something like that, well, we'll just, you know, just, uh, you know, be the catalyst, you know, for them to. Charlie used to deliver milk, right, you know, and I guess, but yeah, they have the smoking, right? So he's up at the, uh, the, uh, facility Adventist College up there and he wanted to get some cigarettes. So he didn't know any better, so he went into their, kind of their campus store, what it was, you know, and had some cigarettes, and the woman says, Oh, we're all good here. I mean, I have no idea. I mean, I'm not Charlie. Poor Charlie, you know. We're all good. We'll smoke, you know. We'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know, we'll smoke, you know. He was actually a lawyer, but he was a big involved in faithfulness, you know, that she gave me his wife, you know, so we used to argue with him about the faith and so on. Charlie, he said to me, you know, he says to me, yeah, why do you believe what they tell me to believe in the church? I said, I do too. So then I'm here, you know, brothers, you know, he didn't have an education, you know, but I mean, somebody's very down to it, I mean, you know, he had the faith, right? Hades was influenced by life. So he says, just as our soul, being air, holds us together, when the soul leaves the body, the body disintegrates. So do breath and air surround the whole world. Now that's interesting, in Homer, you have the soul represented as an air-like substance, and even Dante represents the soul that way. In the Divine Comedy, he encounters the souls of people who have died before, and he of course recognizes them because they're an air-like substance in the shape of that person when they're on earth. Of course, he tries to hug them, it's frustrating because they're trying to hug the air. Of course, that's not what the soul is, but in the battle scenes there in Homer, in one battle scene, the people are always dying in these battle scenes in the Iliad, and their souls are flitting down to Hades in the world. Once one guy is injured and his soul starts to leave his body, and a strong wind comes up with the course of the soul back in the body, and he survives. So when people imagine the soul, which of course you can't imagine the soul, they tend to imagine it like a human person, but much finer material, this air. And actually, the Greek word for soul, which is psuche, where you get the word psychology, which meant originally the study of the soul, but psuche is taken from the Greek word for breath or for air. And even scripture speaks that way, that God breathed into the clay this living soul. And in fact, the word spirit in Latin comes from the word for air or for breath. And we actually carry over the word air or breath, which names a material substance that is difficult to sense, you can't see it, although you can maybe feel it in some way, whether it's in a bag or when it's blowing on you and so on. So we carry the word breath or spirit to us over to these immaterial substances that are in no way sensible, so that even God is said to be a spirit, or the angels are said to be a spirit. And there's a reason why we carry that word over in particular, because it seems to be what? Like an invisible substance, almost an unsensible substance, although a material substance. And so we borrow that word to name these substances that are entirely human material. As Shakespeare says in The Tempest, when he has this vision that Prospero conjures up, and then he forgets, or remembers something he'd forgotten, and the image, the whole scene comes down, and he says, and these are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and melted into air, into thin air. So an axiomander is influenced by air, whether that is or is not the soul. It's sitting tight up with life, and you can't live too long without breathing, as you know. It's even more immediate in that sense than the water that Thales talked about. Now, just as we asked why did an axiomander say the unlimited instead of water, now the question is why did an axiomander say air instead of water, and you could also say why air instead of the unlimited. But, could an axiomander have been influenced by the thinking of an axiomander?