Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 42: Pantheism, Potentiality, and the Confusion of Matter with Privation

Transcript
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In a way, pantheism is doing that with another kind of ability, right? Because everything is in the ability of God to produce, right? But the pantheist, in a way, puts everything that God's able to make actually in God. It's ended up by saying God is a composition of what? Everything, yeah. It's upon means all things, right? They are, son. So that's a different kind of ability, because you're going to have an active ability, right? But you're still, you know, getting similar mistakes, right? Now, another way to see it in mathematics, like we were saying before, any time you cut a line, what do you get? You get a point on that, you see? Now, Nixon was first running against the Democrats there. He said, any way you slice their program, it's still the same old bologna. Well, if any time you slice it, you have bologna, what's it made out of? Bologna, right? Well, if any time you cut a line, you get a point, it must be made out of what? Well, points, yeah, let's see. We saw the difficulty in making a line out of points, right? That the points would have to touch, right? And if they touch, they're going to have to do what? Coinside. Coinside, right? And if two points coincide, then they have no more length than one point, which is no length at all. And even if a hundred or a million or infinity points are attached, they would have only one way of touching, which is to coincide. And therefore, they have no more length than one point. There's no length at all. So you can't really make a line out of what? Points, huh? So there, we can say there's an infinity of points on a line in ability, right? But they're making actual what is on the line in ability. And this is very common. You know, most kids, you know, coming up to here in grade school or high school, that a line is composed of infinity of points, right? No. That's true. Well, you're making actual what's their own in ability. It shows that same difficulty, right? It's not unusual. It's a difficulty. To be mistaken about ability, the inability of man's mind, as I say, to understand ability is a common inability. Inability, in a sense, is very difficult to understand, right? But here's in mathematics, and here in logic, and here in, what, natural philosophy, right? So I don't know the reason why I said it was a difficulty, right? That's why I attached this ninth reading to the reading we had before, because it enables us to go a little bit into what Aristotle said about the first matter. That it's pure ability, right? Substance and ability. It's billable by its proportion. You see, the difficulty of understanding such a thing. But in general, I can see that man has a great difficulty of understanding ability, right? The study of how many particles, as we said earlier, is the most advanced part of modern science as far as the study of matter is concerned, right? But you see, now you come back and you see what you wish. You can get hydrogen and oxygen out of water, and maybe a little bit careful there, right? Are hydrogen and oxygen actually in the water? You know? Well, maybe they are, but the mere fact that you can get hydrogen and oxygen out of water, is that enough to say that it's composed of those two? If that was enough, then you could say, well, it's enough then to say that every automatic particle is composed of all the rest, because you can get them out of there, right? But that runs you into obvious difficulties, right? Especially when out of an automatic particle you get ones that are bigger than the original one. Then they catch this. To say it's composed of that, right? See, as long as you've got things that are smaller in size, it makes, I don't want to say, difficulty, right? But then you realize that they are in itself maybe not as strong as they thought it was. But this goes back to what we said about the Greeks, and we saw explicitly in the fragments of Anaxagoras, and it goes in Anaclase, but it runs through all of that. That they try to understand that they try to understand every change as a change of, what, place, right? That doesn't involve any radical understanding of ability. Because in change of place, something already actually exists, right? Just in an extrinsic way, it's being put here or there, right? Now, let's just say a few words here in preparation for the next reading here, which is the 15th reading, okay? Now, again, I'm trying to stop with what we saw in the 12th and 13th reading, right? And there are scholars that distinguish between matter, form. And he said you don't always have to have the contrary form, but you have to have the lack of form, right? Okay? So these three are involved in becoming, right? The matter receives a form which before it lacked, right? Okay? Now, it's very important to distinguish between these three things, or to see the distinction between these three, right? Now, of those three, which two are most obviously distinct? Form and lack of form. Because form and lack of form are very clearly, it's not the same thing, right? Oh, I think so. Which of these three, which two are most clearly not the same? Oh, I thought you said distinct. Distinct, yeah, not the same. It's a distinct meaning. One is not the other. No, I thought you said that they're clearly distinct, so I was thinking matter. It's obviously form and lack of form, right? How can form and lack of form be the same thing? The being of form and the non-being of form, doesn't make sense, right? Okay? But notice, huh? In a way, Anaxagris is confusing these two, isn't he? Because he's confusing what? You know, a built-in act, right? So Anaxagris is mixing up in a way these two. He's putting what is in the ability of matter, everything that's in the ability of matter, actually in there, right? So he's kind of identifying form with, like, matter. The form is merely hidden, right, in the matter. Now, Plato is going to distinguish, is going to mix up in a way, matter with lack of form. Now, see, Plato, in a sense, is seen as a distinction between matter and form. It's not the same thing, right? Matter is one thing, form is something else, right? So he's more advanced, in a sense, than Anaxagris, right? But now, if you try to think about matter as distinct from form, you necessarily think of matter as being what? Yeah. As being formless, right? Okay. So what Plato's going to do is, in a way, to confuse, not matter of form, right, but matter with the, what? Lack of form, right? He's going to confuse matter with lack of form. He's going to confuse the ability of matter with his formlessness, right? Okay? So Aristotle is going to, very reverently, critique this position of Plato, right? Okay? This is confusion. I've had a sense of the word confusion, right? Well, that's a very common confusion. You can see how Augustine he speaks about matter, you know. If I could say it's a something that is nothing, or nothing that is something, I would say so, right? You know? He sees that, huh? The connection between matter and lack of form. How do you read Stimus it to, right? It's a lot of, you know, as I say, to the early Greeks, who couldn't understand, obviously, change of substance, or in general, even any inward change, right? Only change of place could you understand, right? Matters seem to be almost good. Nothing, right? So Aristotle's going to what? Forced Plato to distinguish these two, right? I just like Thomas sometimes disagrees with what? Albert, huh? Now, if I remember right, I don't think Plato's mentioned by name here, is he? Thomas, you know, Thomas was very quick to mention who made this map and stand, right, when he refutes it. But when he goes against Albert the Great, doesn't mention his name. So you see the respect in the reverence, right, that Thomas has for Albert the Great, right? And again, Aristotle's respect for Plato, right? But obviously Aristotle's not going to say that Plato was, what, wrong because I'm right. Because I'm stupid, right? He's going to point out, first of all, how his thinking about this is different from Plato's, right? And then he's going to, what? Follow the advice of the central thinker, human thought, right? Hair tight, son. He's going to find a common, what? Understanding that he and Plato have, huh? Of something. And from that he's going to show that Plato must decorate or should separate these two, right? And identify them. So we're going to see what Aristotle's doing again. Something like we saw in 10 and 11, right? And in 12 and 13, right? Where he found a common basis, right? A common understanding, right? And then he, what, reasons from that or he tries to become strong in that, right? And makes up the cornerstone of his thinking, right? But in 10 and 11, he found a common understanding among all the Greek natural philosophers, right? In 12 and 13, a common understanding among all men, right? Here, he's going to be finding a common understanding between himself and Plato, and he'll reason from that, right? That Plato should distinguish between matter and lack of form. But first of all, he'll explain what he thinks is the difference between the two, right? And how this is not what Plato's saying. Plato's saying something else. A little bit about how Plato arrived at that position. So let me just say a few more words here about Plato and Aristotle, right? And cut from some general things, huh? What is the relation of Aristotle to Plato? Yeah? Is he a good student of Plato? Yes. He's the best student of Plato, right? I think that's the best way to understand the connection between the two. Aristotle is the best student of Plato. Now, best means what? Better than all the rest, right? See? Now, a lot of people, you know, they see, you know, differences between Plato and Aristotle, and they don't realize, right, that Aristotle is, in fact, the best student of Plato. But there's an interesting text of Thomas where he talks about what a good student is. And interesting text, and one that Monsignor de Amri used to bring up. And it's taken from the days when Thomas was in Paris and starting his lectures on the Scripture. And so you have these two little works of Thomas, but they think they're, you know, part of the opening of his lectures, the preliminary lectures, right? They're called the commendation and partition of Sacred Scripture, right? These commendations of Sacred Scripture and Mishra House divided, right? But as Thomas often does these things, let's have a little quote from Scripture, because that's kind of the leading point in, right? In this particular quote, the good student is metaphorically spoken of as being what? Earth, huh? A good student is like the Earth. Okay? And then Thomas says, well, in what way is the student like the Earth, right? A good student, right? And, as you might expect, there's three things, huh? In which the good student is like the Earth. This is very important to realize that the good student is like the Earth. Of course, this is a metaphor, right? Okay? In a metaphor, you have to see in what way it's a life, right? There might be some ways in which the Earth is not like a good student, right? I was mentioning before with the metaphor of lying, right? Lying is a metaphor for Christ. Lying is a metaphor for the, what? The devil, right, huh? Fire is a metaphor for charity, right? Fire is a metaphor for God himself sometimes, right? But fire is also a metaphor sometimes for anger or lust or something of this sort, right? Okay? So you've got to be careful about that, right? Okay. In what way is the good student like the Earth, right? Well, the first thing is that the Earth is what? Humble, below, right? Okay? So the first thing is about the student is that he's humble. And that means what? That he places his mind under the mind of the teacher, right? Okay? He submits his mind, let's say. Well, obviously you don't do this for just any Tom, Dick, and Harry. And there's a dialogue about this, huh? It's called the Brutagoras. Okay? And it's a very interesting dialogue because it began in the dialogue. A young man comes back in the door of Socrates and he says, Socrates, Socrates, Brutagoras is in town. Well, you introduce me to him, you know? And Socrates says, He doesn't have a watch, but it's off the road. We can't go there to strip at this time of day, right? You know? And so, Socrates gets up, and he starts talking to the other man. He says, Well, what do you know about Brutagoras? He doesn't know much about Brutagoras, but Brutagoras is very, everybody's talking about Brutagoras. You know? I think it's kind of interesting the way Plato does that because eventually Socrates and the young man, they go to one of the great houses of Athens, right, where Brutagoras is the guest instead, right? And he introduces them. We don't really hear anything about the young man after that, right? Oh. In the dialogue, right? But Socrates is engaged, it's engaged in a conversation with what? Brutagoras. Yeah, yeah. I think Plato has prefaced that part before, right? Because in the conversation between Socrates and Brutagoras, we are to learn something, not only about what is being discussed, right, but to learn something about who is or is not to be taken as a what? A teacher. A teacher, right? And how and the way you judge that, right? Uh-huh. Okay? But by itself, I teach a casuric, an undergraduate, right? My brother Richard concluded that casuric was the wisest of those men in the department, right? And so he arranged for me to have casuric as my advisor, right? And he arranged for me and Warren Murray, in fact, before the high school to meet casuric before I went to college, right? And he was a little follow-up talk about it. Life of the mind, right? But then, as they say, casuric, and then, as they say, I'm going to just speak to De Kahnik, when De Kahnik came down his lecture career. Of course, when Kusurik first went to Laval to study on De Kahnik, he had given up for a while to study philosophy because of bad teachers. He had heard about De Kahnik, and then he went up to Laval and he said to De Kahnik, you know, you teach philosophy the way it's been taught to me before it's not going to happen in your class. He'd be a little bit older, Kusurik, because you could even say those things, and De Kahnik said, well, fine, you know. But then I could tell Kusurik was very devoted to De Kahnik, right? And then when Kusurik would ask some of my questions, as long De Kahnik comes to how you put those questions through De Kahnik, and I could see De Kahnik's excellence there, right? But anyway, you could study the whole dialogue with the Tegers because there are many things to be learned about that. And Thomas here was talking about the commentaries in Epistles of St. Timothy, right? Where he gives the division of the cause of error, right? And on the side of the, what, the will, the main cause of error is pride, huh? And he says pride causes mistakes in two ways. The proud man overestimates his ability, right? And therefore he attempts things that are beyond his powers, and therefore he's at fault and mistakes. And the other is he doesn't learn from those that he should learn from, right? And it would keep him from some mistakes, right? Or call back from some mistakes, right? Okay. So, he submits or places his mind under the, what, student, right? He's humble, right? Of course, Aristotle spent, what, 20 years in the school of Plato. He went in at the age of 17, right? He came out at the age of 37, right? Because Plato died. At that time. Okay. So, I mean, that's, you know, 20 years he put himself under the basket, right? Okay. Now, the second thing he says about the earth is that it's, what, stable, right, huh? Okay. What does this mean, right? See, Thomas says, well, the student needs a certain, what, discretion, right? A certain discrimination, right? You don't necessarily take everything the teacher says, right? As of, what, equal value, right? For example, if my teacher is Euclid, right, I might take very much what he says about triangles and numbers and so on, right? When he talks about happiness of the soul or something else, right? I might say, well, I don't think he's so qualified to talk about these things, right? You know? As long as the teacher himself, he won't say that. You know, I was asking, when it seemed to be on one time, you know, I heard these stories that his pure composer was Bach, you know, and of course I was a little shocked by that, see? So, I went to him and asked him, he says, he prefaced the mark, and then nothing to say here, you know, was necessarily true, right? Uh-huh. But, it's Mozart, he liked it. Okay? He said, Bach is too severe. Okay? But the point was, when he himself was there, he says, questioning me not to take what he said about Bach and Mozart as much as what? Some other things he might say, right? Okay? He kind of went to him and mentioned Bach and Mozart in class, I asked him after class, but then he goes, no, no, Mozart's a separate substance. Ah! So, anyway. So, you need some kind of, what? Discretion, right? And judging, right? Okay? So, like, for example, when I read Aristotle, right? Okay, I have some humility, I submit my mind, it's my mind that we have to learn from him, right? Okay? Now, when you get down into, say, the particular parts of natural science, when Aristotle talks about the bees, for example, he proposes some hypotheses about the bees, right? He ends up by saying, you know, that these have not been examined long enough, or observed long enough, right? And if we find something, you know, contrary to Bach's saying here, well, then we should revise Bach's saying here, right? Now, Aristotle himself is aware, right? That he hasn't studied the bees as long as they should be studied, right? Okay? And when he gets, you know, he starts to talk about the biological things, he compares the study of the sun and moon, the stars, to the animals, right? He said, well, the animals, we can, you know, take apart and examine them, right? Rightly closely, but the sun and moon stars, you know, they're too far away from us, right? You know? So Aristotle was, you know, aware of the fact that when he saw them, what, maybe he could round, right? Okay? And, you know, Aristotle thought that, and Thomas Aquinas too, they both thought that illumination was not a change of place, right? That light didn't, what, travel from one end of the room to the other. Because apparently it takes no time, right? Okay? And the arguments are basically in a perfectly good form, huh? If illumination is a, what, change of place, then it takes time. But illumination takes no time. Therefore, it's not a change of place. It doesn't belong with the argument, right? But one could always say, well, maybe, though, you know, light travels so fast you can't perceive any time the illumination of a room, right? Okay? Well, now, we have instruments and experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment, right? You know? The very, you know, genius experiments that enable us to actually, what, measure the speed of light, right? And it's approximately, what, 86,000 miles per second, right? Okay? Okay. Now, I'm going to follow Aristavo in his conclusion here, that illumination takes no, right? Well, I would say, you know, I would lack the second quality of the student, right? You see? You see? Aristavo cannot be as trustworthy there, right, as he might be in these more general things, right? Which, ordinary experience is sufficient, right? Right. You see? Or, if you're Aristavo, or Plato, or Thomas, or that kind of, Shakespeare, you know, if for 2,000 years, they accepted earth, air, fire, and water as the basic elements, right? You know? But you say, well, so you might say, okay, Lavoisier had this experiment, you know? You see? I say, well, I'm going to look the experiment because I know there are fire water at the end. Well, then I would say that I lack the second quality, right? You know? There's some things for which, what? I don't think he'd be less, you know? There's some discrimination, right? There's some things, right? Okay? There's some discretion in terms of what he's set, or how much he's set to himself, right? So he speaks as soon as stability there in the student. Now, the third thing he says about the earth is that it's, what? Fruitful, right? Okay? Fruitful. Growing a crotch is not fruitful. This is the third thing we demand of a good student is that he takes what he's learned from the student, right? And then he, what? Develops it, right? Sees other consequences of it, other conclusions of it, and so on, right? Okay? Sees further consequences, right? First conclusions of that sort, right? In other words, he doesn't just stop with what the teacher has said, right? And even with the understanding of it, but he begins to see other things, right? I gave a good example of that with our good friend Maximander, right? They say Maximander said that water animals come before what? Land animals, huh? And you can see he might have been influenced here by the thinking of Therese, right? As Aristides says, Therese was thinking of living things, mainly when he said water is the beginning of all things. Well, if water is the beginning of all things, then the animals like the fish that live in the water would be closer to the beginning of things, and therefore they become before those land animals, right? See? So he's talking in a sense developing and seeing a consequence of what he said, right? But then he's supposed to be ...pointed to the frog who begins its life as a, what, fish-like thing, and they call it a nut or something, a fish, so the ramen, eventually becomes a semi-terrestrial animal, right? So in a sense, he's not just, you know, taking the counsel and saying, well, you know, he's also, you know, looking for confirmation of this, right? You know, he looks at the frog. But you see these self-equalities there, right? He's obviously thought about this, right? But then even more so, when he says that the beginning of things is the unlimited, right? And he said, well, in a sense, our friend Therese was looking for something that was not limited in qualities, right? He took water. He didn't take orange juice or red wine or sugar or anything like that that had definite qualities, right? He took something like water that seems very, well, without qualities, right? Well, in a sense, maybe Naximander says, yeah, but water does have some qualities, huh? At least in the natural environment, it's wet and cold. And so you still have a problem with how do you get the contrary of wet and cold? How do you put it wet and cold, right? So maybe he's developing the idea that it should be unlimited, but he's going all the way, you might say, right? You see what I mean? So you see those three qualities in Naximander in regard to Therese, right? Unless he really thought deeply about water being the beginning of all things, we had come to the idea, you know, that the frog, I mean, that the body animals come first, right? See? But he's got to scratch it, right? And maybe he's influenced, too, by the fact that, yeah, you know, Thomas is explaining, you know, Genesis sometimes, you know, the spirit of God will go in the waters, right? And going back to Augusta, who takes water there as kind of a metaphor for the first matter, right? Because water is a kind of shapeless thing, right? We see some element of truth there, right? You know, that if the first matter is not water, it's something like water, and being sort of formless like water, right? It's more clear how water is formless, it takes on all different forms, and how air takes on different forms, right? So, I mean, why is it something like that? And you see it all with the truth there, you develop that, right? And you might, you know, not just solve everything that is said there, right? You know? But that's what a good student does, right? So I think it could be said that if you look at these three things, you can see that Aristotle is, in fact, the best student the player ever had, right? That he really, you know, put his mind under the player to learn from him, right? But in the rejection of something that Plato said, right, you can see his, what, his stability, right? His mind, right? It wasn't just, you know, like, putting it in his mind, he's going to accept it, right? But, you know, I'm always amazed by how, you know, things that I see kind of develop in Aristotle while they're already in Plato in kind of a sea, right? Now he's taking this thing and developing him. So the truth that's in Plato in the beginnings, you know, like he says, like he said in the Nicomachean Ethics, you know, he's quoting Plato. And Plato was right, he says, to ask, are we on the way from the beginnings or to the beginnings, right? As if Plato was asking the right questions, right? And Aristotle saw that, right? And he ties it there to the question of whether or not what we're going to reason from the cause to the effect, which means far away from the beginnings, we're going to reason from the effect to the cause, you know? And so I think you could say that Thomas Aquinas, in the same way, is the best student that Aristotle ever had. Because he still made, you know, he's made his mind to learn from this guy. But yet he has stability and he doesn't, you know, accept some things in Aristotle, like the eternal world, right? Because as a Christian, right? But he suddenly develops the thoughts, the right thoughts. It's amazing the way he does this, right? Aristotle makes a distinction in the second book of Wisdom between two kinds of difficulties, two causes of difficulty, right? And Thomas applies it to two kinds of causes of something being easy. You know, two causes of difficulty are what? It can be in us or in the thing, right? But then Thomas is discussing at one point the, you know, is it something difficult for you to do? Is that more meritorious? Well, just a minute now, Thomas says, right? You know, it's easier for me to do it than for you to do it, right? Something that's good. Does that mean that you're going to get more merit for doing it? Not necessarily. No, see? If it's easy because of what? The thing itself is easy, right? That's one thing, right? It's easy because my heart is so filled with the love of God that even difficult things seem easy to me, right? You know? And that's more merit, right? Yes, right? Because I'm doing what the firm will. And the other person was struggling to do what's right, huh? He didn't have the same intensity of the love of God or either. I mean, he's kind of developing, you know. He says, oh, it kind of strikes me because I know the other texts, you know. I see. Yeah, Thomas is, you know. But he's always taking something from Aristotle and developing it out. I was mentioning, you know, the word in there, you know. The word in is extremely important in philosophy, right? Extremely important. And Aristotle does distinguish the basic central meanings of the word in in the fourth book of natural hearing. But he doesn't order the meanings, which he does, you know, the word beginning. And Thomas orders it in the way our style of order to the quick beginning. Starting from the meaning that's most sensible, right? And therefore most known to us. And then proceeding forward to meanings that are less known to us, but always the one that's next to the one before. Thomas is actually boggled, but he does that, right? I don't think anybody else will do it by Thomas, right? I mean, they could take the word in and order the meanings the way Thomas does it. It's actually a principle in the way he does it. And the more I study it, the more I see this is correct. This is the meaning it has to be, right? So, you know, Aristotle's critique of Plato, which is, you know, a seed in the form of, but it's still part of Aristotle being the best student that they've ever had. I would say that St. Thomas was the best student of St. Augustine. Yes, yeah, that's true too, yeah. But there's a famous quote there at the beginning of, you know, commentary on the Summa Theologiae, right? Which, I think, if I'm right, they do the 13th Quotes too, you know, where he says, Thomas, you know, seemed to have inherited the mind of all the Church Fathers because he so revered them, right? Oh, right, yeah. You know, why is it true of Aristotle, too, of Plato? They seem to inherit the mind of all these philosophies before them because they did, you know, learn from them, right? Maybe you could say that Plato was certainly the best student of Socrates, right? It's hard for us to say, you know, where Socrates leaves all from Plato begins, right? Because Socrates, you know, Plato was, what, learning from Socrates, right? You know, Plato was supposed to thank the gods for three things. One, that he was born a man and not a woman. Second, he was born a Greek and not a barbarian, right? And third, that he met Socrates, you know? And, but suddenly, you know, he had these qualities in regard to Socrates, right? To some extent, maybe in regard to Heraclitus, too, you know? Actualists and so on. I mean, sometimes people, you know, think of a student of Plato, someone who follows Plato, everything he does, or something like that, right? Or just repeats Plato or something. I don't know what they think. And they want to, you know, contrast Aristotle where he disappears with Plato, right? Or something like that. But I guess that's not, that's part of the truth that could be, you know, dangerous, right? You know? So what I really see is that Aristotle was, in fact, the best student that Plato ever had. But then you have to know what a good student is to begin with. And this text is interesting, you feel. I'm probably not doing justice to it now, you know? I mean, go back and look at that text in the Commendation, Sacred Scripture. You know, even when I was talking with Monsignor D'Anne sometimes, you know, I would think of something, you know? And so I never thought of that, you know? But it was really at a core with his ideas, right? You know? And so he had learned from it and kind of transposed it, you know? Let's see, yeah, at the time, you know, the last years I was there with him, he was, you know, talking about, you know, what's required if we feel something. of the life, on the side of the reason, on the side of the will, you know, and so on. And then I was reading Thomas' commentaries in St. Paul, like I was reading recently again, and Timothy there, he talks about, you know, the causes of error, ex partea petitus, like pride, and ex partea intellectus, like false imagination, and so on, right? And so he's making a similar distinction, right, about the causes of error to what once he did yon was on the side of the good, right? But since I'm transposing the way Thomas was transposing that remark about the difficulty, right? The difficulty can be what? In the thing or in us, the cause of difficulty. Thomas says it's anything about easy, right? Something can be easy in itself because, you know, it's a little thing, or it can be easy because of us, right? So, you know, Augustine says, you know, where love is, you know, either the no difficulty is felt, the difficulty itself is loved, you know, see? So if you love somebody, you know, you don't feel it difficult to do something for them, maybe, right? Put yourself out for this person, right? But that's a good, that's good! Because, you know, that's, you know, because the thing in itself was easy, but because it was easy because of you, because of the love you have for this person that you're willing to put yourself out and do that, right? Was it easy for Christ to die on the cross? It was easy in some way. The cause would not be in the cross, which is a very painful and shameful death, right? It would have to be in him, right? That his love was so great, right? You know? You know, some of the saints, you know, say, you'd be willing to come down and die again if you had, you know, but God has one foot's enough, you know? That famous scene, you know, that I remember Paul VI, calling your attention to it, but other people have two, you know, where Peter was leaving Rome, you know, and he met Christ on the road, you know, he said, what are you doing? I'm going to be crucified, right? Turn around and look back. So, we're going to look at this 15th reading. Now, this is an extremely important reading for not only seeing that there's a distinction between matter and lack of form, right? But it's also a key reading for understanding what good is and what bad is. Really, really a fundamental text, huh? And even when I talk about good and bad there in the ninth book of wisdom, right, you could misunderstand Aristotle's text if you don't understand this text first. And it's very important to understand this text, huh? Really kind of a marvelous thing. But it also, you know, touches upon, I think illustrates what Aristotle says in the book on fallacies there, the book on cisternary profitations, where he says, the fallacy of the accident deceives even the wise. That's an extremely strong way of saying that it's hard to avoid the mistake of the accidental, right? Well, that's the mistake Plato's making here, the kind of mistake he's making. And Plato's certainly wise if anybody's wise, huh? But, so it's also an occasion for us to understand better the, what, fallacy of the accident, huh? So this text is, this 15th reading is important. But I order it along with the one from Manic Sagres because of that thing we're talking about, right? It's important to distinguish between matter and form, between ability and act, right? But then, once you've done that, you tend to think of matter as something formless, and you have to distinguish between the ability of matter and its formlessness. You're not the same thing. Of course, Hegel, in modern times, he universalizes this. He talks about the portentous power of the negative, huh? He's attributing the power and ability to the negative, huh? There tends to be that. But Hegel, you know, makes it a universal confusion, right? But we'll see, you know, how this, uh, Aristotle's way of refuting failure can be used to refute similar mistakes in other matters, huh? To take off from this. So, I'll be the 15th there for next time, okay? That's the last reading, by the way, in the first book, right? We haven't done all the readings, but it's the last one, anyway. The way Thomas devised it. So we'll see you on the next Tuesday, then, huh? Next week, the Tuesday, maybe when I go back, we'll start on, go to Wednesday, okay? Okay. But next week, we'll begin. Who's that? Forgot to bring the pictures of the granddaughters, but, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's going to be nice pictures of them, you know? Yeah. Real nice expressions on their face, you know? Uh-huh. You get the right, just the right one, you know? Uh-huh. The youngest one, you know, one who was, we'd saw her, seen her after birth, but, you know, when we'd see her. Potentially, you'd connect with her, right? And you talked about the body going down on the rollercoaster, something like that. It's losing potential energy and gaining, what, kinetic energy. What does height have in common with motion? It's getting around, do you? Are you supposed to call it energy? See? Here we say it's got a maximum of potential energy. As it descends, it loses potential energy, but it gains, what, kinetic energy, right? It gets down to the bottom, and then it starts up again, and now it's losing kinetic energy and gaining back the potential energy, right? It doesn't get the same height, but then they say, well, then there's heat, right? It's a fine way of measuring heat and tempo. But what does height have in common with motion? It's a very abstract thing, right? I mean, it's abstract and not in the ordinary sense of, you know, abstract from these two four-sided figure, right? Or a three-sided figure, you know? They don't seem to have anything in common, right? But there seems to be, in some way, a, what, connection, because as it goes down, it's losing height, but it's going faster and faster, right? As it stresses up again, it goes slower and slower, it gets higher and higher. So I see a correlation between the number, which expresses the height, and some other number, right, express the speed, right? And if I see, you know, if you had a frictionless finger, right, we'd get the same height as it left, right? Okay? So then I say, well, okay, so it doesn't mean the same thing, so it's just a different form of energy. But I don't see, in any concrete way, a likeness between height and speed, do you? Right? But there's a way of numerically connecting those two, right? So, I mean, you have to be very careful. You know, as Warren Murray said, the language of science, right? I mean, it seems to be like ordinary language, but is it? It's not, uh, it's, um, remember when I first, you know, studying the kinds of causes and matter form, moving in, and thinking about physics and so on, and it's enforced, you know, related to, you know, something like the, the mover, right? The search of slack, my face. It might need to take it. I mean, there seems to be some glitch in there, right? You know, I mean, I mean, uh, or, you know, air mass seems to be something like matter, right? But it doesn't mean the same thing at all. You know? I mean, you've got to realize that, you know, like some physicists say, we define these things by the way we measure them, right, huh? Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out, how they measure them. Yeah, yeah. I thought I heard Dan Dick Rochelle say that, at the beginning of this Big Bang Theory, all the, all the mass was contained in this little photon type thing or something. Yeah, he just concentrated in some way. All the mass of the entire universe. Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I just, seeing if I understood that correctly. This is a good class. You know, if I feel heat and I see height, what do they have in common, you know? And what? Particularly this is a good idea, so it's news to me. You know? Yeah. That canteen example was good for helping him just stand that difference. That there's a molecule of water and that's small. That was good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sweden, chemistry became the idea of Aristotle first before it came into physics, you know? The chemistry was already in the 19th century, right? They did it to the smallest piece. Yeah, that helped me see that, though. That was an important thing to see. Yeah, yeah. And if I just remember that, I can remember that distinction almost. Yeah. And then this, our imagination is the most common form of deception. False imagination. False imagination. Yeah, yeah. So, is there any way besides this, the knowledge of that helps us to protect us from air that are... Well, you see, like, you know, one of the famous texts is in the De Trinitati of Boethius, right? And Thomas, you know, expands it into an article there and so on, that in theology, you know, you should not try to judge things by your imagination, right? Right. Because these things cannot be imagined, huh? On geometry, to some extent, you can judge by the imagination, right? And, you know, in a sense, when a person says, you know, in the fourth theorem, let's say that you have two triangles here, right? And this angle is equal to that angle, and this side is equal to that side, and this side is equal to that side, okay? And those two triangles are going to be equal, see? This angle is equal to that angle, this side is equal to that side, and this side is equal to that side. The two triangles are equal? Yes. But how do you see that? Well, you see it in your imagination, right? You imagine this triangle, right? With this point right there, right? And this line laid on that line, right? Well, since these lines are the same length, if this line is laid from here and down there, it's going to go inside, right? Then since the angle is the same, this line is going to have to fall on that line, right? And because it's the same length, it's going to go inside with it, right? And then you've got the same end points, the straight line is going to be the same line between two end points, see? So in a sense, I imagine it, right? See? Now, by the mark, too, we're talking about the fifth postulate of Euclid, you know? The fifth postulate says that, excuse me, a straight line falls one, two straight lines, and it makes, what, angles less than, what, two right angles. Those two lines, extended, will eventually, what, meet, right, okay? Now, some people call it the parallel popsicle, right? Well, it's not about parallel lines, it's about lines of E, see? Now, parallel lines are lines that, when extended to infinity, they never, what, meet, okay? But now, can you imagine a line extended to infinity? Can you imagine a line infinite? No. No, see? So, you don't resolve to something you can't imagine. You resolve to something you can, what, can't imagine a geometry, right? But now, in natural philosophy, right, I can imagine something smaller than a molecule of water, right? See? You know? And, you know, there's a movie about a bark song, I never saw, about the incredible shrinking man, huh? Yeah. Okay? And they took their own chemicals like that, and they started shrinking, right? Yeah. Yeah, and he's almost eaten by the cat, you know? And he's not that size, appropriate to be with a cat. Yeah. And I guess at the end of the movie, you know, he's getting reconciled to this, and the discoveries, I don't know. He said, what are you on? Yeah. So, I guess he's, you know, the blades of grass are towering over him, and he's still getting smaller, and so on. That's very imaginative, right? But is it possible for man to keep on getting smaller and smaller and smaller, right? Well, if man is composed mainly of water, and the molecule has a downward limit, is the limit as to how small he can get, right? And, you see? So, the fact that you can imagine something, a man smaller than a molecule of water, you know, doesn't mean you should judge it whether there can be a man smaller, right? You can't judge by your imagination there, right? You have to go back to the natures of things, which are somewhat hidden to us, right? The natures of things are revealed to us by their motion. In fact, nature is defined, therefore, by motion, right? And what we see is that nature is a cause not only if you're growing, but if you're stopping growing, it gets in height, right? And it gets in height, you know, you grow in the wrong direction, maybe, but you're not going to grow taller and taller, right? You keep on eating, right? You know? We stop around, you know, 30, but most of the growth is long before 30. So, you have to judge a natural philosophy by going back to your, what, senses ultimately, right? But you start to, you know, study these immaterial things, and then they kind of transcend the sense of the imagination. That's why we struggle. Yeah. But notice, you know, what we call false imagination could take place even in geometry, right? Because if you imagine something smaller, if you imagine something other than it is in geometry, right, then you could be deceived, right? And the theorem that I do in the third book, you know, where Euclid shows that a horned angle is what? The straight line meets a circle at one point only, right? And it shows that the horned angle here is smaller than any, what, rectilineal angle, right? Now, it seems to me that if this comes down, and touches there, it seems to me that there's open space there above that point where they meet, right? Right? And if there's open space of that point, you could obviously draw a line in there, right? Right? See? But you can't. I think that's an example, not an unusual example, but a wonderful example, where imagination could deceive you even in geometry, right? You know? And I started at, you know, my politician friend, Roy Monroe, you know, he was, I taught at college, you know, a professor, he said, get Euclid. I said, why? I said, get Euclid. So, really. Okay. So, it went around. And I got interest in Euclid, right? And then Roy Monroe, my politician friend, said, what are you doing, Dwayne? I said, I'm studying geometry, kind of a lot, you know? Well, that kind of led him into his theory of gratitude. So, you know what a rectilineal angle is, you know? And now, you make it smaller and smaller like the scissors, you know, you can close it up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, if you make an angle that's small, then you make a rectilineal angle, and eventually you just went to this theorem, right? It's kind of, wow, you know? It's interesting, you know? But it kind of rouses you a wonder, because it's an example of something concrete, what you'd expect, right? I think your imagination can very easily deceive you about this, right? Yeah. Okay? In the same way, you know, with the Greeks there, you know, you could imagine that you could find a line that would measure any two lines if you make it smaller and smaller. It's smaller, right? See? And what they found out was that there are some lines that you can't find a common line to measure. And these are lines that don't have the ratio of a number to a number, or one to a number. And that's kind of an amazing thing, right? Yeah. So even things that can be imagined, you can suddenly just imagine other than they are, right? But a fortiori, things that can't be imagined at all, to imagine them at all is to what? Is to be, what? False. False, right? And when Socrates, you know, clearly represents Socrates in the parmenides, he's trying to imagine the way the universal is covering the singulars, a big tent over them, you know? And of course, if the universal was over them, like a tent where the only part would be on top of you and the part on top of you, and you wouldn't have the whole what the universal says, and all these contradictions, right? And he's trying to imagine the universal, he's a passage in one of his articles in that, Penman's to Logic, you know, another article I think he used it too. Beautiful text there, right? It's like the moderns who want to make the universal to be a class, right? You find it very common. Yeah. And then they kept.