De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 14: The Soul as Form and First Act of the Body

Transcript
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I mean, a third thing now, like cement or something like that, or if I just kind of have to put it on, tie it together or something, you know, but I assume they can't, what, of themselves, they don't become one, right? So you have all these clumsy attempts to try to unify man, right? It was like Humpty Dumpty, right? When they understood what the soul is, right, they didn't understand what the soul is, and misunderstood, I should say, what the soul was, they couldn't put them together again, right? He's just in pieces, huh? And so, so one of two things, either they get into some awkward attempt to try to put them together, like Phaedo is a terrible problem, or a card, or else they just, you know, talk about the ghost in the machine, that's one of the common phrases. Or else they, they just, you know, let's not talk about the soul at all, because they can't make any sense out of this, so. So, in the name of humans, they stop talking about the soul, huh? You know, a lot of people, even in the church itself, are in that position, you know, they can't understand the soul, so they say, let's not talk about it anymore. Nobody else understands the humans. Maybe we get through, you know, with these parts on the definition of the soul, we'll look at that text, and, you know, and so on, and so on. It's very clear that the soul is the form of the body, right? But with all the distinctions that Aristotle does here, we obviously support that position, right? Coming to know the definition of the soul, you're not really kind of in remote ability, and you have to understand all these divisions, and... You have to know the natural terms, and the physics first, but the natural here, you know, you have to understand the matter and the form, and so on. You have to understand the categories, too. In the first and second act. You have to know what a tool is, too. So, if you go back to the two main opinions in the Phaedo, that the soul is the harmony of the body, right? And the soul is a spiritual, immaterial substance, you know, completing itself, distinct from the body. And both opinions have a part of the truth. The harmony of the body is a form of the body, but an accidental form of the body, right? Okay? And that's the position that is mentioned by Simios as a probable opinion of the body. Socrates seems to be thinking that the soul is a spiritual or immaterial substance, a complete spiritual substance, huh? Well, the element of truth in this position here is that the soul is in the genus of substance. It's not in one of the genus of accidents, okay? But, there'd be a complete substance in its own right, and that's false. Now, this thing up here is the element of the truth. The soul is the form of the body, but it's not the what? It's in the form of the body. It's a substantial form of the body. So Aristotle finds the truth which is in between these two mistakes. Now, you see, if you maintain that the soul is an accidental form of the body, you're going to run into a problem with something. Because later on, as we see, especially when you say the human soul, the human soul does things not least in the body. It understands the universal not in the body. Why, if the soul were an accidental form of the body, it would do nothing, right? We'd do nothing through the soul except in the body. So, you can't understand that, why the soul does those things, right? Or even why the soul sometimes opposes the body, right? But, if you say that this is the truth about the soul, then you can't really understand the unity of man. The one who thinks is the one who feels pain in his body, right? And I always go to that experience of your body being in pain, and you're trying to figure out how you can relieve your pain, right? And you've got a muscle cramp, or you've got a headache, or whatever it is, right? And it's a matter of inward experience that the one feeling pain, and the one thinking about how to relieve that pain, is one and the same. And if you kind of deny the obvious, you deny that you have that experience, huh? And therefore, this doesn't explain that unity of man that we all experience. So, as Aristotle says, with the truth, all things harmonize, right? With the true definition that we've seen here of the soul, you can understand both the unity of man, which is, this here would be more in accordance with the unity of man, right? Because matter in form, in accidental form, in a way, form a unity, right? But this would also explain the fact that we have some operations that are not in the body. It would also explain the fact that we're one substance, too. So, when we get into political philosophy, we have something analogous to this thing about the soul, because we talk about the form of government, right? Then we talk about the people, right? In whom this form of government can or cannot be realized. And the people are like the matter, right? And this is like the oxy-story, right? And the people have to have a certain, like, experience, a certain set of customs, right? So, the disposition is going to have this of that form of government. So, Aristotle says, you know, that as a political philosopher, it's not sufficient to talk about the best form of government. Because the best form of government can't be realized in every people. So, we have to talk about the best form of government for most men, as well as the best form of government, which would require unusual circumstances, right? Aristotle's phrase is, Kaya yuke, according to a prayer, according to a wish, right? That the circumstances that would be necessary to realize the best form of government would be one that you would more wish for or pray for than expect to take place in the world, right? But he says, you have to talk only about the best form of government, but the best form of government for most men, considering the virtue that most men are equal, right? And also, the best form of government for these particular people, right? Which might not be the best form of government for most men. And so, you know, our State Department and other people in the United States might try to, what, make the world a safer democracy, right? And try to give the African people, let's say, some of those nations, a Western form of government, but people who aren't really ready for that form of government yet. And you get really not that form of government at all then, right? Appearance of it, right? And you get some form of tyranny or something, right? You know, these terrible things happen in these African nations. But notice, the point here is something similar. That not just any form of government can be realized in the people, but there's a correspondence between the two, right? And that's not just any soul can be in any body, right? Just that not any art can be in any tools, but there's a proportion among them. And they're kind of... relative to each other, right? That's where our scholar says there, he's talking about how governments change. You change the ethos, right? The customs of the people, and you really will change the government, right? And even though the government might appear to be the same, it isn't. So it's not functioning. But you see, the accidental form of the body, the disposition of the body, is not the soul, but is connected with the soul. Just like the ethos of the people is not the form of government, but they're connected, right? You can't have any form of government in just any people. But there must be a harmony, right? Between the form of government and the education and ethos of the people, the customs of the people. And so likewise, the soul can't be in just anybody, but in the body properly disposed, right? And so, when the accidental form of the body is lost, and the dispositions of the body are lost, you're going to lose the soul, right? Not because the soul was an accidental form, but because it actually performed, it was involving the, what? The dispositions of the body are necessary on the side, not of the soul itself, but of the body, which it is the form, right? Okay? And again, the fitness can't really do justification to that, right? Why the soul leaves the body when the body loses these dispositions. But the fact that it does is a sign, not that the soul is an accidental form of the body, or there's a disposition of the body, but it's either a disposition of the body, or there's some connection between the two, right? Okay? The same way here. The fact that we can't realize the American form of government and these uneducated and customarily disposed and people, right, doesn't mean that that custom is that form of government, but it means there's a connection between the two. It's only the people with this education and these customs that are a suitable subject in which you can realize that form of government. You see, I kind of got states in a way that we kept on adding states, right? And each state that's kind of a, you know, public and form of government, right? And, uh, but you had people who were somewhat, what, similarly disposed in terms of education and their customs, right? But then you take some kind of an African nation that might not have education or those customs and you can't really realize that form of government at this time, anyway. So matter and form are sometimes spoken of as relatives, huh? There's a, you know, it's like two and four. One is double and one is half, right? They go together, right? And four can't be double of anything other than two. And two can't be half of anything other than four. And so, likewise, this kind of soul can't be in any kind of body other than that kind of body. And that kind of body can't be informed by any soul other than this kind of. So there's a one-to-one correspondence, right? In Aristotle, we didn't see that part in the physics part where he talks about matter and form being nature and that matter and form belong to the same science, right? It was the same science of opposites. And relatives is one of the forms of opposites, huh? So you really have to study them in the same, what? Science, huh? And that's why, you know, this is the modern so-called social sciences, huh? It's kind of a false division there because you might have politics, which is studying political science, which is studying more the form of government, right? And you might have a sociologist who would part of these to study the, what, customs of the people, right? But really they belong to the same knowledge, right? Because they're relative to each other, right? I remember reading years ago a sociologist there, Matt Pierre there, and the book was called The Freudian Ethic. And he was talking about how the Freudian ethic was replacing the, what was called the Protestant ethic, right? In the United States, right? And it did that implications for our government eventually, right? But yeah, that's well understood in that sense by him, right? You see, that the ethos of the people change, huh? Then really the, what, government would change, huh? And you know, it's a question with Russia now, right? Because Russia doesn't have quite the ethos that peoples in the West have, right? And so it's not maybe quite ready for a fully Western-style or a form of government, right? Maybe the Italian government, right? They want to change the government all the time, right? In the fridge in some way, right? So we say art imitates what nature, right? And so in political philosophy there we imitate this and that's what we learn here about body and soul, right? Interesting the way the word soul is used sometimes. You know, Aristotle has a famous passage in the book on the poetic art, right? Where he talks about plot and character and so on. But he says plot is the, what, soul drama, right? Soul tragedy, huh? And I don't know if he's original with them or not by a freshman we're singing him, you know. I'll do the 13th, you know, speaking of that, the study of the sacred page, right? Is this word, the soul theology, huh? I think it's kind of interesting, huh? A lot of things to be considered in that comparison. About the soul. Yeah. Or brevity is the soul wit, right? Mm-hmm, yeah. But, you know, I was mentioning how when the great Ammonius, your maestries, defining definition, right? I use that Greek word for brief, asuntumos, right? But the definition of the soul here you can say is in a way the soul of this understanding, right? These definitions are the key thing, huh? The definition of reason that we studied earlier, I think, Shakespeare's definition of reason, that's really kind of the soul of the whole use of your reason, huh? The soul of the whole. Now, I think we're going to stop there at the word of five, huh? Okay? Now, 119, we're going to start next time, 119, and Aristotle's going to, in 119, down to the end of this chapter, 2nd Lectio, I think it is in St. Thomas, he's going to manifest, right, that definition, he's going to kind of illustrate the definition, right? by certain likenesses, huh? Okay? He's going to, as Monsignor Dion would say there, he's going to lead you by the hand, right? If you ever look at the chapter there on the Lectio, not Lectio, the question, the article on the teacher there, Prima Parra's, question 117, article 1, it's kind of the key text, but there are other texts where Thomas says that the teacher leads the student from the known to the unknown in two ways, right? And, one way, of course, is by what? Proposing the definitions and the arguments, right? The order of principles and conclusions. But before that, he says, he leads them by the hand by proposing what? Less universal statements, right? Sensible examples, huh? Likenesses, opposites, and so on, right? It can manifest by what? It calls that manidexio. So there's also going to have a manidexio here, but mainly by what? Likeness, right? I was giving you a manidexio by a posita the other time, remember? Oops. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm going to look at that. In the beginning of the second book, you're a beta. Excuse me. There's a definition right there, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, thanks. So, I'm talking about foolish humor, come unsavory guide, right? Remember that? Come bitter conduct, come... Unsavory God. He has a monodexio for what wisdom is, right? The fool is bitter and what? Unsavory. Then wisdom is what? Sweet and savory, right? That's the easy thing there from Thomas, right? Dulce Sapere, right? You know, the Icarus. To sweetly savor, right? Christ, right? Okay? But he's wisdom itself, right? To sweetly savor. The opposite of that is what? Come, bitter conduct. Come, unsavory guide. Now at once, when on the dashing rocks, you know? They see sick raving, bark, and so on. It's kind of marvelous, right? See that, huh? When I was writing about the definition of comedy, you know, and I was taking this starting point of Aristotle, that the laughable is something, what? Ugly. And it's not that this is not painful. And so, in investigating, I went to this text in the physics where Aristotle says, the three main forms of the beautiful are order, symmetry, and the limited, huh? I said, maybe the three main forms of the ugly, then, are what? Disorder, huh? The unsymmetrical, and the what? Unlimited. Yeah, yeah. And once you have to read the comic poets, you'll see that's what they're always talking about. You know? A guy paints himself into a corner. It's funny. You know? Or, you know, people are distracted. They start dressing, and they put on, you know, the underwear, or the other clothes, they put the underwear on. It's something you need to sort out there. It's funny, right? You see this, right? In a very simple way. But the more you read the comic poets, you'll see that that's exactly what they do. So, one opposite, right? I was using the beautiful to see something about the ugly, right? But I was using Shakespeare, you know, using the bad there, the foolish, to represent something about the wise, huh? The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. What does that say about wisdom? There is no way there is a God. Wisdom is a knowledge of God. Sarah Stiles is going to use a manjadetsu here from likeness, huh? He's going to compare the living body to a ballpoint pen or something like that. An axe or something like that. Compare it to, what, the eye or the ear. He's going to start with the artificial, and then he's going to go to the natural, right? Juan C. Dion pointed out in that there's three kinds of examples that Aristotle uses in the first book of the physics. That he starts in what is more known, he goes to what is more likely to try to illustrate. In a sense, he does that here. He'll start with the artificial tool like the saw or the hammer, and then he'll go to the natural tool like the eye or something like that. Using both of them, by certain likeness, to manifest what the soul is, right? If the hammer or the saw was a natural body, would sawing be its soul? And then the soul would be the second act, right? What would be its soul? If the eye was the living body, right? Would seeing be its soul? Or with this ability to see its soul, right? It got manifested by this, like this proportion, right? That's very important, right? We need that, huh? Because substance, and in particular, as you'll see there, soul, but substance in general, it's not sensible, substance. In theory, substantial form is not sensible, right? So it's very hard for us to understand something we can't sense or imagine, huh? And we often falsely imagine what the soul is, huh? To imagine the soul would be the air-like thing in the shape of you or me, right? And even Dante represents the soul that way, although I don't think he thinks it's the soul, but he has to, right? To make it imagination, right? I bet you think your soul is kind of the air-like thing, right? The oxford thing, they charge you outrageous prices for these things, right? Yeah. And they're very cheaply bound, too. They can fall apart for easily. Be careful of them, you know? It's outrageous to have poorly bound, expensive books, right? Yes. What do you do? Got a monopoly, huh? I can buy sometimes the big ones. I've seen them like the ones with all these more or less nonsense notes by Ross, you know, but they're nicely bound, you know, in bigger print, you know, but it costs even more. It's rather a favor, too, these books, you know, but they're not there in print now or not. I suppose they are. They're not those lobes. They're very cheaply bound, too, you know, they're in the ballpark. Sometimes you get these things through your bound, you know. But the lobe translations are proverbially bad, you know? Sometimes they translate I think in the beginning of the physics, they have exactly the opposite meaning of what Aristotle does. But in the Oxford translation of the physics, right, Aristotle speaks of luck and chance, right? And chance can be used both in nature and in human affairs. But luck is the name for chance in human affairs. So he has two words in Greek, huh? And so he says, you know, one is broad than the other. But they mistranslate them. They translate luck by chance and they translate chance by spontaneity. It's a bad translation to begin with. But then they mix the two words. You know. So, I mean, you know, as I say, until translators are philosophers or philosophers are translators, you know, going to have bad translations, right? You have someone who knows Greek but doesn't know philosophy and just translates because of that or he knows philosophy and doesn't know Greek so he just translates that. So we'll see you next Wednesday. It's not going to wait until I think it's July 10th that we go out to see the number. How are your soul and my soul, the next man's soul, when they're separated from the body, right? How are they distinct, right? Because if you just have form, it seems like you have to have a formal distinction there. Therefore, you have a different kind of soul, see? But it's all one kind of soul that we have, see? But the point is that just as the human soul is relative to the human body and the plant soul to the plant body, right? So my soul is made for my body. And your soul is made for your body. And your soul is made for your body. So that even with my soul separated from my body, right? It's still a soul that fits my body. With unique tools for your body? There's something unique, yeah. Yeah, that my soul has the same, you know, there's not a greater distinction, obviously, between the, you know, my soul and the soul and the ant. I'll see myself. He goes, I just took that ant and the ant has the soul and the soul. I thought that's what you were saying that I couldn't see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the way Thomas argues, you know, against those, you know, who say that there's only one soul separated from all bodies, right? because there's no, in immaterial substances, right? You can't have two of the same kind. You can have only form and differences, differences in kind, right? Oh, yeah. But because our soul is by nature the form of a body, right? Uh-huh. You and soul. And my soul is the form of my body and your soul is the form of your body. Uh-huh. There's a basis going back to matter for the distinction, right? Yeah. Not that the existence of your soul depends upon your body but that your soul fits your body, not my body. And that's how we're still an individual after we die. We're still linked to our body. We're still distinct, yeah. Yeah. That's why your soul wants to be joined to your body again, right? Right. One time I was giving you a sermon that. These probable arguments for the Resurrection are part, you know, from what we were told from authority, you know, that there's something unnatural about the soul existing without the body, you know, and if it's unnatural, it's not going to be forever, right? So it gives a probability to the idea of the Resurrection. I thought that's what you were saying during class, but I just couldn't see that. My soul and nature body, it's got the same nature. I could see a dog. There's a horrible story there. Was it Igea? One of those stories, those horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe. You know, the man's wife's wife died, whoever it is, and she threatened to come back, you know, and he's married some other woman, you know. And gradually, Igea, whoever it is, I don't know if it's Igea, it's one of those horrible stories anyway, but the soul of his former, his wife would have died, right? He's not taking over the body, right? It's one of these horrible things, you know, but it's, I don't know, not possible. It could maybe be possessed by a demon, right? But then he would not be the form of your body. I can see this chase gun going in the same way. The will, the will, you know, the power, the will to, it's kind of just been something. So we are unique. That's why we are unique. Totally unique. Yeah. I was reading over some of my notes when we were gone, and I was going over the definition of nature, and I was having trouble distinguishing between first and as such and not by happening. United, well, sir. The soul is defined as something of a, what? Another, huh? Just like time is defined as something of another, right? Page six, we're on here. In their first hour, it made three divisions, right? On the side of the soul itself, to find out what it is, right? And three divisions on the side of that of which the soul is something, to repeat the definition, right? And on the side of the soul itself, he gave what? What three divisions? Being into substance. Quantity, quality, relation, and so on. And since the soul, in which of those genera belongs? Substance. Substance, yeah. And the second division he gave was what? Substance into the matter, the form, or the composite. Yeah, yeah. And that's not really a division of substance into species, is it? No. That's a division of material substance, right? Into what? Composing parts in the part, right? And the composite itself, right? So it's more like the division almost of the meanings of the word. Substance, huh? Okay. Is the soul the composite, or is it the matter, or is it the form? Yeah. So it's form in the genus of what? Substance, right? Yes. And then form is to matter, as we saw earlier when we studied matter and form, as act is to what? Ability or potency. Mm-hmm. So you made a third distinction, which is on two kinds of what? Yeah. Yeah. What was that distinction? First time. Yeah. Second time. Yeah. This is first and second in which sense of before? Yeah. First of all, in the first sense at least, right? In the order of time or generation, huh? So I must acquire, he says, the science of geometry before I can think according to that science, right? Yeah. Okay. Before I can think in the way the geometry thinks, right? Easily orderly. About air and so on. My second act is the operation, the activity, right? The first act is the form. So the soul is a first act or a second act. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now we're going to see in the page six here, he's going to manifest the definition, right? He's going to manifest it by proportions, right? In the sense of Euclid. They like this of ratios, right? He's going to be comparing the soul to things in which is also a first and a second act, right? He's going to compare the soul proportionally to the first act, these other things, not to the, what, second act, right? Okay. So the soul is a substantial form, you could say, right? Or it's a first act, then. But it's a substantial form or the first act of something, right? And what is it, the substantial form or the first act of? Yeah. It's very much something in the genus of substance, right? And then it's of a, what? Yeah. He distinguishes between a natural body and artificial body, right? Okay. And you'll notice here in this second part here of the first chapter that he almost recalls the definition of nature, right? He talks about it being a natural body. We'll see that in the text here, right? And then finally he divided an actual body, right? Into those that, what? Yeah. And those who don't, right? But then later he kind of modified, right? And instead of saying a body having the operations of life and potency, right? He spoke of a body as being what? Yeah. So it's better to make that explicit. Say it's a tool body, right? But I think it's a body that is, what? Composed of tools, huh? And the higher the soul, the greater the, what? Diversity of tools because of the multiplicity of operations. That soul is, what? Capable, right? And that suggests, as I mentioned last time, a comparison between the soul and the body it's in and the different arts and the tools they use. And Aristotle would point out that just as one art cannot go and use the tools of a, what? Another art, right? So the tailor whose tools, let's say, are the needle and thread and scissors, he can't use the hammer and saw of the carpenter, right? For his work. And vice versa, the carpenter can't use the needle and thread and scissors to work with wood, huh? And so Aristotle says, just as one art cannot use the tools of another art, so one soul that's attached to this body with its tools, right, can't enter into another body and be the soul of that body. That'd be like the art of carpentry entering into the tools of the tailor, right? And becoming the art that sows and cuts of the scissors, right? Okay. Well, then having completed these, he gathers up the definition, right? And so is the substantial form, or he says, the first act, right, of a, what? An actual body composed of tools. I mentioned how the grammatic order there in the Greek corresponds to the logical order, right? Which isn't necessary, grammar and logic are different sciences, right? But, um, you'll say in the Greek, I guess, like, entelekeia, which means act, right? He prote, the first, right? Well, in English, we're kind of, got to put first, first, right? Okay? We have to put the adjective first, right? And then you can say of a body that is natural, organic, but we'd have to put natural and having tools or composed of tools, maybe before, right? You know, sometimes we want to do it. You can make phrases like this and say, a body that is natural, composed of tools, right? It's an act, which is the first one, of a body that is natural, having tools, right? Or composed of tools, right? But it'd be simple to say, it's the first act of a natural body composed of tools. A natural tooled body, right? In the Greek, it has one word there, tooled, right? We get our word organic, organic is lost, it's concreteness in English, right? Now that, you said the word tooled again. Is that, that's just another way of describing living, right? It's not a species of living. Not another way of describing living, but it's a way of describing the, specifying what the body is, of which the soul is the first act, right? It's the first act of a body composed of tools. And you can kind of see that. Aristotle goes on to explain that even the plants, which are a lower form of life than the animal, even the plant, there's some diversity of what? Tools, right? Yeah. When you get into the non-living world, right? I mean, is a stone or the dirt out there? You know, or is this water composed of tools, right? Right. Even if the water is composed in some way of hydrogen oxygen, not like tools. So it's kind of interesting that he sees that as a characteristic of the living body. The body is capable of the operations of life, right? That it's a body composed of tools. And as I said, you get a higher soul, you have more diversity of tools. Because there's more operations of which the soul is capable of. And so it needs a body that has more tools. Of course when you get to man, of course you run into another problem. That man's soul is capable of doing so many things that he can't have all the tools that he needs. Like knife and fork and ballpoint pin and so on. It's part of his body, otherwise you'd rather weigh down. I need a hammer today, I need a saw tomorrow, I need a, you know. I'd be walking around thinking of all these tools, you know. You see the carpenter sometimes has this kind of leather belt thing, you know. They've got all these hammer here and tools here. And it's very handy to get up on the ladder or something, you know. Pull one out and so on. But even they can't have all the tools that they use in their life attached to themselves. You know all the tools they give a soldier, you know, and he's got a carry on his back. And he's got tools to fight with and tools to dig a trench with. And maybe tools to eat with. And so on, huh. So this is the first definition then of the soul, right. Now, starting on page 6 and 119, he's going to, as we say, illustrate in a way to manifest this definition of the soul by a likeness, right. Or a couple of likenesses. And it's a likeness of what? Ratios, right. The likeness of proportions. Now, when you have that kind of a likeness, huh. What does that mean, huh. Well, you have to consider in what way the ratios are alike, right. And not make them more alike than they are, right. In that simple example I always give of 4 is to 6 as 2 is to 3, right. And someone says, well, 2 is an even number and 3 is an odd number. So the ratio of 2 to 3 is a ratio of an even number to an odd number. That's true. But is that the way in which 4 is to 6? It also is like that? It's a ratio of an even number to an odd number? No, no. Clearly I've misunderstood it. You've misunderstood what the like is consistent, right. Okay. So in what way is 4 to 6, which are two even numbers, like 2 to 3? Which aren't two even numbers. In what way is 4 to 6 like 2 to 3? What does that just consist? A very simple example that I'm trying to make, right. Well, you could say with Euclid that 4 is the same parts of 6 that 2 is of 3. So if you think or imagine the 6 to be composed of 3 2's, 4 is 2 of those 3 2's, right. So 4 is the same parts of 6 that 2 is of 3. Okay. Or if I say 2 is to 4 as 3 is to what? 6, right. Well, there I might say that 2 is the same part of 4 that 3 is of 6. As 3 is one half of 6, so 2 is one half of 4, right. But 2 is not a 3 and 4 is not a 6. And 2 and 4 are two even numbers. And 3 and 6 are not two even numbers, right. Okay. So you've got to understand in what way they are alike, right. And at the same time see their what? Their difference so you don't exaggerate the like of some. Okay. That's the way in which, who was it in the Middle Ages there? The fourth letter of council. He, Joel Comerford I guess it was, yeah. He took the words of scripture, you know, where Christ says, you know, praying for unity there in the Gospel of St. John. That we would be one as the Father and I are one. Oh. You see? He kind of exaggerated the likeness between our unity and the unity of the Father and the Son. And that's where the fourth letter of council there, the one that's right before Thomas was born, right. But he has a little work on that, on the first two decretals. But, I first was called my attention to it by Paul VI, right, where he's referring to the text there where it says, You can never point out a likeness between the creature and God without at the same time noting a greater what? Discibility. Discibility, right? Discibility. Unlikeness, huh? Unlikeness. You see? There always remains a kind of infinite distance between the creature and God, right, huh? Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. Unlikeness. In the sense of what? In the sense of form. In the Greek word it would be logos there, which he translates, as we do sometimes, by account, right? So he's saying it's usiagar hekataton logan, right? So it's substance according to the what? Form, right? In Aristotle it defines form, if you recall, back in the definition of the four kinds of cause. He says it's what completes the definition, right? So, he just... Yeah, yeah. He refers to the form rather than the matter. And this is the way he defines, remember form before? The what was to be, right? Okay? But this is the what it was to be for this sort of body. The natural body composed of tools, right? Now, he's making a comparison here now. Just as if some tool was a natural body, like an axe, right? For being an axe would be its what? Substance, its form. And this latter, its soul. But this being separated, it would no longer be an axe, except equivocally. But now it is an axe, huh? Now, what is he saying there, right? He's saying that, maybe, of course, now, if the axe were an axe for a body, and the sort of describing it, right? What would be its soul? Would it be chopping down the tree? That would be its second act, right? Yeah. That's not proportional to what the soul is, is it? Because the soul is a what? First act, right? Okay? So it would be what makes the what? Axe actually able to what? Chop, right? That would be its what? Souls. You see that? Mm-hmm. Its ability to chop, you might say, right? That would be its first act. What makes the axe actually able to chop? But not its chopping, right? Its chopping would be proportional to the living axe that the body does through having a soul, right? The soul is a first act. And it's no longer able to chop. It does not any longer be a what? An axe, right? Except equivocally. But now it is an axe. Just like an axe that isn't able to what? But the chopping thing is like a dead body, right? Analogously. But he points out the difference now, right? But the soul is not what it was to be. And the form, the definition of such a body, right? Like the axe. But of such a natural body, right? And then he recalls from the definition of what natural means, right? Nature is what? A principle or cause. The beginning or cause of motion and of rest, right? It's intrinsic to the thing, right? Okay, so he's looking back to the definition of nature that we met in the second book of natural hearing. The second book of the so-called physics, right? Okay, so if you're a ballpoint pen there in your hand, if that was a natural body having life and potency, what would be its soul? Would writing be its soul? Why not? Because the soul is not a second act, the soul is a first act, right? So, who would be the soul of the ballpoint pen? Whatever makes it actually, right, able to what? To write or to be written with, you see? Why the actual writing would be its second act and therefore not its soul, right? But the soul is not the first act of a ballpoint pen, right? But rather the first act of a natural body composed of tools, right? What's interesting is Aristotle is drawing his proportions here, his likenesses, from tools, right? But in 119, the tool is a, what? Artificial tool, like an axe. Well, that's the ballpoint pen that I took in my example, right? In 120, he's going to take, as is an example, one of the tools of a living body, like the eye itself, right? Now, you see a certain order in those two kinds of likenesses there, huh? It begins with the artificial tool, and probably the word tool in Greek, organon, just like the word tool in English. You hear the word tool, you first of all think of a, what? Artificial tool. Yeah, of an artificial tool, right? You don't first think of your body and your eye as being a tool, do you? But a tool is something you use to do something with, right? You use the knife to cut, right? You use the ballpoint pen to write. You use the axe to chop, right? And likewise, you use your eyes to see, and you use your ears to hear. You use your teeth in front to bite, and your teeth in back to chew. And you use your heart to pump blood, et cetera, et cetera, right? So, he's going from the tools that are more known to us, right, in a way, which are probably called tools, first of all, right? To what is later on called a tool, and not thought, first of all, as being a tool. At the same time, which of these two tools is closer to the soul? Yeah. Yeah. This last sentence, I don't know if I quite understand the first part, but when he talks about what it was to be, you mention that. That's his definition of form, but is it more the sense of second act? No, what it was to be, what is an axe, right? Pardon? If you ask, what is an axe, what makes something intrinsically to be an axe, is it chopping? Or is chopping something that it can do because it is an axe, see? Okay, but then why does it say here, the soul is not the what it was to be, if the what it was to be is the first act? Well, he's saying, you're taking only a part of the sentence. For the soul is not the what it was to be, it's not the form, right, and the account, right, the logos, of such a body, right, as is the axe, but of such a natural body, as has a principle of moving and of standing. Oh, I get it. Okay? Getting the whole sentence, yeah. So, no sir, I was careful there to point out the difference, obviously, between the soul and its body and the axe, right? Okay? So, he's making a comparison, right, to something more known to us. So, when a man is going to make an axe, right, he takes, you know, wood and metal and so on, right? So, when a man is going to make an axe, right? So, when a man is going to make an axe, right?