De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 28: Light, Transparency, and the Rejection of Corpuscular Theory

Transcript
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Transparent, eh? It makes the transparent to be what? Actually transparent, right? Just as health makes your body to be actually what? Healthy. Okay? And you're kind of showing this by its opposite. In that in which this is, darkness also is, right? In potency, eh? So you could say that the transparent is able to be what? Enlightened or it's able to be what? Dark, right? And darkness is the lack of light in the transparent, eh? Light, however, is like the color of the transparent, eh? Whenever the transparent is an actuality due to fire or something of this sort, like the body above. For even in this something, one and the same is present, eh? Now, 192, eh? Having said what the transparent is, a bit, of what light is, or what he thinks they are anyway, right? He now rejects the view of some of the, what? Ancient philosophers, which as you may know have come back in the modern scientists, eh? That light is really, what? Some kind of subtle bodies, eh? Okay? Going through space and maybe, you know, bouncing off things and reverberating and so on, huh? Okay? But notice, huh, the modern scientist has come back to that idea with the, let's say, the photon, for example, right, huh? So Einstein was explaining the so-called photoelectric effect, right? Okay? You may know in modern times, if you go back to Sir Isaac Newton and to Hugh Jens, they had two theories about light, and one was that light was a wave-like phenomenon, and Hugh Jens was proposing that, and the other was that light was like little particles, huh? Okay? And using either hypothesis, they were able to explain what they saw, like doing, huh? But Newton had perhaps more authority, huh? In Hugh Jens, huh? But then in the 19th century, lo and behold, huh, there was an experiment performed which seemed to indicate that Hugh Jens was right. An experiment that made sense if you assumed that light was a wave, but didn't make sense if you assumed light was a shower particles. And so after two or three hundred years, huh, it seemed that Hugh Jens had, what, come out on top, huh? Very great scientists, huh, Hugh Jens. Then 1905, huh, in this Annus Mirabilis of Einstein, right? In one year, he published three papers, huh? All three of which are considered worthy of the Nobel Prize. And one of them was the explanation of the photoelectric effect. One was the explanation of Brownian movement, and the third was the special relativity theories that's now called. Well, no one could understand the special relativity theory for many years, so. And then with that, they climatically, they finally understood it. But, I mean, suddenly this is worthy of the Nobel Prize. He actually got the Nobel Prize for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. But this was an effect, an experiment, huh, where light is shown, right, upon certain materials, and it ejects electrons and so on. And Einstein showed this made sense if you assume that light is a shower of particles. Called, later on, he called them light quanta, because he was influenced already by Planck, and he saw a connection between the quanta and these. But later on, they were given the title photon. But that's taken from the Greek word for light, photos, huh? You get the word photography, huh? Photography means literally to draw with light, huh? Draw with light, huh? Okay. Well, now this is the beginning of this so-called wave-particle duality, huh? And physicists, in other words, had experiments that contradict each other or seem to contradict each other. In some experiments, light seemed to be a wave-like thing kind of spread out. Others, it seemed to be a shower of particles pinpointed on. And so he used to joke, you know, on Monday, you know, Wednesday and Friday we teach that it's a wave, and on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we teach that it's a particle. And then, a little bit later than in the 1920s there, Louis de Broglie there, and an influence of that said, well, gee, maybe these things that we knew as particles, like electrons and protons, maybe they also in some cases behave like waves. And so they performed experiments like they'd done with light, and all of a sudden they saw this wave-like aspect. So now they had experiments that seemed to contradict each other. And this is one of the greatest contradictions that had to be tried to resolve. And Newtonian, not Newtonian, but quantum physics attempted to resolve that contradiction. I mention that, apropos of this, because, in a way, the position that Aristotle is rejecting here is certainly closer to what we would know from modern science, huh? Okay? But it's interesting to see the reasons why Aristotle rejects this idea that light is some kind of very subtle bodies or very small particles, you know, shooting through space, huh? You see this starting in 193. What the transparency is, therefore, and what light is, has been said. Okay? That is neither fire nor any body nor a stream from any body, right? For thus it would be some body, but the presence of fire or some such thing in the transparent. It's really like a quality or a habit or a form of the transparent, according to Aristotle's thinking, huh? Okay? Rather than a body there that is, what? If you look at the light as filling the room here in some sense, right? Then you're going to have two bodies, what? In some sense. Yeah, yeah, that's the ugly sense, huh? That's a very good reason he gives there in 193. For two bodies, you're not able to be together in the same, what? Place, huh? Okay? And it seems that light is contrary to darkness. Now, darkness is not a body, is it, right? But darkness seems to be the lack of something, huh? So light seems to be like a form. However, darkness is the deprivation, or to use the English word, the lack of such a state from the transparent. Whence it is clear that the presence of this is light, huh? Now, in 195, he's arguing against Empedocles, who speaks of light as if it's some kind of subtle body spreading out through space, right? In the way the moderns think of the photon, right, huh? Okay? And Empedocles did not speak correctly, nor someone else who spoke thus, speaking as if light is born and spreads out at any time between the earth and the containing body, though escaping our notice, huh? For this is beside the clarity of reason, beside the appearances, huh? And what is Aristotle's reason for saying that the illumination of the room is not the locomotion of some subtle bodies making up light spreading out through the room, right? See? Well, his argument is that any locomotion takes what? Time, right? Well, illumination takes no time. Okay? And Thomas, you know, in his commentary, follows Aristotle in that, huh? And Aristotle says, he might, you know, say that, you know, it moves a short distance so fast that he can't follow it, right? Like the magic trick, you know, the hand is thicker than the eye. Okay? For it might escape us, he says at the bottom of page 20, for it might escape us in a small distance, but not noticing this from the extreme east to the extreme west is a very great requirement, right, huh? No. In other words, it seems incredible to Aristotle and to Thomas Collingham that the light could go from the east to the west, right? And take no time at all. It'd have to be, you know, so fast compared to anything that we have any experience of. I mean, the sun, I mean, it goes a long distance around the earth, but it doesn't go whoop, like that, right, huh? You see? Now, notice, you could put this in the form of a, what? Now, if, then, syllogism, right? Okay? If illumination, right, is, as Empedicase says, right, a locomotion, right, huh? It's spreading out with some very fine bodily particles, right? If illumination is a locomotion. I'm not too clear, you see what I mean, right? If illumination is the spreading out in space, right, in place, right, of some very fine bodies, right? If that's true, what he says. Then, illumination takes time, okay? But, illumination takes no time. Therefore, illumination is not a locomotion. Notice, this is a form of argument we met a long time ago, right? We're saying, if A is so, then B is so, B is not so, A is not so. You could often argue that way, doesn't you, huh? Socrates argues that way, you know, huh? So, is the form of an argument good? Yeah. Notice, if it's true that if A is so, then B is so, and it's true that B is not so, it must be that A is not so, right? But, now, what about the matter? Are the statements in the argument necessary, or is one of them, or both of them, improbable? Well, the if-then statement, I think, is necessary. If illumination is a locomotion, then illumination takes, what, time, right? Okay. But, the second premise here, the simple statement, illumination takes no time, that's only a probable statement, right? It isn't necessarily, what, true, right? And, in fact, with very subtle experiments, like the Michelson-Morley experiment, they can actually measure the, what, time it takes for light to spread, huh? Which is approximately, what, 186,000 miles per second. That's incredible speed, right? Okay. So, Aristotle's argument has got a false statement here in the second premise here, huh? Okay. Now, you can compare that a bit to Aristotle's discussion there of the stars, huh? It seemed to Aristotle that the stars were in no way, what, changing, right? And as far back as men could remember, right? The stars were always the same, huh? And therefore, he concluded that the stars are, what? Yeah. They're unchanging as far as their substance, as far as their qualities are concerned, right? They change only in, what, place, right? Okay. But they don't change in their substance or in their inward, what, qualities, right? Okay. Now, when Thomas Aquinas comments on that, and Aristotle takes it up most formally in the second book of natural philosophy, the book on the universe, huh? Which is usually called in Latin De Celo Ad Mundo, right? I think the Greek title is actually on the universe. The Greek word for celum or the heavens and the universe is the same word. In Aristotle's book is actually, what, to be understood as being about the universe. And they translate in the Latin De Celo, but Celo meant not the universe, but the heavens, right? And Aristotle talks about the whole universe, so they say De Celo Ad Mundo. Okay? Yeah. No, it's a different word. Uwano, I think it is. Uwano. Yeah. But anyway, that's beside the point, in a sense. That's where he's talking about the universe as a whole, right? And there he talks about the, you know, more formally or more completely about the heavenly bodies. Well, Thomas in his commentary on the De Celo Ad Mundo in the book on the Yavari Sun, he says, he points out this argument is not necessary, right? See? Because maybe the time it takes for the stars to change, right, is not only greater than the life of one man, but greater than the life of many generations of men, right? Nevertheless, there's some probability, right, to this argument, right? See? Now, I think if you, you know, pin down on this and even Aristotle himself in this, he would say, well, you can say that the light moves so fast that we just can't see it, right? But that it does so from east to west, I mean, yeah, that's, it's hard to swallow, right? Nevertheless, it seems to me that you could so many towns and the south would see, right, that same weakness, you might say, the argument, huh, that there is in the argument for the eternity of the stars and so on, right, huh? Right. in one case, the witness would be that what? It takes too little time, it waits a little time to be noticed by us, right? In the other, maybe it takes longer time than what? Yeah. That's it. Or, witness. Yeah. Okay. That's it. Now, there are certain, what? You know, maybe if you observe carefully the stars, you might see supernova or something, you know, super new stars and so on, exploding stars, and you might see some evidence there, right? Aristotle, in the beginning of the biological works there, right, when he's turning now from the, talking about the sun, the moon, the stars, to talking about the animals, huh? He says that we're in a much better position he is to understand the animals and he can examine them closely by the sun, the moon, the stars, he can't, right? Mm-hmm. So he's aware of the fact, you know, the distance between him, right, and the things he's talking about, huh? When he talks about the sun, the moon, the stars, and so he talks about the animals, right? He's kind of the beginner in many ways of anatomy, huh? And even Charles Darwin, you know, when he first read the parts of animals of Aristotle, when Oglethorpe, I guess it was, translated them into English from the Greek there, and we have a letter there from Darwin to Oglethorpe, he says, the natives and Cuvier, you know, these famous biologists, have been his heroes, right? But they were mere schoolboys, he says, compared to Aristotle. Kind of strong thing, right? But you could say that Aristotle is a much better biologist maybe than an astronomer in the sense that he is able to, what? Observe and examine more closely the animals than he could the sun, the moon, and the, what? Stars. So, we're starting to get in here, I think, in chapter 7. to get in here. to get in here. to things that really depend upon what we called in the beginning of our actual studies, private experience, right? That common or ordinary experience is not maybe, what, sufficient to talk about the nature of light in particular, right? I mentioned before how the Greek philosophers tried to get further than you can, really, right? On the basis of what? Common experience, huh? Mm-hmm. Okay. And if they have any deficiency, it's that, right? Mm-hmm. But the moderns, it's kind of the reverse, that you can't get anywhere on the basis of what? Common experience, right? Mm-hmm. So to show kind of the uncertainty of that, it's like saying, you know, we can't really know that a whole is more than one of its parts until we know that a molecule of water is more than an atom of hydrogen. But you really have to know that, huh? In order to know that a whole is more than one of its parts, huh? See? And you could say, you know, in some sense, the Greeks are more reasonable than the moderns because no one could know beforehand how far you can get on the basis of what? Mm-hmm. Common experience, right? I mean, if earth, air, fire, and water, for example, to go back to Empedocles, if earth, air, fire, and water were the first forms of matter, if there's no forms of matter before earth, air, fire, and water, then common or ordinary experience would be enough to recognize the first forms of matter, right? But if there's forms of matter before earth, air, fire, and water, they wouldn't be knowable except in some roundabout way by some ingenious experiment, right? They would somehow bring them to light or bring something that would indicate that there's something before them, right? So one would know ahead of time, right, whether common or ordinary experience was sufficient or not, huh? And in a way, you can say what the moderns, you know, they insist, at least, the physical scientists do, upon the principle of simplicity, right? That one should not multiply causes without necessity, and you can say the same thing here, that one should not, what, demand more experience is necessary to know something, right? Chemistry is not necessary. The experience in the chemical lab is necessary to know that water is H2O, if that's what it is. But it's not necessary, the chemical lab, to know that a hole is more than a part. It's like the business there with the sociologists, you know, which people are making fun of, you know? They go and make these long surveys and so on, and end up with the conclusion that men and women are really different. Or boys and girls, you know, really have different interests. My favorite story, which is apparently a true story, you know, was, you know, some woman liberationist there. She was going to, not that her daughter would be typed, you know, so instead of buying her daughter a doll, she brought her a, what, toy truck, huh? And she discovered one day that the daughter was, what, putting the toy truck, tucking into bed there, and, yeah. Just like these kids won't buy this little boy a toy gun or something like that, and the kid, you'll get something, maybe the state of Texas, you know, from the, from the, yeah, yeah, bang, bang, bang, you know? They'll get something, you know? They'll use their finger, you know? They just got to do that, you know? Thomas Aquinas talks about that, you know, in the commentary on Matthew there, right, huh? A boy's always, you know, want to bring in something guilitary, right? Swords or things that sort, huh? So, as you see, the Greeks can be, you can say that they're less culpable, let's say, right, in trying to get as far as they could on the basis of common experience. Aristotle knew himself, right? That for his work in biology, he had to have private experience. So Aristotle did all kinds of anatomy, huh? And when Aristotle, in all the great, Aristotle's pupil was currently the Near East, huh? He had men who would send animals and plants from that area back to Aristotle so he could get a broader view of the, what, kingdom, huh? In the same way, before Aristotle wrote the famous fifth book of the politics and the book on revolution, huh? He made a study of 150 city-states, huh? And the history of their governments and how they changed and so on, huh? So he was aware of the need for private experience, huh? But it's not clear in advance exactly where the line is to be drawn, right? and how far, right? You can go, right? On the basis of common experience. But it's reasonable to see, to try to go as far as you can, right? And then you see it breaks down and then you start doing it. But the moderns, in a sense, are more irrational in the sense they don't think you even know anything on the basis of common experience. Everything requires a, what, private experience. It can look very severe to something, too, that you find in the moderns, huh? Two things invented by the moderns, huh? One is called the telescope and the other is called the, what? Microscope, yeah. You know, you invented some kind of a telescope and other than doing that. Now, a telescope enables you to see something at a, what, distance that the unaided eye could not see, right? A scope comes from the Greek word for what? Look, right. Yeah. And tele is the one for what? Distance, right? Okay. I remember in high school there in Latin class there, one of the readings there was entitled Televisio. And all the kids were saying, you know, what's that about? I mean, they don't have television. But, you know, they had to work, right? Televisio, right? You know, seeing at a distance, huh? Okay. So a telescope enables you to see at a distance, right? So when you train the telescope on the moon and the universe and so on and bigger and bigger greater telescopes, right? You see more and more things, right? Okay. And that change your view about what the moon is, right? What the stars are and so on. The microscope enables you to what? Yeah, see small things and it kind of blows up, you might say. See small things. Of course, see here is taken from the eye, huh? The first sense we're talking about here, right? Okay. Now, the Greeks didn't have the telescope or the microscope, right? But I think if they had had one, they would have, what? Looked through them. They were very wonderful people, right? But in logic, you have two tools that are in a way like the telescope and the microscope. But they're for seeing by reason, right? What are those two tools? Definition. Definition. And definition is analogous to what? A microscope, yeah. In other words, what a definition does in a way is to blow something up so you see it more distinctly. See, this is a square. This is an equilateral and right angle of quadrilateral. Kind of expanding the thing, right? You see, I'm expanding with him, right? You see it more clearly and what? Distinctly and minutely, right? Okay. Isn't that like a microscope? Yeah, the definition is like a microscope, right? Okay. Now, Socrates in the Republic does something like that too. In the Republic, if you know the dialogue, in the first book of the Republic, with Socrates in his conversation, he reasons out, right, that the just man is more happy than the unjust man, right? And so on. And it seems like the conversation is concluded and over. But then in the second book, one of the speakers with Socrates says, Socrates, he says, do you want to just seem to have convinced us? Or do you want really to have convinced us? And Socrates says, well, I'd like to really convince you that the just man is more happy than the unjust man, right? Well, how does Socrates go about trying to really convince them, right? See? Well, he says, I'm going to blow up the soul of man, right? So you see exactly what the condition is of the just soul, and what the condition is of the unjust soul. Now, how is he going to do that? Well, yeah? He'll take a state or a city. Yeah, yeah. He sees a likeness of proportion, a likeness of ratios, a proportion between the parts of the what? Soul, right? And the parts of what? The city. And so, in the city, you can see, as it were, something of the structure of the soul but blown up, what? So big that you can hardly miss it. Okay? Now, in a lesser stage, Peter does that sometimes in other dialogues. Like he'll say, you know, reason is to the emotions, like a man is to what? The horse, right? Okay? And it's easy to see the man on the horse than to see reason and emotions. But some people are led by their emotions, huh? Which I compare to a man, you know, who's riding a horse, and the horse gets away from him, you know, and the man is kind of split in the... In the... It's true. Yeah. And the horse goes riding off like that to the man, you know, being bumped into the rocks or anything like that, you know? That's in a way of what it is to have your emotions eating your what? Your reason, right? Where I was always saying, you know, should reason rule the emotions like a man rules the slave, the master rules the slave, or should reason rule the emotions like a father should rule his children? See? And he's going to point out that reason should rule the emotions like a father rules his children rather than like the master rules the what? Slave. You know, we developed that, huh? But in a way, they're doing something like what the microscope does to the eye, they're doing something like that for a reason, right? Okay? The definition is the more common way that they do this, huh? Okay? The definition, what? Kind of blows up and lets you see more distinctly, huh? What the thing is, huh? Okay? But these proportions, in a way, enable you to magnify that. Well, the models completely neglect the definition in the true sense, the definition of a thing. And they neglect very often those proportions that you have in the dialogues, huh? But they should know about that, right? Because that's been around for some time, right? The Greeks had no way maybe knowing about the microscope, right? But, you know, if they did this sort of thing, right? Well, then certainly they'll be in favor of that, right? You can aid the eye like you need in the reason, right? Now, syllogism, and especially the kind of syllogism called demonstration, is a bit like the, what? Telescope, right? What you realize, for example, is that our reason is not to where the statement we'd like to know, whether it's true or false. It's not like the center of the circle is to the points of the circumference. Did you know the center of the circle is equidistant from all the points on the, what? Circumference, huh? Is that the way our mind or reason is to all the statements we'd like to know? Just think of your studies there, of book one of Euclid, right? No. It's more like a straight line, huh? You just do all those points down the line, huh? You know from your study of Euclid there how you have to prove one statement before you can prove some other statement. And so the conclusion of one syllogism, of one demonstration, is the premise for the next demonstration. And then the conclusion of that is the premise for the next one, right? And so you get down to, say, the end of book one of Euclid, which is just mixed to the end there, the 47 theorem, you get to the Pfeifferian Theorem, right, huh? Which you have to go through many proofs, right, huh? So you can say the Pfeifferian Theorem is at some distance from our mind, right? Other statements are closer to our mind, huh? Some are so close, like quantities equal to the same to each other, they're obvious, right? The reason sees them almost right away. Other ones need some kind of manifestation, right? Others need really a proof. Others need the conclusion of other proofs. And some need the conclusion of proof, or proof, or proof, or proof, right? So, in a sense, syllogism or demonstration, reasoning, does for reasons something like what the telescope does for the what? I, right? Okay? So, the syllogism and the definition are neglected a lot by the moderns, huh? John Stuart Mill says there's no definitions of things at all. Uh-huh. I remember Brother Richard is translating the posthumalytics, and of course, some people in the modern writers there are these subjects, they don't admit there's a definition, there's any syllogisms, right? Uh-huh. And, uh, it's kind of funny, because Richard said sometimes they reason by a syllogism that there are no syllogisms. He said, well, one guy, I forget what the name of the guy was, but he reasons, you know, every argument is from part to part, but, um, no syllogism is from part to part, therefore, well, syllogism is an argument, right? But you've got a syllogism here in the second finger, right? To prove that there are no syllogisms. So, you know. So, so we need, huh? Reason needs these tools, like definition and demonstration, huh? As Thomas says, talking about logic, it supplies reason the tools that it needs. But the senses also need certain, what, tools, right? Okay? And so, the moderns not having definition and demonstration often miss out on many things right? Because of that, huh? But the Greeks not having the telescope and microscope would remain ignorant, right? Of many things, huh? Because of that, huh? It became more excusable than the moderns. Now, going back to when we were with pedocles is not speaking correctly, that's his third reason, right? For... Well, basically, there are two reasons there, huh? Because the 194 is kind of just recalling what has been said before and emphasizing his position, right? Okay. So the first is about the two bodies not being in the same place. Yeah. And the second is is that if illumination was some kind of fine bodies like we call them today photons spreading through space, right? Then it would take some time, huh? But apparently it takes no time. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. In particular, they'll talk about, you know, the reaction to a single photon and something in the eye, huh? Oh. So, but, you have to go into, you know, discussion of the full electric effect, huh? Oh. Among other things. Okay. And 196, huh? He's coming back to the idea that the transparent doesn't have a color of its own. That's why it can be receptive, right? Right? And be the vehicle for conveying color. He says, the uncolored is receptive of color. You can't receive a color that you already, what, have, right? You have to be lacking in that color. But it's without sound of sound, huh? And when they look inside the eye there, the liquid there in the eye, seems to be, what, colorless, right? But if you had, you know, a red liquid there in the center of your eye, huh? And everything would look kind of, what, red or at least pink, huh? If my tongue was made out of something, what, sugary, right? I wouldn't be able to taste my dry wines, one thing, right? You see? So the sense powers have to be, in their medium, have to be lacking in the object they're going to, what, receive, huh? There's a problem, as we'll see, a little bit of the sense of, what, touch, right? Because the organ of touch is not able to be completely denuded of its object, like hot and cold or hard and soft, huh? But we'll see that in the little passages that our translators translate when we get there. Now, 197 is talking about the other kind of visible that he mentioned in 188 that is unnamed, huh? However not all visible things are in light that don't need the proper color of each thing. For some things are not seen in the light, while in darkness they bring about sensation, like what appears fiery and shining, huh? Like fungi, huh? They seem to, what, glow in the dark, huh? Horns, heads, scales, and eyes of fish, huh? Okay? Even the eyes of the cat, huh? Nighttime, see, yeah. Awesome. But if none of these is the proper color seen, huh? To know what causes these are seen, therefore, is another story, huh? Aristotle does have, following the anima, a book called About Sense and the Sensible, where he goes more into the senses, huh? And into them. So, in fact, I'm going to give you a little passage here from Thomas' commentary there on the sensu sensato there. Now, Demarcatus, as you may recall from our study, okay, let's look at 198, which is kind of a summary here. Now ever so much is apparent that what is seen in light is color, whence color is not seen without light. For this was being color for it, being motive of the transparent in act. However, the actuality, the transparent is light. This is the sum of the things we've seen before. A sign of this is apparent, for should someone place what is color upon his eye, he will not see. It seems a transparent in between, right? But the color moves a transparent, such as the air. By this being continuous, however, the sense organ is moved. Now, here's a little criticism here of Demarcatus. Demarcatus is the man who thought that the universe is composed of, what, atoms and the empty, and so he thought that if between us and the moon or something like that, if it was really empty, we'd see much better. You can see a mouse up there, right? And Aristopoulos, you wouldn't see at all if there was not that transparent medium that the light would move. In the same way, you know, sometimes we have a hard time hearing a sound, but if you really had a vacuum, a void, an empty, would you really sound at all? Because it's got to move that, what, medium, right? For Demarcatus does not say this well, believing that if what is in between should come to be void, one would see more exactly. Even if an ant should be in the heavens, huh? You'd see the heavens. But this is impossible. For seeing comes to be by the sensitive, what, suffering or undergoing something, huh? It is impossible, therefore, that it be by the color itself being seen. Now, what he's saying is that the color has to what? Have between it and the eye, the transparent, and the color is what moves the transparent and act. So if we didn't have that transparent air, that transparent water, the color would not act upon the eye. It remains, then, that it be by what is in between, whence it is necessary for there to be something between. There being a void, it falls not that it will be seen more exactly, but that nothing at all will be seen. Although, in some way, the idea of the void seems to fit the idea that it's a shower of particles, which he's already rejected, right? It has been said, therefore, due to what cause it is necessary to see color and light. Fire, however, is seen in both, in darkness and in light, and this by necessity, because, in a way, the light of the what? Fire is strong enough that it makes, to some extent, the transparent to be actually transparent. Okay, now, 201, he's making kind of a side there that the same thing seems to be true about some of the other organs, that they require a medium, right, in between them and their object. This doesn't seem to be true in the case of touch, but Aristotle will maintain it in the case of touch. The skin is the medium, right? And the sense of touch is more within now. But we don't have to get too much involved in that. 202 is, again, dealing with more details that he's going to take up more in the open sense and sensation. Now, since we... Now, since we just talked a bit about the eye, and we haven't talked about hearing and so on, in the book on the sense of the sensible, Aristotle has a kind of interesting comparison here between the eye and the ear, right? And perhaps, just give a little bit of what Thomas says in his commentary here. And Aristotle is kind of saying, which is better, sight or what? Hearing, right? And you probably know from the premium to the wisdom there, you know, that he singles out the sense of sight, huh? I remember having a pious girl in my class there, and I was arguing that the eye is better than the ear, that if you ask people, you know, would you rather be deaf or be blind, they'd rather what? Be deaf than blind, the average person would say, huh? But she insisted she'd rather be blind than deaf, because she was a great lover of music, huh? and played the piano and the organ and so on, right? And I had a silence there in some way, you know? So even if she was quiet, you know, I quoted scripture there about, you know, the apple of your eye, you know, God, is there even like the apple of your eye? So, I mean, scripture obviously was singing out the eye there as opposed to the ear, so that kind of sculched her. But I thought she was going to say, it comes right here. Yeah, I mean, see what's on our side. That's usually a contrast that they make, huh? That the eye is the sense of what? Discovery, right? You have to come up in this text a little bit, too. The eye is the sense of discovery, huh? By oneself. And the ear is more of the sense of learning from the teacher. That's a contrast that Aristotle makes there in the metaphysics a bit, huh? Okay, what comes up in this text again, huh? Um, you see...