Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
34. Reading 13: First Matter Known by Proportion, Ability, and the Soul as Substantial Form
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[0:00] It's the one that touches upon what the all the Greeks before Aristotle could not see. He's saying the underlying nature is knowable by proportion. What he's actually talking about here is the first underlying nature, the first matter of all. And he says it's knowable by proportion. Now, what does he mean?

[0:29] If you go back to what we saw in ten and eleven, we saw let's say the change from let's say hard to soft. There had to be something underlying the change, right? We took the example of butter, right? We're in the change from let's say wet to dry or reverse, there had to be something underlying, the cloth right? Okay.

[1:06] Now Aristotle is asking here: Is what underlies not these kind of changes, which are changes of accidents? What underlies change of substance? If you have let's say

[1:23] a man and a dog, change between man and dog: the man should become a dog, or dog become a man. huh? It's a good case, huh? If the man eat the dog, right? The dog eat the man, right? A man become a dog, or dog become a man. Okay, there was a big. Where is it down in? Where is it? One of those countries there, Vietnam or Korea?

[1:51] One of those ones where they eat dogs, right? Vietnam. Vietnam. I guess we're gonna have the some kind of big games there or something, Some of the Olympics or something, and they're trying to discourage you know the eating of dogs and all of it. Foreigners here. What can we do? This we're doing for hundreds of years.

[2:12] Okay, but you know, vice versa, you know. You know, the dog gets the mitts sometimes, right? You know, the body is okay. So, what would underlie the change between man and dog? Okay. First, I was saying that the what underlies that change is knowable by proportion. It's not knowable by itself.

[2:36] What does that mean? Well, he's saying that the first matter is to man and dog something like let's take play is to sphere and cube He's saying the matter. Or the subject underlying substantial change, the change say from man to dog, that first matter is to man and dog as clay is to sphere and cube. Now,

[3:24] in order to understand a proportion, you have to understand in what way the first is to the second as the what third is to the fourth, right? Okay. And before we try to understand this proportion, let me just take a very simple example of a mathematical proportion. Let's say four is to six as two is to three. All agree? Okay. Now, sometimes you have a student who wants to say, you know, five is to six as two is to three, right?

[4:01] Is that proportional? No. The distance between five and six is the same as between two and three, right? That's not what we mean. We mean that what this is to that four is to six as two is to three, right? And so, if a student is slow to see, say, well, in a way you can say four is two twos and six is three twos, so it's the same ratio, two to three, right?

[4:32] Okay. Okay, that's you know something for students to understand what proportion is. But now, if someone came back and said, okay, four is to six is two is to three, two is an even number, right? And three is an odd number, right? Therefore, four should be an even number and six should be an odd number. You don't understand the proportion, right? You see, proportion doesn't consist in that as two is to three is an even number to an odd number, so four is to six.

[5:04] That's not what the proportion consists in. I don't understand it. What we're saying is that four is the same parts of six that two is of what three, right? Okay. So you got to be careful, right? In considering a proportion, that you what see in what way they are like and don't exaggerate the likeness between the what the terms, right? Okay.

[5:33] Now, up here, notice clay is an actual substance, and sphere and cube are two accidents, huh? Now. Is the likeness of the first matter is to man and dog as clay is to a sphere and cube? That first matter is an actual substance, and man and dog are two accidents. No, man and dog are two actual substances.

[6:22] And over here, in the fourth term, you have not two actual substances, but two accidents. Well, that's what likeness consists of—that's like mixing up, you know, Thinking six is odd because three is odd, right? Okay. Again, the first matter is that an actual substance.

[6:47] No, that's you could say substance and ability, substance potency, but it's not an actual substance. Otherwise, man and dog would be two what? Accidents. accidents. Accidents, yeah. Okay. So all the terms seem to be different, right? Well, what does the likeness consist? What consists in this? That just as clay is able to be a sphere and able to be a cube, right? Huh? But not at the same time, right?

[7:27] And when it's actually a sphere, right? It is still able to be a cube, right? But if it would be actually becoming a cube, it would cease to be a what? Sphere. Yeah. So likewise, the first matter is able to be a man, right? Or a dog, right? Or some other substance, but it can't be both at the same time, right? But when it's one, it remains an ability to being the other, right?

[7:58] But if it became the other, it would cease to be the one it was, right? Okay. So the likeness consists that the first term is to the second in a way as ability is to what? Act, right? Huh? Okay. But in other ways, all the terms are quite different, right? Because in one case you have what? An actual substance in ability to two different accidents, right? Over here you have substance in ability in reference to two what?

[8:33] Actual substances, huh? Okay. Now Aristotle could be more explicit there and say that in a way the first matter is knowable only by this proportion.

[8:49] Why? Well, if you stop and think about substance in ability, If you try to consider substance in ability by itself, is it actually anything? It's going to be, as we say sometimes, pure ability. Ability without any act, consider it by itself. Now, stop and think a bit about ability, and there are many, you know, meanings of the word ability. And its ability for substances is one, but this is the most radical example of ability.

[9:33] But stop and think a bit about ability. which I consider most universally most universally in the ninth book of wisdom, but, but is ability knowable by itself any ability?

[9:53] Take, for example, a ball player's ability, right? To pitch or to hit. Do you actually see his ability, or do you see what he does because of his ability? Say, do you see my ability to talk now, or do you just hear my talking? The way of talking. Yeah. Do you see my ability to walk? No, but you're paralyzed, for all you know, down at this end of the table, right?

[10:23] And so when I get up and I walk, that you realize I have what the ability to walk, right? Okay. So sometimes I begin this way.

[10:40] I say, can you sense or even imagine the ability, some ability? Do you ever sense or imagine somebody's ability to walk, or you just sense his walking?

[11:04] Just the walking. Yeah. Yeah. So right away there's a difficulty in talking about ability, right? You're talking about something you can't sense or imagine. Okay.

[11:20] Well, how is ability known? Ability is known only through the what? The act. The act for which it is an ability, huh? Okay. And that's why ability is known only by reason and not by the senses or imagination. Because as Shakespeare tells us in the definition of reason we looked at earlier in the year, reason is the ability for what discourse, right? And discourse there means knowing one thing through another, like when you reason, right?

[12:01] Or when you define, or when you calculate, and so on. So ability is knowable only by reason. Because the only reason that knows one thing through another. Okay. Yeah. Like an example would be, we know your ability by the test we give you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How long do you want to test? Yeah. Yeah. Show me how able. Show me. You have a, you know, how many jobs playing the piano in your bar, you know?

[12:34] Okay, show me. Okay, sweet. Okay. I'm able to speak French. Well, show me. One dear. Okay. So, ability is knowable only through action, and that's the way we also distinguish the abilities we have. So my ability to See and my ability to hear are not the same ability, because seeing is not a form of hearing, or hearing a form of what seeing, right? So my ability to see or to hear, to walk, are different abilities.

[13:21] And ultimately, we define an ability by the act for which it is an ability. We had an example of that in the definition of reason itself, right? When Shakespeare defined it as the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after, right? Reason doesn't even know what reason is, except through what reason does, huh? Okay. Then reason knows itself as the ability for what it does. Okay.

[13:54] But something that is an ability, or something, need not be itself only an ability. Clay is something in its own right. It's an actual substance, particular kind of matter. Although it's an ability to be in a sphere and a what cube, right? Okay. And man is something actual, right? Apart from his health or his sickness, right? So although man is an ability for sickness or health, he's able to be sick or able to be healthy, not at the same time.

[14:32] But nevertheless, man is knowable apart from sickness, right? And health, huh? You can define man without that. But the first matter, huh? It can't be an actual accident, because accident can't underlie substance, right? And can't be an actual substance, right? So it's nothing actual if you consider it by itself. So it's not knowable by itself. Therefore, it has to be known by this proportion, huh? And that's why

[15:11] the early Greeks had a difficulty in understanding the first matter, because it seemed to be nothing, right? And they thought of the first matter as some kind of an actual substance, like water or air or Mother Earth or something like that, right? And very often the modern scientists think of the first matter as some kind of actual substance, huh? Okay. But sometimes they get down, you know, studying matter very deeply, like when Heisenberg was, you know, going from quantum theory to the study of elementary particles, and there it seemed in the experiments with elementary particles that no form of matter is what permanent, right?

[15:53] No form of matter is eternal, right? And therefore, the first matter must be something what formless, right? Huh? Okay. And Heisenberg says we know matter only through the what forms of matter, right? We don't know matter by itself, huh?

[16:14] But it's more clear to us that man and dog are substances, and there is therefore substantial change when a man dies or a man comes into existence. But the Greek philosophers before Aristotle, they couldn't understand right how such a change would be possible, because they didn't want to get something from nothing, right? And this here was hard to understand, and so it seemed to be to not be, okay.

[16:48] Now the reason why I do what might seem kind of stupid, but the reason why I attach the ninth reading and the fifteenth reading, right,

[17:02] after the thirteenth reading, is because Aristotle is so brief in talking about first matter here that I think you can use the ninth and the fifteenth reading to get into it more, right? Because the ninth reading is a vast critique of Anaxagoras, right? Anaxagoras' difficulties in his trying to understand the first matter, his difficulties arise because he tries to put actually into matter everything that's able to be.

[17:42] Let's make it infinitely small and solid to get all in there, and Aristotle showed many difficulties in it. But what's interesting is too, from the point of view of modern science, there, the most advanced part of modern physics, as far as the study of matter is concerned, right, which is the study of the elementary particleism, there, Anaxagoras' way of speaking came back, yeah, okay, and maybe I'll bring in Heisenberg's book on the unified field theory there on particles, but just to give a little witness there, you know, what speaks of the well-known formula, every elementary particle is composed of all the rest, right?

[18:33] Seem to the physicists, right, when they're studying these things, to be a good statement with what is there, but it's like Anaxagoras' way of speaking about matter, because

[18:48] what we call in philosophy false imagination, right? Heisenberg's student there, Weizsäcker another famous physicist. Weizsäcker has an interesting observation. He says that when we imagine something, we make it actual in imagination. And so, when you try to imagine the first matter, as we tend to do, try to imagine something, we try to understand. We necessarily falsify what it is because we make actual there what is only there in what ability.

[19:26] Now, one could stop here and say that in many other kinds of ability, right, you'll find the same difficulty, right? Oh, this is the most difficult one of all. But men will tend to want to make actual what is there only in what ability. You see that in logic, for example, you see in logic there where they want to make the universal

[20:00] a class, right? You see it in a lot of magicians. Notice the difference between a universal and a class. The difference between, let's say, man, which is said of every individual man, right? I am a man, you are a man, and so on. And let's say mankind, you know, or the human race, right? See, human race is what a collection of many individuals, right? So the individuals are actual in that collection, aren't they?

[20:41] But in universal man, none of us are actual; only in what ability, right? And so, the desire to make a class out of universal is a desire to resolve the imagination, like you do in mathematics, rather than to reason like you have to do in logic.

[21:06] And I can begin a text from John Locke, you know, in the essay of Human Understanding. There is a famous text where he's talking about the general idea of triangle. And he's trying to understand the general idea of triangle, and he says, "Is it you know equilateral or isosceles or scalene, right? " And he says one of these, then it doesn't fit the other one, right? But so he ends up saying it's all and none of these.

[21:41] And then John or Berkeley comes after him, or George Berkeley, the next philosopher. He says, "Well, that's absurd. Can't be all none of these things, right? " Therefore, he denies that there are any general idea of triangle. So neither Locke nor Berkeley can understand the general idea of triangle, right? But notice what they're doing in part. They're resolving to the imagination, see. Any triangle that I imagine is going to be either equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, right?

[22:14] So if I try to imagine triangle general, I'm trying to imagine as being equilateral, scalene, isosceles, all none of these at once, right? You know, so that's end up with that. Is we're speaking, but also it comes from as not understanding what ability, right? See, what's the proper answer to that? See, you say what's the definition of triangle general? It's a plane figure contained by three straight lines.

[22:43] Three straight lines, but three straight lines have to be either equal or unequal, right? So which are they in that definition? Right? Which are they? Actually. They're not actually equal. They could be or unequal. They're able to be. equal. Equal or unequal, see. So they're all of these in ability, yeah. But not an act. He doesn't see. He can't see the distinction there, right? See. So he says all or none of all, and none of these, right?

[23:20] So he's got a contradiction there, right? Well in a way that's what Anaxagoras does with matter right matter, right? He has everything that matter is able, that matter is able to become, actually in matter, right? But in such a small and insignificant way that nothing is clear and distinct. So in a way, it's everything and nothing.

[23:41] Okay. Now the same thing happens with the modern mathematicians, right? You know, they speak of a straight line sometimes as composed of what? Infinity of points, right? Okay. Now why? See, any time you cut into a straight line, So you find? that point. Right. Can't get something out of nothing, right?

[24:14] But what you're doing there is making what? Actual a point that's there only in what? Ability. But they can't understand that ability. So they what? Falsely imagine it to be composed of an infinity of points. They're making actual the line everything that's there in ability.

[24:40] So you can you can go through the different philosophers and thinkers, and you see that they always have difficulty in understanding ability. Man's inability to understand ability, you know, in a sense, it's difficult to understand it, right? But the ability of the first matter, being pure ability, right, is the most difficult to of all to understand.

[25:10] In the ninth book of wisdom, there, with the book on ability and act, Aristotle discusses there the Megarians. We don't know too much about them, but apparently they deny there's any such thing as ability. But you know,

[25:30] you can see you can't sense or imagine it. So what are you talking about? But I mean, there's other probably deeper reasons, you know, why they can't. How are they able to do that? That's a point. That's a point.

[25:47] So Aristotle says, you know, they're blind and they have sight many times a day. You know, it's no miracle in Christ, because you're you're only you're only able to see what you actually see, right? So then, when I close my eyes, I'm blind and now. I've recovered my. eyes. If. I stopped playing the piano. I've lost ability to play the piano. If I stopped speaking English. I don't have the ability to speak English anymore.

[26:15] But anyway, that's the subject of the ninth book of wisdom. But you'll find, you know, running through here the difficulty that they have. But it's kind of striking as they say to see it in the most advanced part of modern science. but this way of speaking advanced it just comes back, so you know. So this is this fifth paragraph is kind of introducing us to thinking about the first matter, but it's so difficult and this is so brief, you know, that the ninth reading, right?

[26:43] was very important, and even the fifteenth reading, huh? But we'll see that when we come to them. For as bronze is towards statue, or wood towards bed, or the matter in the unformed towards any of the things having form before he sees the form, thus the same has itself towards substance, and this something which is the name of the way referring to individual substance and what is.

[27:13] Okay. This then is one beginning, not thus being one existing as the this something, one of which there is a definition, and so on. Summarizing again. Okay. Now the last paragraph at the top of page four is the

[27:35] again summary again of what has been said here, right? In what way there are two, in what way there are three, and so on. First, then, as has been said, that only contraries are the beginnings, as back in the tenth reading, right? Remember that. Later, that is necessary that something underlying there be three, and there was the eleventh reading, right? Okay.

[27:59] And from the present, it is clear what is the difference of the contraries and how the beginnings are to each other, and what is the underlying subject. Whether the form or underlying subject is substance is not yet clear. That's more in wisdom that we do that. But that the beginnings are three, and how three, and what the way of these is clear, how many then, and which are the beginnings can be considered from these things.

[28:23] I see nature. go back to the definition of nature. Nature was defined as the beginning and cause, right? Of motion and rest, and that which it is first, right? As such, and not by happening. And first was going to take all the way back to substance, right? So, in realizing the first matter,

[28:51] is to man and dog like playing as a sphere and cube, You're also going to see the possibility of something else that is the man and dog, like what these accidental forms are to the clay.

[29:09] And what would that be called? Can you repeat that? What if the sphere, for example, or the cube, right, is composed really of the clay and the form, which is an accident that's been acquired, right? Then the man and the dog must be composed of first matter and something proportional to that, right? But instead of being an accidental form, it's going to be a what? Substantial form, right?

[29:43] Okay. And that's the key to later on understanding the what? What the soul is, right? If you go back to the to the Phaedo of Plato, right, in the in the Phaedo of Plato, there are really touched upon there, although it was not developed much, two probable opinions as to what the soul is, huh? And one is the opinion that Socrates or Plato maybe is defending, right, that the soul is a substance, complete in itself, distinct from the body, right?

[30:21] Okay. So the Platonists are saying that the soul is a substance, distinct and complete, apart from the body. And then you have the other position, which is the position that Simmias brings in with the Pythagoreans: the soul is the harmony of the body, right? And this is the common opinion you have among the moderns, huh? You don't use the word soul, right? But if you ask them why is some bodies alive and some are not, well, it's the it's the harmony, the order, the organization of the matter, right?

[31:01] Okay. So what they really have is an accidental form. okay. It says soul is an accidental form. Okay. Now, in the Phaedo, of course, Socrates is arguing more for this position, right? Okay. But you got to realize that the dialogues are mainly dialectical, right? And dialectical means what? That you have a part of the truth at least, but not necessarily the whole truth. And the part of the truth that Socrates is bringing out there in the Phaedo is that the soul is something substantial, right?

[31:53] And you know when he argues against Simmias, right, he says, well, sometimes the soul opposes the body, right? Like the man who's fasting or something, right, resisting his his. His anger, or his lust, or his hunger—whatever it is, right? Okay. And Socrates, says the harmony of the body, you know, the organization of the body, oppose the body, you know, that seems to be the soul is something substantial, right?

[32:18] That opposes the body, right? Okay. Then Socrates is is giving developing arguments there, which Aristotle perfects later on in Thomas, that the soul is at least a man is immortal, right? Okay. And that that point of the soul is being something substantial, right? It couldn't exist apart from the body; it was just an accidental form.

[32:48] But the rock that this position founders on is, if the soul is really a substance, right, distinct from the body, it's in the body like the old saying is, like a sailor in a boat, right, or. a man in his car, then you can't understand the unity of man, right? The body is not really part of man, okay? And that goes against our inward experience of what? When your body's in pain and you're thinking about how to relieve that pain, the one who's thinking is the one who's feeling pain, right?

[33:26] It's not like a doctor, you know, who's curing you or something, right? Might have sympathy for you, right? But there's an urgency when you're thinking about how to relieve your own pain, right? Right? Yeah. See, so it's part of our inward experience, which is a starting point for the study of soul. It's part of your inward experience is that the one who feels pain in his body is the one who's thinking, right?

[33:49] So what Plato's position can't explain really is the what unity of man, right? Why, if you say the soul is the form of the body, right? Then you have the unity. But this can't explain the what immortality of the soul, or can't explain why the soul resists the body and rises above it in some ways, right? The truth is that the soul is a what substantial form.

[34:25] So there's an element of the truth here in the position that said the soul is an accidental form. It is a form, but it's not accidental form. There's a truth in saying the soul is a substance because it is something substantial, but it's but not the whole truth, right? It's not a complete substance.

[34:47] And like we say, now the truth is between two extremes, right? Just like in theology, right? You know, you take the two main mysteries of the faith: there, the Trinity and Incarnation, right? You know, you have similar errors, huh? There's some who deny what the Trinity of persons, right? To hold on to unity of nature. Others deny unity of nature to hold on to the Trinity of persons.

[35:22] But neither of those two extreme positions, which are both false and radical, can explain each other, right? Because if either one of them is true, the other position has no truth at all in it. Why should anybody have thought that? But if the truth is that there are three persons but one nature, then you can see why people would think there's one nature, one person, or why there's three persons and three natures.

[35:47] See, but neither those positions can explain each other, so that the truth is in between. And then you have the reverse as far as person and nature. it probably is because it's a similar thing, right? You have one person, two natures. Some say there's two natures, and there are two persons. Others say there's one person, therefore, monophysicize, one one nature, right? But neither can explain them. Error, right?

[36:12] But the middle position that there is one person, two natures, explains both the errors, because they both have a part of the truth. The same way here, right?

[36:26] This position can't explain the unity of man, right? And the fact that the body really is part of us, right? You see. But this position can't explain why the human soul is immortal, why it has an activity. In fact, as we show, that is not in the body, or why the soul should even oppose inclinations of the body, right? As it does in the same, and even the person fasting, right, to lose weight, or the alcoholic, anonymous person for that matter, right, where the soul is resisting the body, right.

[36:59] But this position here can do justice to both of these. Like we're not studying the soul right now. we're just saying here, This is the first thing you have to see in a way, right? Is that composition?

[37:22] The Church, incidentally, didn't officially say that Aristotle was right until after Thomas had died, right? Oh, right. It was the Council of Yen, I think it is. You know, the member. There, there, it officially says that. But anyway, these two positions here are both have an element of the truth. And that's what I think the Phaedo is interesting when Aristotle discusses the opinion of his predecessors in the first book about the soul.

[37:52] There's so many opinions, and it kind of get lost now. But I think if you look at the Phaedo there, you see these are the two main opinions, and you can see they each have a part of the truth, but the whole truth is down there.

[38:09] But we will study that after you finish the eight books in Natural Hearing. So. This is a very fundamental text for understanding substantial change, huh? Now, if you go back to Empedocles and Anxagoras, and perhaps all of the first philosophers,

[38:31] they did not want to admit and see any kind of change except change of place. Remember that? Yeah. They had difficulty with any kind of inward change. Why? Because they couldn't understand what ability, right? They didn't see how it could be possible. Okay.

[38:53] It's interesting, you know. Heisenberg is the physicist, the greatest physicist of the 20th century, as far as emphasizing the importance of of ability or potency, as he calls it. But you see it sometimes in the other ones too. You know, Louis de Broglie, the great French physicist, the father of wave mechanics. You know, he said, if you ask a physicist of the 19th century what happens when white light hits a prism, you get this whole spread of different colors.

[39:21] He would have said they're all in the white light, and the prism just separated them just to change the place, right? He said, now we no longer think that those colors are actually in the white light, except as in a what possibility? He says, right? Well, it's the idea of what potency again, huh? It's an answer that would have very much surprised a 19th century physicist, huh?

[39:45] So it's interesting, huh? That the it was kind of a not a a circle in history there, but you know, I I used the thing of a spiral staircase, right? But you come back and sense the same point, but at a different what level of experience, right? You know, so you see the early Greek natural philosophers that attempt what to to deny any change except change of place, right?

[40:14] And and this ignorance really of ability in any radical sense, huh? And then you move towards Aristotle, you start to excuse me understand ability, right? You see the possibility then of inward change and even a substantial change, and now it's possible. And then you find with the early modern scientists, you know, they're speaking only of change of place and so on. And then finally, you know, in the 20th century in quantum physics, they started to what move away and back to the idea of ability or potency, but on a particular, more particular level of experience, right?

[40:50] An experiment and so on, huh? So in a way, you're coming back to the same position, but at a different what? Level. Yeah, the more general level, and then in a more particular level, huh? You see, sometimes now the biologists are starting to come back to the idea that nature maybe makes things for an end or a purpose, you know, but but but in a very more complicated way, right?

[41:13] Detailed way, particular way, huh? So the way, but I say it's spiral because it's a different level of experience, more particular one, huh? Does the church say anything have an official position about this first matter, prime matter? Is it, is that tied into? it? Well, it's tied in, yeah, The two go together. So they, yeah, yeah. I don't know, but their concern was much defining what first matter is, but the the definition of the soul is very important for theology, right?

[41:47] See, in theology, we're more concerned with the soul than with matter because the soul is in the image made the human soul is made in the image and likeness of God, huh? And that's what theology does considers everything in reference to God, right? So the soul is much more important. So it's implicit in them saying that the soul is a substantial form that. prime matter? Yeah, it, has to be that, yeah, yeah, the two go together.

[42:13] You couldn't separate the two. But so what you find explicitly in the Council of Vienne, I think it's the Vienna. I had bring the text in there from the Vienna, but

[42:23] it's talking about the soul, right? Because that's the key thing, you know. You see the way the way that Aristotle eventually shows immortality to the soul. you have to reason that the soul has a it does something not in the body, right? Okay, and you have to show that the soul does something not in the body, and once you can show that, then you know its existence is not only in the body, or as Thomas will put it, its existence is not immersed in the body.

[43:04] Okay, it's like Descartes. said you know I think, therefore, I am. Right? Well you have to be before you can do something, right? So if your being depends upon something, your doing depends upon something, right? And if the soul had being only in the body, it would do something only in the body and through the body, right? So if it does something not in the body, you have to prove that, right?

[43:27] That can be proven. Then its being is not just in the body. Therefore, the being is not tied to the body. But that shows that the being of the soul is not accidental being. It's substantial being, right? You see? Okay. But then once you see that part of the truth, you have to think of the soul as being a substance, right? You know, in the body like a sailor in a boat or something, or a man as car, right?

[43:51] And then you don't understand the unity of man, right? You see? And then you realize that there's an element of truth over here in saying that the soul is the accidental form of the body, because it is the form of the body that's not the accidental form of the body. It's the substantial form. Then you see the whole truth, and then with the truth, everything harmonizes. Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics, right, after the definition of the purpose of man, right, he says, with the truth, all things harmonize, huh?

[44:20] And you can harmonize everything that we know about man with that understanding of the soul. But neither of these positions will work to harmonize. Won't fit. Anything won't fit with that position, huh? The soul is a complete substance, distinct from the body. Won't fit with this idea over here. Then with the unity, with the experience of the unity of man, that the body is part of us, right?

[44:49] But this here can't explain that the soul is an activity, and therefore a being that's not in the body, not share the body. We're incarnate souls.

[45:04] That's that way, huh? Composed as soul and body. But notice that way of being parts. You know, we're composed of soul and body. That's one of the four senses of parts in the in the in the fifth book of Wisdom But it's the one that Aristotle is what leads up to right here in the thirteenth reading. Leads up to that sense, but it's the one that is kind of hidden.

[45:30] You'll see it in the dialectic of Book Three of Wisdom. You see it back in Book One here. That sense of parts kind of excludes. It's kind of hidden, huh? It's a different sense. You know, I kind of read it out as a simple example. I say,

[45:52] what are the parts of the word cat? C T. Yeah, that's the question. Think that's the first meaning of part, right? Okay. And so let's say you know, is the other part besides C and T? Say, well, take away the C, take away the A, take away the T, nothing's left, right? They must be the only parts, right? So there's nothing in the word cat besides those letters, right?

[46:23] Right. But then you take the word cat and you say, okay, it's got the same letters, right? Uh huh. In order, yeah, ordered part. But now, if I say the parts of the word cat are the letters and the order, it's kind of strange to see that at first, doesn't it? This is another meaning of the word part, right? See, when I say C, A, and T are the parts of the word cat, period, right?

[46:57] Yeah, those are like the quantitative parts you might call them, right? Okay. But when I say the letters and the order of the letters are parts of the word, right? They're parts we call them essential parts, right? Matter and form, right? Okay. And that's the way body and soul. analogous to that, right? Except it's not accidental form but that sense of part, right? Body and soul are parts of us, not in the sense in which C, A, and T are parts of cat, but proportional, right?

[47:33] Identical to the way in which the letters and the order of the letters are parts of the word cat. I see. Or what are the parts of a rubber ball? Well, the rubber and that shape, right?

[47:50] Yeah. That's a different sense of parts than this, right? And Monsignor Dion, you know, used to have a nice phrase, you know, someone who's stuck on the first meaning of a word can't see the other meanings of the word. You know, you can't move the word. Because you know, the way Thomas, you know, when he speaks of this in Latin, you know, the term is impositio nominis, right?

[48:20] Which means what? The placing of a name upon something, or as we say in English, the label on something, right? Put a name on it, right? Okay. So you place the name upon this, right? Then you carry it over and use the word translatio, carry over, and you place it upon something else because of a certain what? Similarity. Yeah, or some connection it has, right? Then you pick up and place it upon something else, right?

[48:45] You know. Well, he's got four meanings of the word part there in the fifth book of wisdom. Remember the one I was giving the other the other day there that when they talk about logical arguments, right? And I give it to my students all the time. I say the whole is more than the part, right? Okay, I said okay. Now, what's a man? Well, man's an animal, but he's not just an animal; he's a rational animal.

[49:21] Okay. So, animal's only a part, of what man is, And they all agree, right? You say, Yeah, but animal includes besides man includes what dog, horse, and elephant, and many other things, right? So, what is only a part of man includes much more than man. So sometimes the part is more than the whole. This is a sophistic argument, right? Based on mixing up two senses of the word whole and part, right?

[49:55] And rational animal. We say that's a whole. An animal is a what part? This is one of the three meanings he gives of whole and part that are what composed whole, right? A whole put together from its parts, and then distinguishes that from the what universal whole, which is set of its parts, right? And so, what you're doing here is confusing animal as it's a composing part of the definition of man, which whole definition contains more than that part, right?

[50:30] With animal as a universal whole and what they call subject parts, right? Because of that, of which it is said, and man is a subject part of animal. So, man is a part of animal, and animal is a part of man in two different senses of the word part, right? Okay, man is a subject part of animal, speech letter An animal is a part of the definition of man, right?

[51:00] So, two different meanings of parts: on the parts of the definition and the subject parts of the universal whole. And you have the quantitative part, right? And then you have, besides all those, what here matter and form right? Essential parts. Four different meanings of part there.

[51:22] So, you know, it used to be the old. army against the soul is the guy who's been, you know, cutting open cadavers, you know, for years, you know, in the medical school or like that, and you know, lungs and brain and liver and pancreas and so on, and never, never found the soul there among those parts, right?

[51:44] Well, that's like you know, when I was up here, right? You know, swept it away, right? Up here, you know, I kind of opened up and I got C and A and T, and that was it. There was no order there besides, you know, but you know there is that order there besides that. But it's not when they, it's not going to show up when the quantitative parts of a cat, huh?

[52:07] You can see A T, and you get the order here. But that's more known to us—that sense of part, the quantitative parts, huh? You go back to the to the first reading here in the in the first book. There we had he was manifesting the confused and distinct, right? We know things in confused way before we know them distinctly. And he started off with like a quantitative whole, right—the sensible composed whole, right?

[52:44] Then he went to the definition, right? It's another kind of composed whole. Then he approached the universal whole, right, which he's trying to show there. But this one that he ends up with down here is a different sense. He leaves it out of that, doesn't he? Because that's what, in some sense, less known to us.