Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
37. Aristotle, Plato and the Good Student: Preparing for Matter and Lack of Form
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[0:00] Now, let's just say a few words here in preparation for the next reading here, which is the fifteenth reading, okay? Now, again, I'm kind of stuck with what we saw. In the twelfth and thirteenth reading, right? And then Aristotle distinguished between matter, form. He said you don't always have to have the contrary form, but you have to have the lack of form, right? Okay.

[0:46] So these three are involved in in becoming, right? Huh? Matter receives a form, which before it lacked, right? Okay. Now, it's very important to distinguish between these three things, or to see the distinction between these three, right? Okay. Now, of those three, which two are most obviously distinct?

[1:23] Form and lack of form. Yeah. As form and lack of form are very clearly, not the same thing, right? Oh, I think that. Which of these of these three? Three. Which two are most clearly not the same? Oh, I thought you said distinct. Distinct, yeah, not the same. It's a distinct meaning. One is not the other. No, I think that are clearly distinct, not the same. Matter.

[1:51] Yeah. Now it's obviously form and lack of form, right? Huh? Okay. How can form and lack of form be the same thing? The being a form and the non-being a form, that makes sense, right? Okay.

[2:10] But notice, huh? In a way, Anaxagoras is confusing these two, isn't it? Because he's confusing what, you know, built in act, right? Okay. So Anaxagoras mixes

[2:28] up in a way these two. He's putting what is the ability of matter, everything that's the ability of matter, actually in there, right? So he's he's kind of identifying form with what matter. The form is merely hidden, right, in the matter. Okay.

[2:54] Now Plato is going to distinguish. Is going to mix up in a way matter with lack of form. Yeah. Now, see, Plato, in a sense, is seeing as a distinction between matter and form, not the same thing, right? Matter is one thing, form is something else, right? So he's more advanced in the sense than Anaxagoras, right? Okay. But now, if you try to think about matter. As distinct from form, you necessarily think that matter is being what?

[3:34] Yeah, is being formless, right? Okay. So what Plato is going to do is in a way to confuse not matter and form, right? But matter with the what? Lack of form, right? He's going to confuse matter with lack of form. He's going to confuse the ability of matter with its formlessness, right?

[4:03] Okay. So Aristotle is going to, very reverently, um, critique this position of Plato, right? Okay. This confusion, the bad sense of the word confusion, right? Yeah. That's a very common confusion.

[4:31] You can see how aggressively he speaks about matter, you know. If I could say it's something that is nothing, or nothing that is something, I would say so, right? You know, he sees that, huh? The connection between matter and lack of form. But how do you distinguish the two, right?

[4:51] And to a lot of, you know, as I say, to the early Greeks who couldn't understand obviously change of substance or in general, even even inward change, right? Only change of place could understand, right? Matter seemed to be almost what Nothing, right?

[5:10] So Aristotle is going to what? Force Plato to distinguish these two, right? Just like Thomas sometimes disagrees with what Albert, huh? Now, if I remember right, I don't think Plato's mentioned by name here, is he? Huh? And

[5:33] Thomas, you know, Thomas is very quick to mention who made this or that mistake, right? When he reads it, when he goes against Albert the Great, doesn't mention his name. So you see the respect and the reverence, right, that Thomas has for Albert the Great, right? And again, Aristotle's respect for Plato, right? But obviously, Aristotle is not going to say that Plato was what wrong because I'm right.

[6:00] Because I'm stupid, right? He's going to point out first of all how his thinking about this is different from Plato's, right? And then he's going to what?

[6:14] Follow the advice of the central thinker, human thought, right? Heraclitus, huh? He's going to find a common what? Understanding that he and Plato have, huh? Of something. And from that, he's going to show that Plato must separate or should separate these two, right? And identify them. So you can see what Aristotle is doing again, something like we saw in

[6:42] ten and eleven, right? And in twelve and thirteen, right? Where he found a common basis, right? A common understanding, right? And then he what? Reasons from that, or he tries to become strong in that, right? And makes up the cornerstone of his thinking, right? But in ten and eleven, he found a common understanding among all the Greek natural philosophers, right? In twelve and thirteen, a common understanding among all men, right?

[7:11] Here he's going to be finding a common understanding between himself and Plato, and he will reason from that, right? That Plato should distinguish between matter and lack of form. But first of all, he'll explain what he thinks is the difference between the two, right? And how this is not what Plato's saying. Plato's saying something else. A little bit about how Plato arrived at that position.

[7:47] So let me just say a few more words here about Plato and Aristotle, right? Get some some general things. What is the relation of Aristotle to Plato?

[8:15] He's a student. Yeah, yeah. And is he a good student of Plato? Yes, yes. He's the best student of Plato, right? I think that's the best way to understand the connection between the two. Aristotle is the best student of Plato.

[8:38] Now, best means what? Better than all the rest, right? See. Now, a lot of people, you know, they see you know differences between Plato and Aristotle, and they don't realize, right, that Aristotle is in fact the best student of Plato. But it was interesting. Text of Thomas where he talks about what a good student is, and interesting text. And one that Monsignor Dionne used to bring up, it's taken from the days when Thomas was in Paris and starting his lectures on the Scripture.

[9:16] And so you have these two little works of Thomas, but they they think they're you know part of the opening of his lectures, preliminary to his lectures, right? They're called the Commendation and Partition of Sacred Scripture, right? These commandments, Sacred Scripture, and you show how it's divided, right? But as Thomas often does, these things he'll start with a little quote from Scripture because that's kind of the leading point in, right?

[9:40] In this particular quote, the good student is metaphorically spoken of as being what? Earth, huh? A good student is like the earth. Okay. And then Thomas says, "Well, what way is a student like the earth? Right? A good student, right? And as you might expect, there's three things, huh? Which the good student is like the earth. This

[10:09] is very important to realize about the student, isn't it? A good student is like the earth. Of course, this is a metaphor, right? Okay. In a metaphor, you have to see what way it's alike, right? Okay.

[10:33] Can make you some ways which the earth is not like a good student, right? I was mentioning before with the metaphor of lion, right? Lion is a metaphor for Christ. Lion is a metaphor for the what? Devil, right? Fire is a metaphor for charity, right? Fire is a metaphor for for God Himself, sometimes, right? Um,

[10:59] but fire is also a metaphor sometimes for anger or lust or something of this sort, right? Okay. So you got to be careful about those, right? Okay. But in what way is the good student like the earth, right? Well, the first thing is that the earth is what humble, below, right? Okay. So the first thing is about the student is that he's humble, okay?

[11:29] And that means what? That he places his mind under the mind of the teacher, right? Okay. He submits his mind, I'd say. Now, obviously, don't do this for just anyone Tom Dick can hear. Okay.

[12:04] And there's a dialogue about this, huh Um, called the Protagoras. Okay. And it's a very interesting dialogue because at the beginning of the dialogue, the young man comes knocking on your Socrates, and he says, "Socrates, Socrates, Protagoras is in town. Will you introduce me to him? " You know, and Socrates says, "He doesn't have a watch, but he It's awfully early. We can't go there and disturb it at this time of day, right?

[12:32] " You know. And so Socrates gets up and starts finding the young man. He says, "What do you know about Protagoras? " He doesn't know much about Protagoras. Protagoras is very everybody's talking about Protagoras, you know. And it's very interesting way Plato does that because eventually Socrates and the young man they go to one of the great houses of Athens, right? Where Protagoras is the guest instead, right?

[12:55] And he introduces them. We don't really hear anything about the young man after that. Oh, the dialogue, right? But Socrates is engaged. It's engaged in a conversation with Protagoras. Yeah, yeah. I think Plato has prefaced that part before because in the conversation between Socrates and Protagoras, we have to learn something not only about what is being discussed, right, but to learn something about. Who is or is not to be taken as a what teacher, right?

[13:26] And how the way you you judge that, right? Okay. Um. My myself, I take you know my teacher Kasurik in undergraduate, right? My brother Richard concluded that Kasurik was the wisest of those men in the department, right? And so he arranged for me to have Kasurik as my advisor, right? And he arranged for me at Warren Murray, the public high school, to to meet Kasirik and go into college, right?

[14:02] And he was a little fondly talked about the life of the mind, right? Okay. And uh. But then, as they say, uh uh Kasurik. um. uh introduced me to De Koninck see right? and De Koninck came down his lecture tour, see

[14:27] Of course when Kasurik first went to Laval to study under De Koninck, he had given up for a while to study philosophy because of bad teachers, or you know. He had heard about De Koninck and then went up to Laval, and he said to De Koninck You know, you teach philosophy the way it's been taught to me before. " it's not going to happen in your class.

[14:46] " He'd be a little bit older, so you see those things. And De Koninck said, "Well, fine, you know. " And but then you can see how Kasurik was very devoted to De Koninck, right? You know. And then when Kasurik would answer my questions, as long as De Koninck comes to town, he put those questions to De Koninck, and I could see, you know, De Koninck's excellence there, right?

[15:08] But anyway, you can see the whole dialogue continues because there are many things to be learned about that. And Thomas, you know, was talking about the commentaries on epistles of Saint Timothy, right? Where he does the division of the cause of error, right? And on the side of the what the will, the main cause of error is pride, and he says pride causes mistakes in two ways.

[15:37] The proud man overestimates his ability, right? And therefore, he attempts things that are beyond his powers, and therefore, easily falls in mistakes. And the other is he doesn't learn from the that he should learn from, right? And will keep him from some mistakes, right? Or call him back from some mistakes, right? Okay.

[15:59] So he submits or places his mind under the what student, right? He's humble, right? Of course, Aristotle spent what twenty years in the school of Plato. He went in at the age of seventeen, right? And came out at the age of thirty-seven, right? Because Plato died at that time. Okay. So I mean, that's you know twenty years he put himself under the master, right? Okay.

[16:35] Now the second thing he says about the earth is that it's what stable, right? Okay. Now, what does this mean, right? See, Thomas says, "Well, the student needs a certain what discretion, right? A certain discrimination, right? " Um, you don't necessarily take everything the teacher says, right? As of what equal value, right? See, okay.

[17:16] For example, if my teacher is Euclid, right, I might take very much what he says about triangles and numbers and so on, right. When he talks about happiness or the soul or something else, right, I might say, "Well, I don't think he's qualified to talk about these things," right? You know. I was

[17:38] asking Monsignor Dionne one time, you know I heard these stories. That his favorite composer was Bach, you know. Of course, I was a little shocked by that. So I went to him and asked him. he prefaced the remark and then nothing to say here, you know, is necessarily true, right? But it's Mozart, he liked. it. Okay, He said, Bach is too severe. Okay, but the point was, when he himself was there.

[18:03] he says, cautioning me not to take what he said about Bach and Mozart as much as what some other things he might say, right? Okay.

[18:15] He kind of went to him and mentioned Bach and Mozart in class, so I asked him after class, "but then he goes, no no, Mozart's a separate substance."

[18:25] So anyway, so you need some kind of what discretion, right? In judging, right? Okay. So, like, for example, when I read Aristotle, right? Okay, I have some humility, I submit my mind, place my mind under him to learn from him, right? Okay. Now, when you get down into, say, the particular parts of natural science, Aristotle talks about the bees, for example. Proposes certain hypotheses about the bees, right?

[19:09] Ends up by saying, you know, but these have not been examined long enough or observed long enough, right? And if we find something, you know, contrary to what he's saying here, then we should revise what he's saying here, right? Aristotle himself is aware, right, that he hasn't studied the bees as long as they should be studied, right? Okay. And when he gets, you know, he starts to talk about the biological things.

[19:32] He compares the study of the sun and moon and stars to the animals, right? He said, "Well, the animals we can, you know, take apart and examine them, right, very closely, but the sun and moon and stars, you know, they're too far away from us, right, you know." So Aristotle was, you know, aware of the fact that when he's on what maybe the ground, right? Okay.

[19:54] And you know, Aristotle thought that Thomas Aquinas too. They both thought that illumination was not a change of place, right? That light didn't what travel from one end of the room to the other, because apparently it takes no time, right? Okay, and the the argument is basically in a perfectly good form. If illumination is is a what change of place, then it takes time. Illumination takes no time.

[20:28] Therefore, it's not a change of place. Nothing wrong with the argument, right? But one could always say, well, maybe though, you know, light travels so fast you can't perceive any time in the illumination of a room, right? Okay. Well, now we have instruments and experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment, right? You know, very you know ingenious experiments that enable us to actually what measure the speed of light, right?

[20:56] And it's approximately what 86, 000 miles per second, right? Okay. Now I'm going to follow Aristotle in his conclusion here that the illumination takes no right. Well, I would say you know I would lack the second quality of a student, right? You see, you see, Aristotle cannot be as trustworthy there, right? As he might be in these more general things, right? Which ordinary experience is sufficient, right?

[21:30] See, or if Aristotle or Plato or Thomas, that kind of Shakespeare, you know, if for two thousand years there they accepted earth, air, fire, and water as the basic elements, right? You know, but you say, well, Lavoisier had this experiment, and you know, you see, I said, well, I'm going to look at the experiment because I know there's earth, fire, and water at the end. Well, then I would say that I lack the second quality, right?

[21:59] You know, there's some things for which what? I don't think he he'd be less, yeah, you know, There's some discrimination, right? There's some things, right? Okay. There's some discretion, in terms of what he's set, or how much he's set to himself, right? Okay. So he speaks of the certain stability there, in the student.

[22:43] Now the third thing he says about the earth is that it's what fruitful, right? Okay, fruitful. Growing crops is not fruitful. This is the third thing we demand of a good student: is that he takes what he's learned from the students, right? And then he what develops it, right? Sees other consequences of it, other conclusions of it, and so on, right? Okay.

[23:19] Sees further consequences, right? Sees conclusions in that sort, right? In other words, he doesn't just stop with what the teacher has said, right? And even with the understanding of it, but he begins to see other things, right? I give a good example of that with our good friend Anaximander right? They say Anaximander said that water animals come before what land animals, huh? And you can see he might have been influenced here by the thinking of Thales, right?

[23:56] As Aristotle says, Thales was thinking of living things mainly when he said water is the beginning of all things. Well, if water is the beginning of all things, then the animals like the fish that live in the water would be closer to the beginning of things, and therefore they come before those land animals, right? See, so he's kind of, in a sense, developing and seeing a consequence of what he said, right?

[24:18] But then he's supposed. to have Pointed to the to the frog who begins its life as a what fish-like thing, and they call it a newt or something. the fish is, so the ramen eventually becomes a semi-terrestrial land animal, right? So in sense, he's he's not just you know taking the counsel and saying well, you know, he's also you know looking for confirmation of this, right? You know, he looks at the frog.

[24:41] We see these, you see all the qualities there, right? Huh? He's obviously thought about this, right? Huh? But then even more so when he says that the beginning of things is the unlimited, right? And he said, well, in a sense, our friend Anaximander was looking for something that was not limited in qualities, right? He took water. He didn't take orange juice or red wine or sugar or anything like that.

[25:10] That indefinite qualities, right? He took something like water that seems very, without, qualities, right? Well, in a sense, maybe Anaximander says, yeah, but water does have some qualities, huh? At least in the natural environment, it's wet and cold. And so you still have a problem of how do you get the contrary, but in cold, how does it become cold, right? So maybe he's developing the idea that it should be unlimited, but he's going all the way, he might say, right?

[25:38] You see what I mean? So you see those qualities in Anaximander in regard to Thales right? And this is Anaximander in regard to Thales right Unless he really thought deeply about water being the beginning of all things. We have come to the idea, you know, that the frog, I mean, that the water animals come first, right? But he's got the stretchy, right? And maybe he's influenced too by the fact that, yeah, you know, you know, Thomas is explaining, you know, Genesis sometimes, you know, the Spirit of God who goes in the waters, right?

[26:09] And going back to Augustine, who takes water there as kind of a metaphor for the first matter, right? Because water is a kind of shapeless thing, right? We see some element of truth there, right? You know that if the first matter is not water, it's something like water in being sort of formless like water. It's more clear how water is formless; it takes on all different forms, and how air takes on different forms, right?

[26:34] So, I mean, water is something like that. You see, element of truth there. You develop that, right? You might, you know, not just swallow everything that is said there, right? You know, that's what a good student does, right?

[26:48] So I think it could be said that if you look at these three things, you can see that Aristotle is in fact the best student Plato ever had, right? That he really, you know, put his mind under Plato to learn from him, right? But in rejection of something that Plato said, right? You know, you can see his what his stability, right? His mind, right? It wasn't just you know putting in his mind; he's been accepted, right?

[27:20] But but. You know, yeah, I was amazed by by how you know things I see kind of developed in Aristotle. How they're already in Plato with kind of a seed, right? And he's taking this thing and developing it.

[27:35] So the truth that's in Plato in the beginnings, you know, like he says, what he says in the Nicomachean Ethics, you know, he's quoting Plato. And Plato was right; he says to ask, are we on the way from the beginnings or to the beginnings, right? Because Plato's asking the right questions. Aristotle saw that, right? And he applies it there to the question of whether we're going to reason from the cause to the effect, which means far away from the beginnings, or we're going to reason from the effect to the cause, you know.

[28:07] And so, I think you could say that Thomas Aquinas, in the same way, is the best student that Aristotle ever had. Because he still made, you know, he's made his mind to learn from this guy. You get he has stability because you know, except you know, some things in Aristotle, like the eternal world, right? Because as a Christian, right? And but he certainly develops the thoughts of Aristotle amazingly when he does this, right?

[28:44] Aristotle makes a distinction in the in the uh second book of wisdom between two kinds of difficulties, two causes of difficulty, right? And Thomas applies it to two kinds of causes of something being easy.

[29:03] You know, two causes of difficulty are what can be in us or in the thing, right? Well, then Thomas is discussing at one point the, you know, is it something difficult for you to do? Is that more meritorious? Well, just a minute now, Thomas says, right? You know, it's easier for me to do it than for you to do it, right? Something that's good does that mean that you're going to get more merit for doing it?

[29:33] See, not necessarily. No, see, if it's easy because of what the thing itself is easy, right? That's one thing, right? It's easy because my heart is so filled with the love of God, even difficult things seem easy, right? You know, and that's more merit, more merit, right? Huh? Yes, I. Because I'm doing it with the firm of will, and that person was, you know, struggling to do what's what's right.

[30:02] Doesn't have the same intensity of the love of God or fever. I mean, he's kind of developing all the situations, especially like all the other texts, you know. I see, yeah, Thomas just, you know, but he's always taking something Aristotle and developing it. out. I was mentioning, you know, the word in there. You know, the word in is extremely important in philosophy, right? Extremely important. And Aristotle does distinguish the basic central meanings of the in in the fourth book of Natural hearing, but he doesn't order the meanings, which he does, you know, the word beginning, you know, and Thomas orders it the way Aristotle ordered the word beginning, starting from the meaning that's most sensible, right, and therefore most known to us, and then proceeding

[30:56] forward to meanings that are less known to us, but always the one that is next to the one before. That's basically what he does, right? I don't think anybody else would do it but Thomas, right? I mean, they could take the word in and order the meanings the way Thomas does. it. It's actually a principle in the way he does it. And the more I study it, the more I see this is correct.

[31:14] This is the way it has to be, right? You know. So, you know, Aristotle's critique of Plato which is, you know, a seed in the form of, but there's no part of Aristotle being the best student that they've ever had.

[31:40] You could probably say that Saint Thomas was the best student of Saint Augustine. Yes, yeah, that's true too. Yeah, yeah. But there's a famous quote there at the beginning of Cajetan's, you know, commentary on the Summa Theologiae, right? Which I think F. M. Wright did in 13 quotes it too, you know, which says Thomas, you know, seemed to have inherited the mind of all the Church Fathers because he saw evidence there, right?

[32:06] Oh. In a way, this is too of Aristotle too of Plato. The days he inherited the mind of all these philosophers before. This means he did learn from them. Maybe you could say that Plato was certainly the best student of Socrates, right? It's hard for us to say where Socrates leaves off and Plato begins, right? Because Socrates, you know, Plato was what learning from Socrates, right? You know, Plato was supposed to thank the gods for three things: one, that he was born a man and not a woman; secondly, he was born a Greek and not a barbarian, right?

[32:45] And thirdly, he met Socrates. And but suddenly, you know, he he had these qualities in regard to Socrates, right? To some extent, maybe in regard to Heraclitus, too, you know, actualists and

[33:07] so on. I mean, sometimes people, you know, think of a student of Plato, someone who follows Plato everything he does, or something like that, right? Who just repeats Plato or something. I don't know what they think.

[33:20] And they want to, you know, contrast Aristotle. where he disagrees with Plato, right, or something like that. And, well, yeah, that's not the—that's part of the truth. That could be, you know, dangerous, right? You know, that's what I really see is that Aristotle is, in fact, the best student that Plato ever had. But you have to know what a good student is to begin with. This text is interesting.

[33:45] If you, I'm probably not doing justice to it now. You know, I mean, go back and look at that text in the commendation, sacred scripture.

[33:58] No, even when I was talking with Monsignor D'Anne, sometimes you know, I would think of something. You know, so I never thought of that. You know, yeah, but it was really in accordance with his ideas, right? You know, and so yeah, Mervyn kind of transposed it. You know, Monsignor Dionne. The time, the last years I was there with him, he was, you know, talking about what's required for philosophical. life on the side of the reason, on the side of the will, you know, and so on.

[34:26] And then I was reading Thomas's commentaries in St. Paul. I was reading recently again, and in Timothy there he talks about you know the causes of error: ex parte appetitus, like pride, and ex parte intellectus, like false imagination, and so on, right? And so he's making a similar distinction, right, about the causes of error to what Monsignor Dionne was on the side of the good, right? But since I'm transposing in the way Thomas was transposing that remark about the difficulty, right?

[34:56] The difficulty can be what in the thing or in us, the cause of the difficulty. Thomas says the thing is not easy, right? Something can be easy in itself because you know it's a little thing, or can be easy because of us, right?

[35:15] So you know, you know, Augustine says you know where love is, you know, Either no difficulty is felt. or The difficulty itself is loved. You know, see, so if you love somebody, you know, you don't find difficult to do something for them, maybe, right? Put yourself out for this person, right? But but that's a good that's good because you know that it's you know because the thing in itself was easy, but because it was easy because of you, because I love you, I this person that you want to put yourself out and do that, right?

[35:50] Was it easy for Christ to die on the cross? It was easy in some way. The cause would not be in the cross, which is a very painful and shameful death, right? It would have to be in him, right? That his love was so great, right? You know,

[36:16] you know, some of the saints, you know, say he wouldn't come down die again if he had, you know, but God has one, foot's enough. you know That famous scene. You know that I remember Paul VI, calling your attention to it, but other people have too. You know where Peter was leaving Rome. You know, and he met Christ on the road. You know, he said, What are you doing?

[36:37] I'm going to be crucified, right? Turned around went back. So we look at this fifteenth reading. Now this is an extremely important reading for not only seeing that there's a distinction between matter and lack of form, right? But it's also a key reading for understanding what good is and what bad is. Really, really fundamental text, huh? And even when I talk about good and bad, there in the ninth book of Wisdom, right?

[37:07] You could misunderstand Aristotle's text if you don't understand this text first, and it's very important to understand this text, huh? Really, kind of a marvelous thing. But

[37:22] it also, you know, touches upon. I think illustrates what Aristotle says in the book on fallacies. There, the book on Sophistical Refutations, where he says the fallacy of the accident deceives even the wise. That's an extremely strong way of saying that it's hard to avoid the the mistake of the accidental, right? Well, that's the mistake Plato's making here. The kind of mistake he's making. And Plato's certainly wise if anybody's wise, huh?

[37:55] But so it's also an occasion for us to understand better the what fallacy of the accident, huh? So this text is is this fifteenth reading is important. But I order it along with the one from Anaxagoras because of that thing we're talking about, right? It's important to distinguish between matter and form, between ability and act, right? But then once you've done that, you tend to think of matter as something formless, and you have to distinguish between the ability of matter and its formlessness.

[38:32] They're not the same thing. Of course, Hegel in modern times universalizes this. He talks about the portentous power of the negative. He's attributing the power, the ability, to the negative, huh? The tendency to that, but Hegel, you know, makes a bit universal confusion, right? But we'll see, you know, how this uh, Aristotle's way of refuting failure can be used to refute similar mistakes in other matters, huh?

[39:06] To take off from this. So the the fifteenth there for next time, okay? That's the last reading, by the way, in in the first book, right? We haven't done all the readings, but it's the last one. The way Thomas divides it. So fifteen. So we'll be together next Tuesday then. Next week with Tuesday, maybe when I go back, we'll start on go to Wednesday, okay? But next week we'll be together Tuesday.

[39:45] Forgot to bring the pictures of the granddaughters, but it's really nice pictures, them, you know. Real nice expressions on their face, you know. You get the right, just the right one, you know. The youngest one, you know, one who's we'd saw seen her after birth, but you know when we see her, potential energy, kinetic energy, right?

[40:11] And you talk about the body going down the roller coaster, something like that. It's losing potential energy and gaining what kinetic energy. What what does height have in common with motion?

[40:27] I don't see anything common, do you? Heights should both be called energy. So here we see it's got a maximum of potential energy, as it descends it loses potential energy, but it gains what kinetic energy, right? It gets down to the bottom and then starts up again, and now it's losing kinetic energy, gaining back the potential energy, right? It doesn't get the same height, but then they say within this heat, right?

[40:58] Find a way of measuring heat and temperature, but what does height have in common with motion? You know, it's a very abstract thing, right? I mean, abstract and not in the ordinary sense. I mean, you don't abstract from from these two four sided figure, right? Or three sided figure. You know, you don't seem to have anything in common, right? But there seems to be in some way a connection because as it goes down, it's losing height, but it's going faster and faster, right?

[41:35] As it starts up again, it goes slower and slower. It gets higher and higher, so I see a correlation between the number which expresses the height and some other number that expresses the speed, right? And if I see, you know, if you had a a frictionless thing here, right, we'd get the same height as it left, right? What then? So that I say, well, okay, so those are really

[42:12] the same thing. It's just different form of energy. But I don't see in any concrete way a likeness between height and and speed, do you?

[42:25] Right, but there's a way of numerically connecting those two, right? So I mean, you have to be very careful about you know as Warren Murray said, the language of science, right? You know, I mean, it seems to be like ordinary language, but isn't, and it's not.

[42:48] It's remember when I first you know studying the kinds of causes and matter form moving in and thinking about physics and so on and is in force you know related to you know something like the the mover right? The searchers laughed my face

[43:10] if I needed to take it. There's usually something mentioned there, right? You know, I mean, I mean, or you know, in math, you do something like matter, right? Now, but it doesn't mean the same thing at all, you know.

[43:26] I mean, you gotta realize that that you know, like some physicists say, we define these things by the way we measure them, right? Ah, yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out. I knew. Yeah, yeah.

[43:51] I thought I heard Dominic Rochelle saying that at the beginning of this Big Bang theory, all the all the mass was contained in this little photon type thing or something. Yeah, it was concentrated some way to all of it. Yeah, yeah. All the mass of the entire universe. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. Okay, I just seeing if I understood that correctly. This is a good class. But you know, if I feel heat and I see height, and what what what do they have in common?

[44:28] You know, what potential is negative? It is, it seems to me. You know. That canteen example was good for helping me understand that difference. It's a molecule of water, and that's small. That was good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we in chemistry came the idea of Aristotle first before it came into physics. You know, it's chemistry during the 19th century, right? They did to the smallest piece. Yeah, that helped me see that.

[45:06] So that was an important thing to see. Yeah. If I just remember that, I can remember that distinction almost. Yeah. Um. I know this. Our imagination is the most common form of deception. False imagination. False imagination. Yeah.

[45:34] Is there anywhere besides just the knowledge that helps us to protect us from air that are? Well, you see, like like you know, one of the famous texts is in the De Trinitate of Boethius, right? And Thomas you know expands it into an article there, and so on. In theology, you know, you should not try to judge things by imagination, right? Because these things cannot be imagined.

[46:08] On geometry, to some extent, you can judge by the imagination, right? And you know, in a sense, when a person says, you know, in the fourth theorem, say that you have two triangles here, right? And this angle is equal to that angle, and this side to that side, and this side is equal to that side. okay. And those two triangles are going to be equal? see? This angle is equal to that angle.

[46:40] This side is equal to that side. And this side to that side, the two triangles equal. Yes. But how do you see that? We see it in your imagination, right? You imagine this triangle, right? Um. With this point right there, right, and this line laid on that line, right. Well, since these lines are the same length, if this line is laid from here down there, it's going to coincide, right?

[47:04] Then, since the angle is the same, this line is going to have to fall on that line, right? And because it's the same length, it's going to coincide with it, right? And you've got the same endpoints. The straight line is going to be the same line between two endpoints. So, in a sense, I I imagine it, right? See now, my brother Mark too is talking about the the fifth postulate of Euclid.

[47:29] You know, and the fifth postulate says that straight line falls one straight line, it makes what angles less than what two right angles. Those two lines, when extended, will eventually what meet, right? Okay. Now some people call it the parallel postulate, right? It's not about parallel lines; it's about lines that meet. See now, parallel lines are lines that, when extended to infinity, they never what meet. Meet, okay.

[48:05] But now, can you imagine a line extended to infinity? Can you imagine a line infinite? No. No. See, so you don't resolve to something you can't imagine. You resolve to something you can what Can't imagine geometry, right? Okay. But now in

[48:28] in natural philosophy, right? Um, I can imagine something smaller than a molecule of water, right? You know, and you know there's a movie. My brother Mark saw it. I never saw it, but the incredible shrinking man, huh? Yeah. Okay. And he took the wrong chemical, and my daddy started shrinking, right? Yeah. And he's almost eaten by the cat, you know. He gets down to that size appropriate to the cat.

[48:56] I guess at the end of the movie, and now he's getting reconciled to this and the discoveries and the knowledge. He said, "What are you? " Yeah. I guess he's he's you know the blades of grass are towering over him, and he's still getting smaller and so on. That's very imaginative, right? But is it possible for man to keep on getting smaller and smaller and smaller? Right.

[49:16] Well, if man is composed mainly of water, and the molecule has a definite limit, is the limit as how small he can get, right? And you see, so the fact that you can imagine something a man smaller than than a molecule of water, you know, doesn't mean you should judge it whether there can be a man smaller, right? You can't judge by your imagination there, right? You have to go back to the natures of things, which are somewhat hidden to us, right?

[49:43] The natures of things are revealed to us by their motion. In fact, nature is defined therefore by motion, right? And what we see is that the that nature is a cause not only of your growing, but if you stop growing, get to certain height, right? And get to certain height, you know, you grow the wrong direction, maybe, but it's not going to grow taller and taller, right?

[50:04] Keep on eating, right? You know, we stop around you know thirty, but most of growth is long before 30. So you have to judge a natural philosophy by going back to your what senses ultimately, right?

[50:30] But you start to you know study these immaterial things, then they kind of transcend the sense of the imagination. That's why we struggle, yeah. But but notice you know what we call false imagination could take place even in geometry, right? Because if you imagine something smaller, if you imagine something other than it is in geometry, right, then you could be deceived, right? In the theorem that I the third book, you know, where

[51:04] Euclid shows that a horn angle is what: the straight line meets a circle at one point only, right? And he shows that the horn angle here is smaller than any what rectilineal Angle, right? Okay. Now it seems to me that if this comes down, if you move around something, they can move more. Intention there, it seems to me that there's open space there above that point where they meet, right?

[51:36] Right. And this open space of that point, you could obviously draw a line in there, right? Right. See. But you can't. I think that's an example, unusual example, but a wonderful example where imagination could deceive you even in geometry, right? You know. And I started thinking of my politician friend, Robert Monroe. You know, you know he was. I was out of college and I was certain to get Euclid.

[52:03] I said, "Boy, I should get Euclid." So real, okay. So I read him. I got interested in Euclid, right? And then Robert Monroe, my politician friend, said, "What are you doing?" Dwayne? I said, "I'm studying geometry." He kind of laughed, you know. Well, that kind of led him into this theorem gradually. You know what a rectilineal angle is, you know? Wow. You make it smaller and smaller like the scissors, you know.

[52:24] You can close it up. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. If you make an angle that's smaller than a rectilinear angle, I eventually introduced me to this theorem. Right? It's kind of wow, you know. It's interesting, you know. But it kind of rouses your wonder because it's an example of something contrary to what you'd expect, right? I think imagination can very easily deceive you about this, right? Yeah. Okay.

[52:45] In the same way, you know, with the Greeks there, you know, you could imagine that you could find a line to measure any two lines if you make it smaller and smaller, get smaller, right? See. And and what they found out was that there are some lines that you can't find a common line to measure. And these are lines that don't have the ratio of a number to a number or one to a number.

[53:09] And that's kind of a waging thing, right? Yeah. So even things that can be imagined, you can suddenly imagine other than they are, right? But a fortiori, things that can't be imagined at all, to imagine them at all is to what? Is to be what? False. False, right? You know, and when Socrates, you know, Plato presents Socrates and the Parmenides, he's trying to imagine the way the universal is covering the singulars, a big tent over them, you know.

[53:44] And of course, if the universal was over them like a tent, then only part would be on top of you, and part on top of you, and you would have the whole what the universal says, and all these contradictions, right? And but he's trying to imagine the universal.

[54:01] He used a passage in one of his articles in that Pedmont's logic, you know, and I think he used it too. Beautiful text there, right? It's like the moderns who want to make the universal to be a class, right? I find that very common, and they can't. Understand what the universal is, and therefore they try to turn it into something you can imagine, right? Which is a class of people, right?

[54:31] Yeah. No, you said Heisenberg sees the distinction that every element isn't in every other element. Some of the other moderns don't see that. Well, I'm saying their common way of speaking, you know, among the elementary students, students the elementary particles. that is to say, was that every elementary particle is composed of all the rest, right? See. And do they by that? Do they mean potentially? Do they?

[55:00] Well, I know. You say composed of, you're making it actual. Maybe pin them down. Oh, maybe things act that way, but you know, they'd see the difficulty sooner or later, right? But it'd be the same difficulty that Hank Segrist is in. It's like when I was a child, you know, you get these birthday cards, and the picture on the birthday card is a picture of a postman coming with a birthday card, and on what he's bringing to the house is a picture of a post.

[55:31] Remember those ones? Yeah. Well, you know, if you if you went on doing that, right, you'd be getting postmen and what cards smaller and smaller and smaller, right? Yeah. Eventually, they they break down, right? They don't go. If you ever had the the the Christmas or birthday card they sent you, but it'd

[55:58] be okay if electrons or protons could come in just any size, right? But experimentally, right, all protons are the same in size and or mass or charge and so on. It's two thousand times the size of an electron. Something like that, yeah. But the point here is that they have a definite size, right? Ah, yeah. You see. Yeah. That was really really struck me today. That just thinking of that.

[56:31] The atomic weights are based on the number of protons, right? Of the atomic number. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that was good too. And the cause of difficulty. It's easier for me to do it. It may not be less meritorious. That was good. We can do things for God. our love of God and it's easier for us more meritorious. Because we're seeing for more love than God, right? Yeah, if this is easier for me to do than for you to do it, it's not to say less meritorious.

[57:27] If it's easier for me to do it because I love God more, then it's it's better. Yeah, you see, I am quite a lover of that. I mean, I can see the truth of that. Just you know, you can see real easy, but I just never thought that through. I guess. Let's get the

[57:52] difficult game in the morning, you know, and getting dressed and so on. You know, you put your pants in a way you can jump on the bed and shoot into the pants. That's the little thing, you know.

[58:05] I mean, some people find even little things very difficult to do. Well, one would be easy because it would be virtue, not virtue, right? But, but the thing in itself, the little thing, right? You say, yeah. Then other thing they call that's not as meritorious, right? If the littleness is due to the thing itself, right? Yeah.

[58:46] So if I if I get you breakfast, that does meritorious is laying down my life for you, or difficult to lay down your life, right? Okay. But if the man who lays down his life for you, if it's easier for him to lay down his life for you than for someone else to get you breakfast, does the man who gets you breakfast get more merit? See, no, because the man who lays down his life finds it easier than the man because he loves you more, right?

[59:35] I mean, with these babies around, you know, I mean, my wife is often helping out changing diapers, but I try to avoid it as much as possible.

[59:44] I mean, back in the groove, you know, the kids are nine, my own kids. I mean, you know, but now there is enough around. I