De Anima (On the Soul)
32. De Anima III, Lectio 3: The Common Sense and Judging White from Sweet
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[0:00] been on the you know I have a downgrade list there on the judgment. you know, So, really she was the first time I heard her, she was supposed to have been consolidating, you know. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. God our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, ordain luminary images, and arouse us to consider more correctly.

[0:28] Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, and help us to understand all that you've written. Saint Pius the tenth, pray for us. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. This happens to be the feast of Pius the tenth. There, you know, and the priest at the mass this morning, my house, was act was saying, I guess his parents The statue of Pius X, They're quite devoted to him, and he says they're always, you know, praying to Pius X, You know, mainly for my getting through school.

[1:00] he said, "Well, I guess he succeeded, right?" He says, "do you know who else has a statue of Pius X? Well, nobody else in the congregation sees that have a statue of Pius X. But did I tell you some of those little anecdotes about his his miracles and so on. Didn't I hear about those? The one that they described is a kind of public audience, more or less.

[1:28] some father came up with his little boy who was crippled and had all kinds of ailments, right? And he took that, you know, he took the little boy in his arms, he like this, he went on lecturing, you know, giving us what he taught. And before long, the little boy slipped down from his arms and ran around. Oh, that's right, right? Didn't he? tell you that story?

[1:48] And then there was another story. I guess there was two old nuns who were just like tottering on the edge of the grave, and they could hardly move, you know, and so on. But as I guess a special privilege, they're allowed to have a little tiny audience with the Pope, you know. And it was not going to be very long, you know, kind of a farewell to this world.

[2:08] They traveled in a taxi to the Vatican, right? And of course, they were working there for a very short time to see the Pope. And so they asked the taxi man, you know, to to wait, yeah. So they went in, and apparently he cured them, right? They come out, you know, bouncing out, and the taxi cab guy would not believe it was the same two nuns that came out.

[2:32] Well, kind of interesting, yeah. Examples, that. Have you used something from his cyclical? Didn't we in here one time talking about causes of error. Interesting text. Okay, we're down to page twenty nine in your text number two eighty five, which is the start of the third Lectio in Thomason. And here Aristotle's going to take up another act where it's more clear that goes beyond the capability of the outward senses,

[3:14] and it's a kind of discrimination that is made, which is going to reason could not be made by any what one of the exterior senses or even two or three of them working what together, right? So he begins by pointing out what each sense seems to be capable of discriminating. Each sense, therefore, he says, is of its underlying sensible. Underlying sensible, he means what what we called before the private sensible, right?

[3:48] The sensible that comes under that as its what object, right? And is present in the sense organ as a sense organ, and it discerns the differences of its underlying sensible. So, if the underlying sensible of sight is, for example, color, then by sight we can distinguish between white and black, or yellow and green, or red or blue, or something, right? Okay, by the eye, huh? Or taste could distinguish between the sweet and the what?

[4:23] Bitter, or the sweet and the what? Sour, and so on. The case is similar to the cases. But now, in two eighty-six, he goes on to a discernment that he's going to argue could not be done by one of the exterior senses, and not even by them in what combination?

[4:47] However, he says, since we discern white and sweet, we sense the difference there between white and sweet, and each of the sensibles in addition to each other, we sense by something that they differ. They're talking about the sensible difference between these things, not you know what the philosopher by reason might say what white is or what color is or what sound is, right? But this very sensible character, quality there, of whiteness or the sensible quality of sweetness, huh?

[5:27] And we distinguish between those two sensible qualities. Okay, now it's going to be by some kind of sense, for they are something what sensible, right? Okay, by which it is also clear, he says, that the flesh is not the ultimate sense organ, for it would be necessary for the discerning to discern by touching it. That seems kind of like almost out of place there, but as Thomas points out, this common sense that Aristotle is approaching seems to be especially close to the sense of what touch, because the sense of touch is the most fundamental of all the senses.

[6:16] And if you have the sense of touch, you don't necessarily have the other senses, but you don't have the other senses without having the sense of what touch, huh? So it's very close to this inward sense that he calls the common sense. Okay, right? Sometimes it's called the central sense because of the many equivocations of the word common sense, right? In sentence, if we use the word common sense, we mean what reason's ability to judge things are not too difficult to judge.

[6:50] Okay, and you know we borrow the words. From the senses to express the judgments of reason, so I say to you sometimes that makes sense, right? I'd say confirming your judgment. That doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. We hear people saying that, right? But there you're talking about reason rather than senses. Nonsense. Okay, but in those ways of speaking,

[7:24] the connection there between the senses, which judge in some way, and reason, which also judges a thing, but also the fact that reason ultimately goes back to the senses as the starting point of our knowledge in making its what judgments. Okay, that makes sense. It doesn't make sense. He's a man, a sensible man, right? Okay. So as I say, we use the word common sense. Sometimes people will

[7:55] use another sense. So sometimes they call it simple sense. You have the idea that it's it's reason, right? And it's a phenomenon of statements. And also, if you want to avoid that mistake of thinking the common sense knows the common sensibles, right? That seems to go, but no, the common sense is this common beginning, might say, of all the ultimate senses. This common term or end of all their changes, huh?

[8:27] Okay, but the sense of touch, especially, seems to be close to that being very fundamental and kind of the root sense. And so he said that if you thought of it as being flesh, the organ of sense of touch, insofar as it's like the common sense, then I have to be what touching the color of your clothing here, right, in order to compare blackness with whiteness and blackness with sweetness or something of that sort, right?

[9:01] Okay. But I'm obviously by my skin not in touch, right, with you. Now, continuing the main thought here, two eighty-seven here now, page thirty. Nor can one discern that the sweet is different from the white, that this sense quality is different by something separated, but both must be clear by some one thing. It makes a nice comparison, right? For in this way, even if I should sense this, if I should sense, for example, white but not sweet, and you should sense that, let's say you sense sweet but not white.

[9:53] It would be clear that they are different from each other, but something one must say that they are what different, huh? For the sweet is different from the what white, huh? That sense quality, right? Of sweetness is different from the color white.

[10:12] The same thing, therefore, says this. Now, is that clear, right? Well, two things here to see, really. The first thing to see is that the sense of sight, obviously by itself, cannot distinguish between white and sweet, because it doesn't know sweet. Yeah. So it can't judge that whiteness and sweetness are different, huh? Likewise, for the same reason, the sense of taste can't judge or discern the difference between sweetness and white because it doesn't know white at all.

[11:02] But could the two of them together, knowing white by my sight and knowing sweet by my sense of taste, could I then know the difference between the two?

[11:20] Or that be like you knowing white and I knowing sweet? Has to be one in the same ability that knows what both, right, and judges them to be different, huh? Now, sometimes I use some homely comparisons to a similar thing in in reasoning. Like to say, you know, if the word cat, all you know is the letter C, and all you know is the letter A, and all I know is the letter T.

[12:01] Can either one of us spell the word cat? No. Together, can we? Now, one of us has to get into his head all three letters, right? Okay.

[12:20] Now, the same way in reasoning, you know, in a syllogism, you have two premises usually. And if you know one premise, and I know the other premise, but not vice versa, we don't know each other's premise. Can either one of us syllogize? I was taking a simple syllogism there, like

[12:46] every mother is a woman, no man is a woman, therefore no man is a what mother, right? Now, if you know that every mother is a woman, you don't know that no man is a woman. And I know that no man is a woman, but I don't know that what. Every mother is a woman, right? Can we syllogize that no man is a mother? No. See, not even together, right?

[13:16] One of us would have to get into his head, right? One of us at least would have to know both what premises, right? Okay. The same way multiplying, right?

[13:30] If I know four but I don't know six, and you know six but you don't know four, can we multiply four times six together? Now one of us would have to get both four and six into his head and then multiply the two in order to get to twenty-four. And the same way, in a what definition, right? If I know that the square is a quadrilateral, I don't know anything else about it.

[13:59] And you know it's equilateral, but that's all you know. And you know it's right-angled, but that's all you know. Can we define it? Any one of us? No. And even together, we can't define it unless what I know gets into your head, right? What you know gets into my head, right? One of us, at least, will have to know quadrilateral, equilateral, rectangle, right angle. See? Okay. Aristotle says that in order to discriminate between white and sweet,

[14:41] even the two senses that know individually, right, or separately, white and sweet, they together put in what? Know the difference, huh? So it has to come back then to a kind of what? Common what? Center, right? And what you might call the common sense or the central sense. It's still a kind of sense power, but it's a an inward sense. We could call it to distinguish it from those outward senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, huh?

[15:22] So he says there in 287. The same thing, therefore, says this. When says it says, so does it understand and sense. I notice how he uses the word understand as well as sense there, right? And Thomas says, why did he do that?

[15:41] Well, because, as he'll say in the next reading, the philosophers before him had not really distinguished between sense and reason. That's one reason why he makes sense, right? And it's Aristotle's custom that you see many times in his works that he will speak in the opinion of his contemporaries, right? Before he's tried to determine the truth, right? Right. And then after he determines the truth, he'll speak differently.

[16:13] See? Okay. Although as Thomas points out, you could also say that reason also, as well as the central sense, compares the what objects of different senses. So as a physicist, we might talk about color, right? And we might talk about what sound, right? Okay. So reason, as well as the central sense,

[16:48] compare the different senses or compare the objects of different senses. Okay. But notice the understanding or reason, as we'll see later on when we take it up. Its object is more the what it is of these things, huh? What is sound, right? Huh? What is color or what is light, huh? While this sense of common sense is merely concerned with the sensible quality of these, of whiteness and sweetness and so on, and the sound, huh?

[17:17] Okay. So he concludes at the end of two eighty-seven. It is clear, therefore, that it is not possible to discern separated things by separated powers. Now, let me make another point about what I was saying before. Huh? It's possible sometimes to know the same thing in different ways, huh? And we talked about how the first example of that, perhaps, in our knowing, is the outward senses, two or more of them, knowing the same common sensible.

[18:02] I mentioned how I could know the shape of this table. You know, if you brought me in here blindfolded. I could feel this table and more or less get to know the shape of the table just by feeling it. Okay, without touching the table, I could look at the table and see the shape of it. So the eye knows shape through color, and the touch knows it through hardness or something like that.

[18:29] Okay, the air was as hard as this. I wouldn't be able to know it. Okay. Well, in a more different case, but again, an example of this, when we study the senses and and the inward senses, we can study them in two ways. We can study them from inward experience, inward experience of sensing, right, and but discriminating between the objects of the different senses, right, and so on.

[19:07] Or we can what? Maybe dissect, right, and do certain experiments too, maybe in some cases, but certainly dissect the organs, right? Okay. So you might find out from what a dissection of the head, right,

[19:26] that the outward senses are somehow connected with, let's say, the brain, right? Okay. So that the outward senses come back to an inward what A joint place, huh? But here we're coming to that same conclusion by what inward experience, huh? Okay. Sometimes that I teach the soul,

[19:56] and these books about the soul, I'll say that the the De Anima, as we usually call these three books about the soul from the Latin words about the soul, that they're about the that this is based upon our common inward

[20:18] experience of life. Okay. And also saying common inward experience of life. We talked before, if you recall, the beginning of our study of natural philosophy, how the eight books of natural hearing are based on our common experience of of natural things, huh? Mean the experience which all men have and cannot avoid having it, and here we're talking about a common experience, but a what inward one, okay?

[21:01] And as someone has said, we know ourselves more by inward experience. We know by inward experience the dog and the cat less so, right? We, in some sense, know what it is for the dog or the cat to be angry, right? Or for the dog or the cat to be experiencing thirst or something like that, right? Or hunger, right? Because of the proximity of them to us, right?

[21:40] But by inward experience, we would know least of all the what plant life, right? Okay. And even if you take us, right, I'm more aware inwardly of my thinking and so on, and of my emotions, than I am of my what digesting food, right? And my growing, right? You know, I mean, I don't think I have much experience when I was a child of growing, right? I mean, you know, the old idea, you know, you get up here against the wall here, you know, and you mark off the height of the head there, and so on.

[22:21] That was when you were so and so time, and now you're here, and so on, right? But that's more outward experience, isn't it? You know, you measure the the body. I guess you know the the baby is brought to the and the checkup and so on. They talk about how much the baby's growing, you know, and if it's growing, you know, it should be growing and so on.

[22:45] But without an experience, we know best of all the what the plant, and less so the animal, and least of all what man. Now you can dissect a plant and interfere with it less than if you try to dissect an animal. that's alive, right? And as you know, how men are very much what influenced by things, right? You know, they always talk about common example in teaching, huh?

[23:24] When a guy first starts teaching, maybe he's going to have a dean or somebody going to come in and sit at the back of the class and see how he's doing, right? And of course, this makes maybe a young professor or a teacher or something like that kind of what tense or nervous, you see, and they know they're being evaluated or something like that, right? And even when they interview people, you know, for a job at a college or university, sometimes they have give a kind of You know, mock class.

[23:54] You know, maybe running into a few students there and so on, right? But it's a tense thing because they're what? It's interfering with what? What they would normally be doing, right? So they're. It's the old idea, you know, of trying to watch yourself fall asleep, right? You know, When the observation interferes in a kind of serious way, with what you have to observe. And

[24:25] so, from the point of view of outward experience, the plant is more able to be known by us than the animal, and the animal more so than the what? Man, right? Okay.

[24:40] But from the point of view of inward experience, man himself would seem to be what most known. Then we kind of know the animal because those things we have in common. The animal, but our growing and digesting our food, we're not very much aware of that.

[25:02] By inward experience. So there are things you you're going to know by inward experience. You wouldn't know by outward experience and vice versa. But maybe there are some things you might know by both. So it might be that that the outward senses come back to a common center called a central common sense, right? Is something we can investigate by inward experience of discerning between white and sweet, right?

[25:33] And someone by outward experience dissecting might come and see some connection between the two, okay? Nerves going back here or something of that sort, right? Oh. Now in 288 he adds that it must be the same thing, judging these to be different. Now, in two ways you may place the now, not only on the side of the knower that now he judges, right, that these are different, but now he judges that these two things are different.

[26:28] Now, right? That it is not any separated time is seen from the following. For just as the same thing says that the good is different from the bad, thus also when it says the one to be different from the other, the one is not accidental. I mean, I now say that it is different, but not that it is what different now, but it speaks thus both now and that they are different now.

[26:58] Therefore, at the same time, whence it is unseparated in an unseparated time. That's what he's saying there, right? I mean, to take out something different from that. I can remember now the past, right? I can remember yesterday. Now, and there the now is only on the side of the what the knowing, right, and not to the known, right? Because I don't remember the past to be now, but I now remember the past to be past, right?

[27:36] See. But in the case of this common sense, right? I'm tasting my licorice right now. Okay, so the I'm comparing the color of the licorice with the what taste of licorice, and they're not the same thing: the color of the licorice and the taste of licorice. So I'm saying now that these two things are now different: the blackness and the and the licorice taste there, right? And the licorice are what different, huh?

[28:17] Now, in the rest of this reading, he's going to do raise first of all an objection, right, to this. Conclusion that there is a what central sense, right? That's knowing these different sensibles together at the same time and saying that they're different, right? Okay. Then he's going to give a solution to that objection, right?

[28:51] And then he's going to what? Counter object to the solution, saying it's insufficient. And he's going to propose a certain likeness there to give us the what true solution, huh? Okay.

[29:08] So in 289 he gives the objection, right? And in 290 he gives a solution to the objection. But in 291 he objects to the solution to the object- to the objection, right? Original objection. And then 292 he gives the true solution, huh? Okay. Now you've got to look at this objection. I think in the context of the way we approach the senses, and in the context too of the way our mind actually comes to these things.

[30:01] We had learned before how sensing is a kind of undergoing, right? A kind of being acted upon, a kind of receiving, right? Okay. Now it's more known to us how matter receives things

[30:22] than how the senses receive something, and so we have to, in a way, distinguish between the way that the senses receive and the way matter receives. The way matter is acted upon and the way the senses act upon. Nevertheless, there's a likeness between the two, right? Okay. And this objection, I sense, seems to be based upon something that we see first of all in matter,

[30:58] because matter doesn't seem to be able to be acted upon by contraries at the same time. So that if the Piece of wood, whatever it is, is becoming hot. It can't be becoming cold at the same what time, right? Okay.

[31:29] So how can there be one thing being moved by contraries and different types of things? So he says in the objection here, But indeed, it is impossible that the same as undivided is moved according to contrary motions and in an undivided time. For sweet, in this way, it moves the sense of the understanding, but the bitter in a what contrary way, right? And again, the white even in another different way, huh?

[32:03] So how can one and the same thing be moved in all these different ways? Okay. I mean the objection, though partly, is confusing the way matter is moved with the way the senses are moved, right? Okay. But he's starting from what is more known to us, and the objection comes to mind. Then he kind of solves it with the way we might possibly solve some problems about the way matter we see.

[32:38] Is it therefore that the discerning is together and undivided in number and unseparated, while in being it is separated? Now I think that's always confusing the way Aristotle speaks there. Can it be so presumptuous as to criticize his speaking? When Aristotle talks about the definition of a thing and the definition speaks about what was to be, right? He sometimes just takes to be there as a kind of contraction of that, right?

[33:13] Okay. So he's saying that it's one in number, right? But many in definition, huh? Okay. Now let me try to explain that with a simple example. of going back to what we saw before. Remember this contrast we're making when, talking about motion, we said you have the ability for some kind of activity or any kind of ability for that matter. You distinguish one ability from another by what it's an ability for, right?

[33:49] Okay. So let's say the ability to talk and the ability to walk are they the same ability? No. And why not? Because talking is not the same as walking. Yeah. If talking were a form of walking, then would be come under the ability to walk, right? Or if walking was a kind of talking, right? Okay. So they're really two different abilities, and you can what

[34:29] talk and walk at the same time for any logic, right? Okay. You know what I want to talk about. You know, can't walk and shoot gun at the same time. Crazy old James to use about his opponents. Can't walk and shoot gun at the same time. Two things, okay? But you do those two things together because they're really two different what abilities, right? Now let's take a little different example here.

[35:00] I have the ability to be, let's say, healthy, right? I'm also able to be what sick, right? So sometimes in my life, you could say I have been sick, and sometimes I am healthy, right? Okay, I'm more healthy than sick. Sometimes you're one, sometimes the other, right? Okay. Now, is it the same thing to be healthy and to be sick? No. Okay. But now, is the ability to be healthy and the ability to be sick, Are they, two different abilities, like the ability to talk and the ability to walk.

[35:46] No, no, no. If they were really distinct abilities, I could be healthy and sick at the same time. But my being healthy excludes really my being sick at the same time, right? And my being sick excludes my being healthy at the same time, right? So it seems to be the same thing. My body, in some way, is able to be healthy or to be what sick, right?

[36:16] It can't be both at the same time, right? Okay. Nevertheless, you could say that the ability to be healthy and the ability to be sick are two in definition. Here you're defining ability by healthy. Here you're defining ability by what? Sickness, right? So in a way, it's two in definition or in being, as you would say, right? But one in number, right? Okay.

[36:53] Now take another example of that, right? Suppose you have a nice piece of clay here in the room, right? We say that the clay has an ability to be, let's say, a cube, right? It also has the ability to be a sphere. Can it be a cube and a sphere though at the same time? Yeah. Now this is really two different abilities of the clay. The ability to be a cube is the ability to be a sphere.

[37:31] No. You might say it's really one ability. Let's call it the moldability. It's moldable the clay, right? But this moldability of the clay is what enables it to become a sphere or a cube or a cylinder or the other things, right? Okay. So it seems to be really the same ability, the moldability. But we define it what differently, right? Okay. Now, I can

[38:04] take my ability to stand and my ability to what? Sit, right? Are they like my ability to stand and my ability to talk? I can talk and stand at the same time. I can sit and talk at the same time. That's the curse, right? But I can't sit and what? Stand at the same time, right? Okay. So, what is this ability that we call the common sense or the central sense, right?

[38:43] Is it like the ability to talk and to walk, or is it like the ability to be healthy, the ability to be sick? Which is what?

[38:56] Compared to what? Is the ability called the common sense there, right? I'm able to what? Know by the common sense both color, let's say, and sweetness, right? Okay. Or black and the taste of licorice, right? And I can compare these two and say that they are different now, right? Okay.

[39:21] So is the common sense in that respect, right? More like the ability to be healthy, the ability to be sick, or like the ability to talk, the ability to walk? The latter. I think it's more like talking or walking because you can talk at the same time as all these other things. Yeah. But notice the ability to talk and the ability to walk have one more ability, right?

[39:48] See. And so a man could, you know, be paralyzed and still have the ability to talk, or vice versa; he could be impeded in speech but still have the ability to walk, right? They're really two different abilities. And what we've been arguing before is that must be one and the same, right? That knows both, right? Okay. Okay. And so, therefore, someone might try to say, "Well, it's like the second one, right?

[40:16] We really have one ability, but it's an ability for what opposites, right? Okay. But it's not really exactly where the common sense is, because you don't at the same time receive what both, right? Okay. You don't at the same time, you're not at the same time healthy and sick, right? Okay. But at the same time, you're discerning the difference between white and sweet, right? Or even between white and black, right?

[40:50] We're back to the other senses, right? White and black. right? So the exception there in knowing is not exactly like this, is it? Because here, one contrary excludes the other, right? You see, as you go up from the senses and towards reason, this becomes even more true. That reason is even more capable than senses of receiving contraries at the same time. And so there's a famous proposition there in Aristotle, and it goes back to Plato, right?

[41:26] It comes up. I don't know if you ever read the dialogue called the Symposium, right? Okay. Good example there at the end. You know, everybody's had quite a bit to drink and so on, and they've all kind of slid under the table. And at the end, the young people conversing are Socrates and the tragic poet Agathon, who is the man his honor. This whole symposium is being held because he's won the what first prize for writing tragedies that year, right?

[42:02] And then there's a comic poet, what Aristophanes, right? Who's won prizes, I guess, for his comedies, right? Okay. And the last bit of conversation, the guy who's never written this, says that Socrates was saying to Agathon and to

[42:27] Aristophanes that if you knew what you were doing, you could write both tragedy and what. Comedy, right? Well, I don't know that much about these men, but as far as I know, Aristophanes could only really succeed at comedy, when we? Write tragedy, and maybe Agathon reversed. if you write tragedy, but not comedy, right?

[42:57] Moliere seems to be, you know, a comic dramatist, but he doesn't seem to be able to write what a tragic, right? But you take, you know, the two supreme poets, Homer and Aristotle, and Aristotle, but Shakespeare, and they can write both what tragedy and comedy, huh? Now, in the case of Homer, we've lost Homer's comic work, which is called the Margites. He has certain quotes on that in Plato and so on.

[43:31] But in the book on the poetic art Aristotle says that the Margites is to comedy, but the Iliad is to what tragedy, right? Okay. So if that is true, then Homer excelled in both.

[43:51] In the same way, Shakespeare. Now, a lot of times, people, you know, they hear Romeo and Juliet or King Lear, or they they introduce the tragedies or Macbeth, right? And so on. But I remember my brother, you know, seeing one of the Shakespeare's comedies, and realize how funny Shakespeare was. So Shakespeare can do both, right? In the same way that a great actor like Alec Guinness, you know, can do these comic roles very well, but then he could do the the tragic roles.

[44:20] By the lesser artists, only one or the other, right? They're kind of limited, huh? But going back to Socrates and Marx, right? He said if you knew what you were doing, right, you could do both, right? But that's based upon, you know, a thought that comes out in different places in the time of dialogue. it's even more fully Aristotle that there's the same knowledge of what opposites, opposites, yeah.

[44:48] So the medical art, for example, is a knowledge of what health and sickness, right? And if the doctor says that your blood pressure is abnormal, your blood pressure is unhealthy, it's high, right? You couldn't possibly know that your blood pressure is high if you didn't know what normal blood pressure should be, right? Huh? And now they're always checking your cholesterol, you know, and they want to tell me I'm beyond 200, whatever that means, right?

[45:20] Okay, and so in the very knowledge of what abnormal blood pressure is or high blood pressure is, is an understanding of what. normal or healthy blood pressure is, huh? So one opposite in a way doesn't exclude the other opposite in our knowledge, but it's a what? Help to knowing the other. In the same way, in ethics, huh? You can't really know what virtue is, moral virtue, for example.

[45:56] That's a habit, right? In the middle, right, towards us is determined by right reason, without the same time knowing that vices are excess or what defect, right? So courage is between cowardice or cowardliness and foolhardiness, huh? And generosity or liberality is between what stinginess and extravagance, right? Okay. So I told you that student I had when I was first teaching at Saint Mary's College in California. There, my brother Mark and Ron McGrath.

[46:41] There, he said, you know, you guys shouldn't be teaching ethics, right? Because it's the same knowledge of opposites, right? So if you teach them ethics, they learn about the bad as well as about the good, and since most people are inclined to be bad, he says, you are making them worse. You know, it's kind of you know a clever objection to teaching ethics, which is probably a requirement, the you know required course, right?

[47:05] It was at a lot of colleges, huh? So it's kind of a bright student, you know, if they got this objection, huh? The same way, you know, as a logician, you know about correct and what incorrect reasoning, huh? And so, in general, it is the same knowledge of opposites, but that's contrary to the way opposites are in matter, right? So, although in my knowledge of high blood pressure, in my knowledge of abnormal blood pressure, right, is my knowledge of normal blood pressure, right?

[47:43] In my body, I can't have both at the same time, right? So that's one of the striking ways that we show that reason is something what immaterial that doesn't receive opposites in the way that the what that matter does, right? In matter, one opposite excludes the other, but in reason, one opposite helps you to know the other. You know, saying there that opposites alongside each other are more clear, right?

[48:17] So knowing what tragedy is doesn't prevent you from knowing what comedy is. You can see, in a sense, better what comedy is because you know what tragedy is, and vice versa, right? And knowing what joy is doesn't prevent you from knowing what sadness is, or vice versa. But in a sense, knowing what joy is helps to know what sadness is, and vice versa. But in my body, I can't be at the same time joyful and sad, right?

[48:48] Okay, so now, matter in some way has an ability for opposites, But not at the same time. That's sometimes interesting if you study Hegel and Marx. You see,

[49:14] what Hegel does in his system is to take the way opposites are in our mind. And then he flip flops that into matter. So, because in our mind opposites are together, then he puts opposites together in matter. Now, it's kind of amusing because Marx, coming after Hegel, he says we're going to set Hegel on his feet again. You see that what's fundamental, Marx thinks, is matter. He's a materialist, right?

[49:55] And what goes on in thought is just a reflection of the way matter is. So Marx is going to reverse the order and start with matter. But he's already borrowed from Hegel the idea that there are opposites together in matter, and that goes all the way down. You know, you find Lenin defining dialectics in the Marxist sense. You know, it's a study of the contradiction. He says, within the very essence of things.

[50:30] So Marx has not really set Hegel on his feet again. He's transposed right the way things are in the mind into matter, right? Okay, and rather than starting with matter and rising up,

[50:54] but when you start with matter, then you see this difference, you know, later on when you study the knowing power. So perhaps in that first solution, one is assimilating the union of opposites there, even in the sense powers, too much to the what way in which opposites can be found in what matter, right?

[51:24] Or is this not possible? He says, right, for what is the same and undivided is the contraries in potency, right? While not in being, but it is divided by being worked on, and is not possible white and black to be together, at least in matter, you might say, right? Whence neither is it possible to suffer the species of these if sense and understanding are such.

[51:55] You can't suffer them, what, or undergo them, or be acted upon, right, at the same time, right? He says, if sense and understanding are such, right, if they are like, you might say, matter, right? Okay.

[52:14] Now, in the last paragraph, two ninety two. He gives another way of speaking about this, another likeness, huh? Okay. And he's comparing now the

[52:31] central sense to a point, right? Which could be considered the beginning of many lines, right? Until again, you might have the eye, I'd say, and the ear and the tongue, so on, right? And this central or common sense,

[52:59] he says, is like a point here, right? Which can be considered as the beginning of all these, right, and the root of all them, or as the end, right, of them, okay? So, in the eye or the ear and so on, the tongue acting upon

[53:19] that acting upon in some way goes back, right, to the central common sense, huh? Okay. Now, is that one point or many points there? Point. That's one point. Yeah, it's one point, huh? Okay. But it can be considered as the beginning or end of this line, right? And as the beginning or end of this line, or beginning or end of that line, right?

[53:49] And actually, at the same time, right? So the central sense is like that, rather than like this example we had here, going back to the way opposites are in matter, right? Okay. Now you might define, as we would define, as somebody writes this, you might define this point as the beginning of that line going to the eye. You might also define it as the beginning of what the line going to the ear, right?

[54:31] You might also define it as the beginning of the line going to the tongue and so on, okay? But that's different than defining this

[54:44] ability, right, of the body to be healthy or sick by either health or by sick, right? Okay. Or defining, let's say, take my example there, the clay. You might say the moldability of the clay is an ability to be a sphere. That's what it is, right? Doesn't exhaust what it is, but it says in some way what it is, right? The moldability of the clay is an ability to be a sphere.

[55:14] It's also an ability to be a cube, right? It's also an ability to be a cylinder and so on, right? It's also an ability to be a pyramid, right? Okay. But it can't be all those at the same time, right? Okay. So, but this point here is what? Again, one in number, but it's actually at the same time, right? Beginning or the end of this line going to the eye, and the beginning or end of this line going to the ear, right?

[55:47] And the beginning or end of this line going to the what? Tongue, right? So it's interesting comparison that he makes there, right? So in one way it's one, right? There's one point. Another way it's many, insofar as it can be considered as the beginning or end of any different what lines, right? And actually at the same time. Okay? I think I mentioned here, and make a little side here, but I think it's kind of interesting.

[56:26] how I use this analogy to the point when I'm explaining the incarnation, right? In incarnation you have what? Two natures, right? But one person, right? And of course, the heresies that people got into sometimes was, or one group of heresy was that because there are two natures, there must be what? Two persons, Two persons, right? Okay. So I make kind of a homely examples, right? Yeah. Because the person is something indivisible, right?

[57:02] So it's like a point, and you say, well, you got two natures. Represents nature by these lines, going to have two what points to determine it. You have two natures, two lines that have two endpoints, right? Because human nature, right, is going to have an end, right? And so the divine. So if you have two persons, you have two natures, right? But actually, that's not the way it took place, is it?

[57:37] You had the divine nature, right? Divine person, and the human nature was what taken to the divine person, is it? So notice, huh? If you didn't draw the second line to the endpoint of the original line, then the second line would have its own endpoint.

[58:05] But when you draw the second line to the point that's the end of the first line, it doesn't have its own endpoint, right? Distinct from the endpoint of the original line, but it's the same endpoint. So two natures in one what person, right? Okay, that's only you know like incarnation in a very distant way, right? You know, it's a little crutch there and so on. But you kind of see, you know, why is it that my human nature, my individual human nature, has its own what person, right?

[58:49] Distinct from your person, right? Huh? Why the individual human nature Christ, right, doesn't have its own personhood separate from the second person of the Blessed Trinity? See, why is that, right? See, well, just a kind of a distant likeness, here see. If I say here you've got a line with its own endpoint, and now I'm going to draw a second line, so the second line's going to have its own endpoint.

[59:17] Well, if you just consider it by itself, I draw a line with its own endpoint, different from the endpoint of the original first line, right? But if you draw that second line to the endpoint of the first one, you see. This is the way you know in theology they use the Latin. They say he assumes, right? Okay. You know, some I guess I just take to oneself, right?

[59:45] He takes the human nature to himself, right? The same way that I draw this line to that endpoint, and therefore there's only one person subsisting in two what Nature is, the human and the divine, huh? Yeah.

[1:00:02] So that's a quite different, useful point, but point is very useful, right? There's another comparison I think for me to make I think it's kind of interesting too.

[1:00:18] You know, the first meaning of the word beginning is that of what? Point. The point is the beginning of a line, or a line is beginning of a surface, right? Or a surface is the beginning of a body, right? That's the first meaning of beginning, because the one that's most known to us, right? Most sensible. But when you take up the word beginning and the word cause,

[1:00:48] you find out that every cause is a beginning in some way, but not every beginning is a what? Cause, right? Okay. Now the question is, can a beginning have a beginning? Which is like the question then, can a cause have a cause? Yeah, yeah.

[1:01:11] But notice now, right? The surface is the beginning of a body, but the surface is the beginning that has a beginning. So the six say squares that are the surfaces of a cube, right? The square is a what? Beginning of the cube, right? But the square has a beginning itself, which is what? Size. The four lines, yeah. So the line is a beginning of the what? Square, which is a beginning of the cube.

[1:01:48] So here, it's beginning has a beginning, right? Right. Okay. Now the line is that a beginning, but has a beginning? Sure. Yeah. And the beginning of a line is a point. Right. Okay. What about the point? What's the beginning of the point? Yeah. Doesn't have a beginning, does it? No. No. It's indivisible, right? So it's kind of interesting, huh? This kind of and more general aspect, right, reflects the fact of what you learned later on about causes, that a cause can have a cause, right?

[1:02:23] But eventually you come to a cause that has no cause. Right. That's the first cause, right? It's very concrete to see that with the example of the point, huh? So it's a beautiful thing there. The other place I think I mentioned we studied the Trinity there, not Trinity, eternity. Thomas's comparison of eternity to the point at the center of a circle, and he compares it like this.

[1:02:50] He'll say the now of eternity is like the center of a circle, which is in the same relation to all the points on the what circumference, right? It's directly opposite, you might say, to them, right? But if you look at the points on the circumference, one is before or after another, right? Right. So the nows of time are before and after each other. What the now of eternity is present to the nows of the past, the present, the future.

[1:03:31] Everything is present to God in His knowledge, huh? So he compares that to the center to the point in center circle, which is not a part of that circumference at all, is it? So the now of eternity is outside entirely of time. Why the nows of time are arranged, you might say, in time before and after each other.

[1:03:53] Makes another comparison, though, which is which is of the man who's on top of a mountain, and he can see, you know, down the road like that that's curved, you know, he can see at once people who are there, people who are there, who are there, who are there, but to those who are down the road, right, you know, but somebody knows, I think, you know, and there's somebody trying to catch up with us, you know.

[1:04:13] But they're all what spread out together, right? The man on top of the mountain, huh? This is the one he makes with point, huh? So,

[1:04:27] excuse the pun, you can make a lot of points. Who's the point, huh? He said on that one, the nows of time are on the circumference, points on the circumference. Yeah, one is before after another, right? Yeah. See, but the but the point in this in the center there is directly across, you might say, from each of them, huh? Yeah. And therefore, it's like the the now of eternity, huh?

[1:04:57] See how important it is to know a little bit of geometry, so we can these points, you know, the actual philosophy, and all the way up to to the eternity and the incarnation and all those wonderful things. So just as the point there is the come back to as an example now, just as the point is one in number there, but it's the beginning the end of all of these lines, right?

[1:05:23] And can be considered in that way as many, right? So this is the way the central sense is. I could also take it, you know, in the sense of

[1:05:39] the point there in a line, right? That point there is one, right? And if you speak of the line as continuous, huh? Continuous, if you may recall from the second book of Natural Hearing of the Physics, the continuous is that whose parts have a common what limit, huh? Common boundary, right? So in the case of a circle, I'd say the diameter is the common boundary of the two sides, right?

[1:06:10] Okay. In the line, this point here, right, is the common limit of these two parts of the line, huh? So you can speak of one what point there, right? But you'd also speak of it as being the end of this line and the what beginning of that line, right? Okay. The same way you might speak of the diameter of a circle as being the end of the left side and the beginning of the what right side.

[1:06:38] So you can use it as one line, right? Or in some way as two, right? It's the beginning of one and the end of the other.

[1:06:53] Therefore, as undivided, what discerns is one and at one time. While as being divided, it uses twice the same point at the same time. Therefore, it discerns two in so far as it uses the limit twice, and it discerns the separate things as a separately. As one, it discerns something one and at one time. Okay.

[1:07:18] Now in the last sentence here, what's Aristotle's been doing here? He's not yet saying that we've come to something that really transcends altogether the sense order, right?

[1:07:30] And that's what he's saying here in the last sentence. This is the epilogue here. Concerning then the principle of the source, the soul, by which we say an animal is sensitive, let it be determined in this way. Up to this point, right? Okay. In other words, he's not considering this common sense as something entirely outside the genus of sense, like reason will be seen later on to be.

[1:07:57] But he's seeing it as what? Something still in the order of the senses, and so he called an inward sense, huh? Now maybe sometime when we look at some of the articles in the Summa Theologiae on the soul, right? Thomas, in the article there on the inward senses, he goes more into the inward senses than Aristotle does here, right? And following some thinking that Avicenna in particular did, right?

[1:08:28] Okay. Aristotle talks about some of these in the later books there. But it's kind of amusing in Shakespeare's time, you know, they got into the habit of talking about five inward senses. They got the number corresponding to the outward senses, huh? But Thomas doesn't speak of five inward senses. He just of four. But we'll look at that more in detail. Anyway, Aristotle here has come to something inward, but not yet to what?

[1:08:57] The mind or reason or the understanding, huh? I just want to take a break over there or something. Okay. It's a good place to do it before we go out to the fourth meeting here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good place to do it before we go out to the fourth meeting here.