Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
12. Empedocles on Love and Hate, Mind vs. Chance, and Anaxagoras on Everything in Everything
Class of 2005-01-27
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/012-empedocles-on-love-and-hate-mind-vs-chance-and-anaxagoras/

[0:00] From change of place to talk about these more radical kinds of change, right? So I came into existence in nineteen thirty-six. I know I'm gonna go out of existence, you know, but I am going to go out of existence too, you know. That procession, my soul, God, procession. Yeah, yeah, going forward, yeah, yeah. And but no, if you say I came into existence and I go out of existence, or my cat came into existence, goes out of existence.

[0:30] and so, I can speak, as if existence were a house that you come into, you go out of, right? But if you you are kind of imagining it as almost like a change of place, right? And that's not what it is, because you have to be before you get into the house, and you couldn't go out of the house unless you continue to exist outside the house.

[0:49] But the house's existence, well, then got a real contradiction there, right? So now we're going to come to the position of Empedocles about the mover, right? And in his thinking about the mover, and also in Anaxagoras', one in some cases both of these probable statements, underlie my thinking. huh And that's why I stated these here. Contrary effects have contrary what causes, right? Or vice versa, contrary causes have contrary effects.

[1:29] Now, are those statements on the surface has some probability? Okay. So, if you see contrary effects, would you look for the same cause for both? No, Same? Let's take a very simple example here that we're all familiar with: butter. Sometimes becomes hard, and sometimes butter becomes soft. Right? Would you all agree? Hard and soft are contraries. Now, would you guess that what makes butter hard is what makes it soft, or vice versa?

[2:13] No. And as hard and soft are contraries, wouldn't you guess that what makes it hard and soft would be also a contrary too? Okay.

[2:28] Then you have the other way of looking at it, right? If you have contrary causes, right? Wouldn't you expect contrary effects, if I am nice to you, you expect one effect. If I mean to you, expect another contrary result, isn't it right?

[2:49] Okay. Now, what about the second one here? When like causes, insofar as they are like, give rise to like effects, right? And vice versa. If you see like effects, would you kind of guess that they're like this in their causes, right? Okay.

[3:12] Now, what Empedocles sees is that earth, air, fire, and water come together, right, to make flesh and blood and bones, and then they are separated, right? Okay. And then maybe later on, mixed together again, right? So here you have contrary effects. Things are mixed together, and then they are separated, right? Would you expect those contrary effects to have the same cause?

[3:52] Just like with magnets, right? Sometimes they jump together, and sometimes they push each other away, right? Would you expect it to be the same thing that makes them come together and makes them separate? No. Okay. Um. Like in the atom, right? There should be, the atom should blow up because the protons are what pushing away right from each other, right? So it must be something contrary, right, that is putting them together.

[4:21] Nuclear forces, they call. it, okay. So Empedocles is looking for contrary causes of contrary effects, right? Okay. That's kind of a general thing, right? Just like if I knew the butter became hard and soft, but not why, I'd be looking for contrary causes, right? And maybe I might eventually discover that heat makes it soft and cold makes it hard, right? Okay. Now, what are the contrary causes that bring together earth, air, fire, and water and separates them, right?

[5:02] And now we go to the propositions, right? Okay. What brings us together? What brings human beings together? Well, they like each other or love each other, right? What separates them?

[5:18] Yeah, yeah. So there must be something like love, right, in the universe that brings the elements together, right? And something like hate that separates them, right? And for want of a better name, just call them kind of cosmic love, right? And a cosmic hate, right? So Empedocles introduces two movers, right? Love and hate. Love, which brings together earth, air, fire, and water, and hate, which what separates them, right?

[5:54] And there's a cycle of coming together and separating. Produced by love and hate, so he says. I shall tell something double. At one time, it grew from the many to be only one, right? Another time, another hand, it grew apart from the one to be many. There is a double birth of mortals and a double death, right? Speaking like you know, the commoners, huh? The coming together of all things gives birth to and destroys one; the other and the contrary nourish these things, grow apart, flies in all directions.

[6:32] But now, the next sentence, he starts to talk about the movers, right? And in no place do these things stop taking turns forever. At one time, all things come together by what love, and at another time, again, everything is carried away by the hate of strife. Okay, Now we don't have to go into the whole, but he'll come back and say it again a number of ways in the remaining two paragraphs of this long DK seventeen, right?

[7:04] Okay, and the next fragment talks about that love and hate, huh? Of course, Aristotle sees and Empedocles a little bit like a Manichaean, huh? That love seems to be something good and hate something bad, right, huh? But in a sense, the Manichaean thinking that there is a good God and a bad God, right? The good itself and the bad itself, right? Goes back to the idea that there is good and bad in the world, right?

[7:37] And these are contrary, right? Well, contrary effects have contrary causes. Therefore, there must be what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Aristotle's talking about this Empedocles He's the first guy to think like this, right? Only the Greeks, right? Okay, but so some probability what he's saying, right? Contrary effects have contrary causes. There is some probability of the Manichaeans, and they convinced Augustine for a while, right? No, no minor catch.

[8:07] They lost him finally, right? But that was more about the prayers, right, huh? Of course, the Manichaean heresy revived from time to time, you know. And the Dominican Order was originally founded to fight the revival of Manichaean heresy in the south of France, right? The Albigensians, right?

[8:31] okay. So that's a very dominant thought, right? And the famous story of Thomas Aquinas there when he's sitting at the house, he's invited dinner at the King of France's house, and middle of the dinner, he almost slams the table, you know, and he says, "That finishes the Manichaeans. " He was thinking out, you know, the arguments against the Manichaeans, and then he wakes up, he's he's aware of the fact that he's sitting at the table of the king, you know, and Saint Louis, of course, the king was a saint, Saint Louis, and he said, "hey, someone get.

[9:00] " You know, people or whatever it is and write down what Thomas has thought of. You know, so but it's interesting that Aristotle gives kind of the same argument against the Manichaeans that Augustine does, but as far as we know, Augustine didn't know that part of Aristotle, right? So these two great minds, Aristotle and Augustine, come up with the same argument against the Manichaeans, but independently, right?

[9:28] But Thomas Aquinas has the benefit of being able to read both Aristotle and Augustine, so he writes the De Malo, the question is disputati De Malo, the greatest understanding of evil that we have. So, Empedocles has these two here, love and hate, huh? But notice how that's like what you have in modern science. We have a force of attraction and a force of what? Repulsion, right? And these are contrary forces, right?

[9:56] Huh? Having contrary what? Effects, huh? And there's some truth. to this right now. Okay. What would what would Empedocles say for like when you go when you go to the level level of the human mind and the will, you know, I I can do two opposite things simply from my will and it's the same cause. Yeah. Be nice to him and nasty to him. Yeah, yeah. Aristotle has as a third corollary about the causes too, right?

[10:25] The same thing can be a cause of opposites, right? By its presence and by its absence, right? But I I guess Empedocles didn't go into. No, we'll see a little bit what he says about those things. Okay. So in DK seventeen and DK twenty one, DK twenty three, the details are not too important for our purposes here. But he's talking about love and hate, mixing these things, right, in one combination, and then separating them, right, and love combining them again, and so on, right.

[10:59] Now, in the next group of fragments here on page six, there DK fifty seven, DK fifty nine, DK sixty one. You have only a part of Empedocles' thinking, and Aristotle, when he discusses Empedocles, gives us a clearer picture of what Empedocles is thinking. But here you have with Empedocles and the next thinker, Anaxagoras, there's another great dichotomy, right? Okay.

[11:29] Now the first great dichotomy we saw was between Heraclitus, at least in his words, right? We said day and night are the same, and what Parmenides, right? Parmenides says something cannot both be and not be, right? Yeah. Therefore, change is an illusion. Right. Heraclitus is saying all things change. Change is very real, and therefore day and night are the same thing in the sleeping, the waking, right?

[11:58] See that that famous dichotomy, right? Okay. We saw another dichotomy between Empedocles and Democritus, right? The one saying the empty is and the other empty is not is not, but a much more important dichotomy now is this one here.

[12:17] When you ask what is the cause of the good order of the parts of animals and plants, right? Okay. What is the cause? What is responsible

[12:36] for the good order in the parts of animals and plants? Now, Anaxagoras, as we shall see, is going to be moved by the probable statements we saw. The like effects have what like like causes, right? Okay. And there is a likeness between the good order in the parts of animals and plants and the good order in artificial things. Okay.

[13:28] Now the good order in artificial things is like the good order in the parts of animals and plants. Okay. And so, if I was to lose, say, my natural teeth—the teeth that nature has given me—right—and the dentist was to make me a pair of false teeth, right? Would he put the biting teeth in back and the chewing teeth in front? Depending on what you wanted. Yeah, he did.

[14:14] I remember, you know, the the the when I was in high school, right? You know, I was in the military academy, right, St. Thomas Military Academy. And once in a while, we'd see these army movies that are done for the the recruits, right, in the army. And they presuppose nothing, right? As far as your education is concerned, right? I remember one guy telling me of being in the army there, and they showed him a movie, you know, about cleaning your teeth, right?

[14:46] Brushing your teeth, and then afterwards they all went down to you know, have those round sinks, you know, they seen the runs, and they passed off toothbrushes, and everybody put into practice what they had learned in the movie, right? So you presuppose nothing, right?

[15:01] Well, this guy in the one movie, army movie, had false teeth, right? And when he tried to bite into an apple, of course his teeth would, you know, they were, you know, they don't stay in position too well, I guess, so they didn't before anyway, you know. And then he takes a knife and he cuts the apple up into small pieces and he can eat it, you know.

[15:20] And then he's happy, you know, so on. But you know, you see advertisements now on TV, you know, you know, where people are eating apples, right, with their false teeth because they have the good thing, right? Okay. But you know, if you try to eat an apple, you always bite off a piece, right? And then goes to teeth in back to be chewed up, right? So wouldn't the dentist put the biting teeth in front and the chewing teeth in back, just as nature did, right?

[15:45] Okay. Or you know how how our blood vessels are what are circular, right? The cross section, right, rather than this way. Well, you know the pipes that they put into the house, you know, for water and so on. They are also what circular, circular, yeah. And they say that they made them, you know, square like this. You tend to get stuff in the corners, you know, and therefore clogged up, right?

[16:13] So we get we get clogged up, yes, but we get more clogged up if we had square-shaped vessels, and so you can see the likeness there, huh? Okay, and so

[16:29] you see a likeness here between the good order in the parts of artificial things and the good order in the parts of animals and plants, right? Now, the cause of the good order in artificial things is known to us, right? It's namely the human mind, right?

[16:52] Okay. While the cause of the good order in the parts of animals and plants is at first unknown to us, right? Okay. But if like effects have like causes, a reasonable guess would be that the cause of the order in the parts of animals and plants is some other mind, right? Okay. Which Anaxagoras will call the greater mind, right? Because it's responsible for much more order than our mind, right?

[17:24] So that's a reasonable guess, right? Otherwise, you expect it to be as the great Heraclitus says, "a heap poured at random." right? I should be a heap rather than an ordered whole, right? Now, is there any other alternative to saying that there's a greater mind, right? Well, the alternative to that would be to say that it happens by chance, right? Okay.

[17:53] So this mindless love, right, is bringing earth, air, fire, and water together, right? Since it's mindless, it brings them together in just any combination, right? And these fragments here that we have that survive are examples of these crazy combinations that result from the mindless love bringing these things together, right? On it, many sides of foreheads without necks burst forth, and bare arms wandered bareft to shoulders, and eyes wandered neither foreheads, right?

[18:26] But yet, when God was more mixed with God, he's calling the elements, you know, gods, right? You know, poetic way speaking. These things fell together in whatever way, and what happened to meet, and many other things besides them continually came to be. Many things were born with two faces and two breasts, offspring of cattle with faces of men, others the reverse, born of men with the heads of oxen, mixed in part from men and part female by nature, and so on.

[18:53] So what you expect is all kinds of crazy combinations, right? But hate keeps on separating these things and love. Uniting them, right? So Empedocles said, eventually it happens to bring them together in a what? Good way, right? And that might be one in a hundred, maybe one in a thousand, maybe one in a million, maybe one in a billion, right? But if love is always bringing these things together and hate separating them, you know, eventually you happen to hit upon a good combination, Well, that combination can survive, right?

[19:29] And all the bad ones, what, would perish because they're not viable; they're not able to survive, right? I say. So those who had their teeth up here, you know, they couldn't eat, you know, properly, so they died off, right? Those who had their teeth here, right? Those who had the chewing teeth in front couldn't tear off the thing as well, so they maybe didn't survive, right? Okay.

[19:50] Now this is basically what you have in some of the modern biologists, right? A friend of mine was explaining what Empedocles said to a modern join. biologist says, "Well, that's my theory. That's my theory. Is it? So they have a mindless matter, right? Bring things together, right? And you expect, you know, most of these combinations, right, would be bad, right? But eventually, it happens to bring them together in a good combination that survives, right?

[20:23] And reproduces, and the other ones all perish, right? So you're saying, really, in Empedocles, that basically nature produces heaps, for the most part, right? Chaos, disorder, right? And what you see now, where you see good in every animal, almost every plant, right? Good reproductive parts was the rare exception, right? But they survived, and the others perished, right? So this is the famous dichotomy, right? It's come down through history, right?

[21:00] Is is there a greater mind responsible for the what order, right? And that you find, which would be suggested by the fact that like effects have like what causes, right? Or are you going to try to say that it happened by chance? And you know, it's more reasonable. But wouldn't they still have to? I mean, let's suppose that that was the way it happened that things just combined and dissolved at random, and then some survived.

[21:33] Yeah. But survival, I mean, there there's some got to be something, some ordered substrate that that you know to against which things either survive or don't survive. Yeah, it has to be an environment, you know. In other words, even if you hit upon a good combination, you know, the world is is not friendly to you, right? Good in terms of yeah, it has to be in terms of something, right?

[21:55] So there isn't that still in order back of that, yeah. And also, if you finally do come across this a good thing by chance, yeah. So if you have two two bears, yeah, they they have sex. Why on earth do you think that their child is going to turn out good? Yeah. It'd just be it'd be just as uh chancy for that, yeah. As so you can't explain that.

[22:22] So in other words if you're acting, some of the chances for bad, you know, almost infinitely outweigh those for good, things should be getting really more disordered, right? Right. Like the physicists say, you know, the second law of thermodynamics: if there's random action, you're going from an ordered state to a disordered one. You know. But

[22:43] you can see, nevertheless, Empedocles' theory is is still popular, right, with the modern modern biologists, right? Materialist, so yeah, yeah. But it's part, yeah, because if you think it matters the beginning of all things, you're going to have to say that. Chance, right? It's responsible for the order that we see, you know.

[23:07] Okay. Now, in the last two fragments here of Empedocles, we see something of his thinking about knowing, right? And he's a materialist here, right? Still, by earth we see earth, by water water, godlike air by air, destroying fire by fire, love by love, and heat by heat. It's because we have these things in us, right, that we know them, right? And

[23:39] there's some truth in what Empedocles is saying, right? That the known must be in the knower before it is known. Okay. But is it in the knower in this material way that he thinks? My favorite example is that of David, right? But he hits the rock right into the forehead there of Goliath. Did Goliath begin to know stones better then? Right.

[24:20] You know, if I remember you, gentlemen. But you know, if you cut open my head now, you know, would you find a little piece of bone or flesh chiseled out? And each one of you have a little statue up there. Each one of you. At least for me, I hope. What? At least for me, I hope.

[24:40] No, is your shape, or by recognizing you in a sense, is that in my brain even in a material way? See. He's still thinking of it that way, right? See. If that were true, then wouldn't this chair know what wood is because it has wood in it, right? If it, if being in there a material way made you know it, right? Then the wooden chair would know what wood is, right?

[25:08] And a Manhattan would know what sweet vermouth is and what and what whiskey is, right? And water would know what water is because it has water in it, right? So Aristotle would take over the idea that yeah, the thing known must be in the knower, right, before it can be known. But how is it in the knower, right? Yeah. Is it in a material way or an immaterial way?

[25:31] And Aristotle will see that it's got to be in there in an immaterial way. And more immaterial in the mind than in the what senses, right? But even the senses is a kind of you know rising above this material way of being in something. Just just like with the with the eye, the only reason we're able to see is because in a way there's no color in the eye.

[25:52] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If it were yellow, I wouldn't be able to see that color. Yeah. Yeah. That's where Aristotle says, you know, if the tongue were sugary, right, you would be able to taste all different things. And so, the Empedocles thinks they're actually composed of the things we know. Where Aristotle says, no, the senses and the reason are inability to be seen the likeness of these things, but it's not composed of these things.

[26:20] And he still thinks the thought is something what material. Now, if you had to choose between bone, flesh, and blood for thought, which would be thought?

[26:36] Yeah, because thought is what you're thinking, you're moving right, doing your reasoning right, and blood flows right. But also, the idea we think of thought as being something fine and what thin, right? And so we think of

[26:54] insight, penetration by the mind, right? Finer, you say, finer in some way. Yeah, I mean, if I put a dry bone on here, it wouldn't go through, would it? No. Or a piece of dry flesh wouldn't go through, right? If you put some blood here, you go right through, right? So, blood penetrates things like thought penetrates things, right? So, if you had to guess, is thought bone or flesh or blood?

[27:21] Blood would be the best guess. And the modern biologist kind of thinks of thought as being maybe, you know, electric waves or something in the brain or something, right? But something, you know, even finer and thinner, right? Still material than than blood, right? Huh? So my high school teacher, you know, biology teacher, you know, cause what? To know the answer to the question, you'd say boneheads you'd cause Boneheads.

[27:50] But. That was not a compliment, right? No. Depends upon his position. So, Empedocles still thinks, and men before him apparently, that thought is something material. See, and most people they talk about on the street today, they think the brain is what what thinks, right? And we need a course in the third book on soul. Okay.

[28:16] So now we come to the great Anxagoras. Do you want to start him now or not? Do, one or two of them, sir? What? Do you want to do, one or two of them, or something, or how much?

[28:33] I begin with the fragments of Anaxagoras here on matter and change. We he says that you know only change of place is the only kind of change, right? And then we'll come to his position about the mind. It's interesting, right? If you read the Phaedo, which takes place in the last day of Socrates' life in prison there when he's going to die, and he gives. An account of his study of natural philosophy, a bit, and how he became very enthusiastic about Anaxagoras.

[29:04] Aristotle pays a very nice compliment to Anaxagoras. He says, "Anaxagoras introduced mind as a cause of the order in the natural world." He seemed like a sober man among drunk men. It's a very nice way of saying it, right? So there is a lot of admiration that Aristotle has for Anaxagoras, and that Socrates had for him, and Plato, so on. Anaxagoras is the man who brought what philosophy to Athens, right?

[29:34] Yeah, he became the friend of what? Pericles, huh? Oh. And, but then he was accused of what impiety, like Socrates was, because he said that the sun was a what? Burning rock. Yeah, burning rock, rather than the sun was the god Apollo, right? Huh. And we think the reason why he said the sun was a burning stone was because in his part of Greece. We know that one of the meteors that came down.

[30:03] Oh. Usually, a meteor is, you know, almost consumed. You know, it's come down dust of something. But there's a couple of times, you know, not a couple of times, a couple of times, where a meteor has hit the earth those are burning rock, right? Apparently, there's one down in the southwest of the United States where this happened, and the Indians would talk to the white men about, you know, this burning rock that came out of the sky, and this is a story that was passed down, you know, from generation to generation among the Indians, and now they can go and kind of study the landscape and see the result of this, and they know that one of these came down in Asia Minor, there where

[30:41] Anaxagoras came from, north. So maybe he thought that falling stars or shooting stars, as they call them, were what rocks, right, on fire, right? Aristotle himself thought he was if it was really on fire, it would have burnt up the sun a long time ago, right? But anyway, for this opinion, he was charged with impiety, right? But they were probably, you know, politically after Pericles, get his friend, you know.

[31:10] Okay. Now the position of Anaxagoras on matter is discussed by some link by Aristotle, some link by Aristotle in the first book of Natural Hearing, and he gives us his reasoning a little more complete than the fragments give us his reasoning. So let's say a little bit about that reasoning, right?

[31:49] One premise that Anaxagoras had is that you can't get something from nothing, okay? And this is touched upon this fragment here. How could hair come? What is not hair? And flesh? What is not flesh, right? Okay.

[32:05] So, so can't get something from nothing. Now, to this common thought of the early Greeks, he had an observation as a result of an induction that in the natural world, everything eventually comes to be from everything, the material world.

[32:55] Now, let's try to just give a little flavor of that induction, right? I take kind of a simple example here. Let's start with grass, right? Okay.

[33:13] Now the cow comes along, eats some grass. So what do you get? A bigger cow, right? So from grass you can get some cow, right? Okay. Now Berquist wants a steak, right? So you get a bigger man, right? You get a, man. So you're getting not only more cow, but more man out of that grass, right? Now we find out that Berquist is a Christian, so we give him to the what?

[33:45] Lion, right? So now you're getting more lion out of that little grass, right? Now the lion is punished for eating a Christian, and so now you're getting worms, right? From grass, right? Eventually. And from the worms you get, let's say, more bird. The bird eats the worms, right? And from the bird you get more cat. If the cat eats the worm, right? Maybe the cat dies, and the cat's pushing up Daisy, right?

[34:22] Okay. So this seems to go on and on without stop, right? Okay. So you can start anywhere you want in the world, right? And eventually out of anything in the world, you'll get everything else. But you can't get something out of nothing. Therefore, there must be a bit of everything inside of what? Everything. Yeah.

[34:48] That's one of his first major conclusions, huh? Everything is inside of everything. Well, there's a bit of everything inside of everything, right? But then things keep on coming to be forever, right? So it's got to be an infinity of pieces of everything inside of everything, right? But now how do you fit an infinity of pieces of everything inside of a plate of grass? They're small. Yeah, make them infinitely small, right?

[35:33] Okay. So now the grand conclusion: there's an infinity of infinitely small pieces of everything inside of everything, right? Very complicated, right? Okay. And that's what you come to the next. fragment there. All things were together, infinite or unlimited in number, right? And in what? Smallness, right? Okay. Nothing was clear.

[36:03] Now, what's striking is that this way of speaking of matter came back in the twentieth century when they begin to study the elementary particles, huh? And if you read, you know, I have an office at school there, Heisenberg's book, you know, on the unified field theory of elementary particles. I'm not concerned with that particular theory; I'm tempted to try to understand them, you know. But the way they were speaking in their experiments of what they saw, right?

[36:36] Okay. What they saw was that out of any elementary particle, you could eventually get all the other elementary particles, and therefore the common way of speaking was that every elementary particle is composed of all the rest. The same thinking as Anaxagoras, right? The thought of any elementary particle you can get all the rest, and like everybody else, you can't get something or nothing, right? Then every elementary particle must be composed of all the rest.

[37:10] So the same way of speaking as Anaxagoras had, huh? They said, there's some difficulties in that, thought, right? And Aristotle points them out in the ninth reading there of the first book of Natural Hearing.

[37:33] I don't know if you want to go back to that or not. That's in the Natural Philosophy course, right? But the same difficulties would be in the modern physics, right? If you said that what everything isn't said everything is made small pieces, huh? Let's just take one difficulty, huh?

[37:54] Say, if flesh and blood and bones and everything else could be infinitely small, they could fall below any size. Then the whole that they make up could fall below any size, right? Aristotle says that the parts of animals and plants can get smaller and smaller and smaller, and there's no limit to how small they can get, right? Then the whole thing that is made up of them, right, can get smaller and smaller and smaller, and be no limit.

[38:30] But then Aristotle goes out to the natural world and says, "But does a cat and a dog and a tree and a grass of just any size? " No, different kinds of animals, different kinds of plants. Plants, there's certain limits as to how big they get, and how what small they get, right? Okay. So if the whole doesn't have just any size, then the parts don't have just any size, right?

[38:57] And therefore Aristotle comes the idea that there's a smallest piece. Of flesh and blood and bones, right? And therefore, this position is wrong that they can be infinitely small, right? The same way in modern physics, there, if every elementary particle was composed of all the rest, then inside each elementary particle world would be all the rest, inside each one of those inside of that original one would be all the rest, inside each one of those would be all the rest, and so on infinitely, right?

[39:28] And therefore, the elementary particles would be getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. But in our experiments, all electrons have the same size. Yeah, all protons have the same size. So they can't really all be in there. Actually, they can only be in there in what ability? But you see, here in the modern physicists, like in Anaxagoras, the difficulty of understanding what it is to be in there in ability, and this runs across the board. With other kinds of ability, that there's a tendency in our mind to imagine what is in something only an ability to be actually in there.

[40:12] And like Weizsäcker the pupil of Heisenberg, Heisenberg said, when we imagine something, we make it actual in our imagination. So there's the great source of error there. Thomas talks about in the epistles to Timothy, you know, false imagination, right? The great cause of error, imagining things other than they are, or imagining what cannot be imagined, right?

[40:42] Imagine the soul to be an air-like substance, right? It's your imagination; it deceives you there, right? People imagine the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit should not be parts of God. God has no parts. He's not a part of anything. Do you know what? God's not a part of anything. Everything else is almost has parts and is a part of something, but God is has no parts.

[41:11] He's not a part of anything. He's kind of interesting, God. You know, God has no end or purpose. No, he's the end or purpose of all other things, right? But he has no end or purpose. Then he'd have a cause. That's one of the causes, huh? So God has, but God has no parts. Not a part of anything. So Anaxagoras can't quite understand ability, right? He says nothing is distinct.

[41:42] He's trying to get the idea of ability. Aristotle says we listen to what he's trying to say, but it doesn't say exactly. You can see he's trying to get the idea of potency, right? Because in making these things infinitely small, he gives them about as much as little actuality as he could, right? But it's not quite the idea of ability yet, right? He can't quite say it, right?

[42:05] And I'm going to go through the history of philosophy and show people having difficulty understanding the ability of matter, right? But also understanding the ability of other things.

[42:21] You know, if you read that famous dialogue, the Meno, right? Socrates thinks what that this he's trying to claim that the slave boy already actually knew how to double the square. See, why? Because the way to double the square comes out of what the slave boy knows, out of his answers, not out of Socrates' answers. And therefore, he imagines that what the slave boy is able to know, he already actually knew, but it was hidden, right?

[42:54] Yeah. The inability to understand ability, huh? You can see what Aristotle has in in the ninth book of wisdom, which we're looking at eventually.

[43:14] Whole book devoted to ability and act, right? Or think you know what? That passage I had not given to you before from John Locke there, you know, in the essay on human understanding, where he's trying to understand the definition of triangle in general, right? And as it equilateral, scalene, or isosceles. What's all or none of these? He says. That's same idea, right? You can't understand the ability of the genus, right?

[43:45] See, when you define triangle in general, you see it's a plane figure contained by three straight lines. Now, if you try to imagine those three straight lines, you have to imagine them as equal or unequal, and so on. So, which are they, equal or unequal? Well, you say it's one of these, then you exclude the other ones, right? So it must be all of them, or none of them.

[44:13] You can't say, well, it's all of them in ability, none of them in act. You can't make the distinction between ability and act. And so then, Berkeley in his principles quotes this passage and he says, "Well, now, who can make any sense out of that? You know, it's all none of these, right? So he denies that we have any general ideas. Neither one can understand the ability of the genus, right?

[44:45] Yeah. So the three straight lines in the definition of triangle in general are equal or unequal, or it's both of them in ability, but none of them in what? Act. When you add the difference, you make actual what is there in ability, huh? So the different kinds of ability, huh? They're talking about in the Meno and in Locke there and here, but in all of them there's a tendency to want to make actual something that is there only in what ability, right?

[45:18] Is that you know, you know, is it was would the C. S. Lewis say that pantheism is the oldest thinking of the human mind about God? But in pantheism, you're saying that what God is made up of all things, right? You're making, you know, actually distinct everything that's in the ability or the power of God, right? And that's the same kind of mistake, you know, but the imagination tends to deceive us there, huh?

[45:50] So now I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks. I'm going away on Wednesday if the snow. doesn't