A critical history of Greek philosophy

by W. T. Stace

After these preliminaries, we can pass on to consider the main subject of physics, the scale of being. We should notice, in the first place, that it is also a scale of values. What is higher in the scale of being is of more worth, because the principle of form is more advanced in it. It constitutes also a theory of development, a philosophy of evolution. The lower develops into the higher. It does not, however, so develop in time. That the lower form passes in due time into a higher form is a discovery of modern times. Such a conception was impossible for Aristotle. For him, genus and species are eternal. They have neither beginning nor end. Individual men are born and die, but the species man never dies, and has always existed upon the earth. The same is true of plants and animals. And since man has always existed, he cannot have evolved in time from a lower being. There is no room here for Darwinism. In what sense, then, is this a theory of development or evolution? The process involved is not a time-process, it is a logical process, and the development is a logical development. The lower always contains the higher potentially. The man is in the ape ideally. The higher, again, contains the lower actually. The man is all that the ape is, and more also. What is merely implicit in the lower form is explicit in the higher. The form which is dimly seen struggling to light in the lower, has realized itself in the higher. The higher is the same thing as the lower, but it is the same thing in a more [{294}] evolved state. The higher presupposes the lower and rests upon it as foundation. The higher is the form of which the lower is the matter. It actually is what the lower is struggling to become. Hence the entire universe is one continuous chain. It is a process; not a time-process, but an eternal process. The one ultimate reality, God, reason, absolute form, eternally exhibits itself in every stage of its development. All the stages, therefore, must exist for ever side by side.

Now the form of a thing is its organization. Hence to be higher in the scale means to be more organized. The first distinction, therefore, with which nature presents us is between the organic and the inorganic. Aristotle was the discoverer of the idea of organism, as he was also the inventor of the word. At the bottom of the scale of being, therefore, is inorganic matter. Inorganic matter is the nearest existent thing to absolutely formless matter, which, of course, does not exist. In the inorganic world matter preponderates to such an extent as almost to overwhelm form, and we can only expect to see the universal exhibiting itself in it in a vague and dim way. What, then, is its form? And this is the same as asking what its function, end, or essential activity is. The end of inorganic matter is merely external to it. Form has not truly entered into it at all, and remains outside it. Hence the activity of inorganic matter can only be to move in space towards its external end. This is the explanation of what we, in modern times, call gravitation. But, according to Aristotle, every element has its peculiar and natural motion; its end is conceived merely spatially, and its activity is to move towards its "proper place," and, having thus reached its end, it rests. The natural [{295}] movement of fire is up. We may call this a principle of levitation, as opposed to gravitation. Aristotle has been the subject of cheap criticism on account of his frequent use of the words "natural" and "unnatural." [Footnote 15] It is said that he was satisfied to explain the operations of nature by simply labelling them "natural." If you ask a quite uneducated person why heavy bodies fall, he may quite possibly reply, "Oh! naturally they fall." This simply means that the man has never thought about the matter at all, and thinks whatever is absolutely familiar to him is "natural" and needs no explanation. It is like the feminine argument that a thing is so, "because it is." It is assumed that Aristotle was guilty of a like futility. This is not the case. His use of the word "natural" does not indicate lack of thought. There is a thought, an idea, here. No doubt he was quite wrong in many of his facts. Thus there is no such principle as levitation in the universe. But there is a principle of gravitation, and when he explains this by saying it is "natural" for earth to move downwards, he means, not that the fact is familiar, but that the principle of form, or the world-reason, can only exhibit itself here so dimly as to give rise to a comparatively aimless and purposeless movement in a straight line. Not absolutely purposeless, however, because nothing in the world is such, and the purpose here is simply the movement of matter towards its end. This may or may not be a true explanation of gravity. But has anybody since ever explained it better?

[Footnote 15: See, e.g. Sir Alexander Grant's Aristotle in the Ancient Classics for English Readers Series (Blackwood), pages 119-121.]

This gives us, too, the clue to the distinction between [{296}] the inorganic and the organic. If inorganic matter is what has its end outside itself, organic matter will be what has its end within itself. This is the essential character of an organism, that its end is internal to it. It is an inward self-developing principle. Its function, therefore, can only be the actualisation, the self-realization of this inward end. Whereas, therefore, inorganic matter has no activity except spatial movement, organic matter has for its activity growth, and this growth is not the mere mechanical addition of extraneous matter, as we add a pound of tea to a pound of tea. It is true growth from within. It is the making outward of what is inward. It is the making explicit of what is implicit. It is the making actual of what is potential in the embryo organism.

The lowest in the scale of being is thus inorganic matter, and above it comes organic matter, in which the principle of form becomes real and definite as the inward organization of the thing. This inward organization is the life, or what we call the soul, of the organism. Even the human soul is nothing but the organization of the body. It stands to the body in the relation of form to matter. With organism, then, we reach the idea of living soul. But this living soul will itself have lower and higher grades of being, the higher being a higher realization of the principle of form. As the essential of organism is self-realization, this will express itself first as self-preservation. Self-preservation means first the preservation of the individual, and this gives the function of nutrition. Secondly, it means preservation of the species, and this gives the function of propagation. The lowest grade in the organic kingdom will, therefore, be [{297}] those organisms whose sole functions are to nourish themselves, grow, and propagate their kind. These are plants. And we may sum up this by saying that plants possess the nutritive soul. Aristotle intended to write a treatise upon plants, which intention, however, he never carried out. All that we have from him on plants is scattered references in his other books. Had the promised treatise been forthcoming, we cannot doubt what its plan would have been. Aristotle would have shown, as he did in the case of animals, that there are higher and lower grades of organism within the plant kingdom, and he would have attempted to trace the development in detail through all the then known species of plants.

Next above plants in the scale of being come animals. Since the higher always contains the lower, but exhibits a further realization of form peculiar to itself, animals share with plants the functions of nutrition and propagation. What is peculiar to them, the point in which they rise above plants, is the possession of sensation. Sense-perception is therefore the special function of animals, and they possess, therefore, the nutritive and the sensitive souls. With sensation come pleasure and pain, for pleasure is a pleasant sensation, and pain the opposite. Hence arises the impulse to seek the pleasant and avoid the painful. This can only be achieved by the power of movement. Most animals, accordingly, have the power of locomotion, which is not possessed by plants, because they do not require it, since they are not sensitive to pleasure and pain. In his books upon animals Aristotle attempts to carry out the principle of development in detail, showing what are the higher, and what the lower, animal organisms. This he connects with the [{298}] methods of propagation employed by different animals. Sex-generation is the mark of a higher organism than parthenogenesis.

The scale of being proceeds from animals to man. The human organism, of course, contains the principles of all lower organisms. Man nourishes himself, grows, propagates his kind, moves about, and is endowed with sense-perception. But he must have in addition his own special function, which constitutes his advance beyond the animals. This is reason. Reason is the essential, the proper end and activity of man. His soul is nutritive, sensitive, and rational. In man, therefore, the world-reason which could only appear in inorganic matter as gravitation and levitation, in plants as nutrition, in animals as sensation, appears at last in its own proper form, as what it essentially is, reason. The world-reason, so long struggling towards the light, has reached it, has become actual, has become existent, in man. The world-process has attained its proximate end.

Within human consciousness there are lower and higher grades, and Aristotle has taken great pains to trace these from the bottom to the top. These stages of consciousness are what are ordinarily called "faculties." But Aristotle notes that it is nonsense to talk, as Plato did, of the "parts" of the soul. The soul, being a single indivisible being, has no parts. They are different aspects of the activity of one and the same being; different stages of its development. They can no more be separated than the convex and concave aspects of a curve. The lowest faculty, if we must use that word, is sense-perception. Now what we perceive in a thing is its qualities. Perception tells us that a piece of gold is [{299}] heavy, yellow, etc. The underlying substratum which supports the qualities cannot be perceived. This means that the matter is unknowable, the form knowable, for the qualities are part of the form. Sense-perception, therefore, takes place when the object stamps its form upon the soul. This is important for what it implies rather than what it states. It shows the thoroughly idealistic trend of Aristotle's thought. For if the form is what is knowable in a thing, the more form there is, the more knowable it will be. Absolute form, God, will be the absolutely knowable. That the Absolute is what alone is completely knowable, intelligible, and comprehensible, and the finite and material comparatively unknowable, is a point of view essential to idealism, and stands in marked contrast to the popular idea of rationalism that the Absolute is unknowable, and matter knowable. For idealism, the Absolute is reason, thought. What can be more thoroughly intelligible than reason? What can thought understand, if not thought? This, of course, is not stated by Aristotle. But it is implied in his theory of sense-perception.

Next in the scale above the senses comes the common sense. This has nothing to do with what we understand by that phrase in every-day language. It means the central sensation-ganglion in which isolated sensations meet, are combined, and form a unity of experience. We saw, in considering Plato, that the simplest kind of knowledge, such as, "this paper is white," involves, not only isolated sensations, but their comparison and contrast. Bare sensations would not even make objects. For every object is a combined bundle of sensations. What thus combines the various sensations, and in [{300}] particular those received from different sense-organs, what compares and contrasts them, and turns them from a blind medley of phantasms into a definite experience, a single cosmos, is the common sense. Its organ is the heart.

Above the common sense is the faculty of imagination. By this Aristotle means, not the creative imagination of the artist, but the power, which everyone possesses, of forming mental images and pictures. This is due to the excitation in the sense-organ continuing after the object has ceased to affect it.