A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (short story to read txt) 📖

That matter and form are relative terms shows, too, that the form cannot be merely the shape. For what is form in one aspect is matter in another. But shape is never anything but shape. No doubt the shape is part of the form, for the form in fact includes all the qualities of the thing. But the shape is quite an unimportant part of the form. For form includes organization, the relation of part to part, and the subordination of all parts to the whole. The form is the sum of the internal and external relations, the ideal framework, so to speak, into which the thing is moulded. Form also includes function. For it includes the final cause. Now the function of a thing is just what the thing is for. And what it is for is the same as its end, or final cause. {278} Therefore function is included in form. For example, the function of a hand, its power of gripping, is part of its form. And therefore, if it loses its function by being cut off from the arm, it likewise loses its form. Even the dead hand, of course, has some form, for every individual object is a compound of matter and form. But it has lost the highest part of its form, and relatively to the living hand it is mere matter, although, relatively to the flesh and bones of which it is composed, it is still form. Clearly, then, form is not merely shape. For the hand cut off does not lose its shape.

The form includes all the qualities of the thing. The matter is what has the qualities. For the qualities are all universals. A piece of gold is yellow, and this means simply that it has this in common with other pieces of gold, and other yellow objects. To say that anything has a quality is immediately to place it in a class. And what the class has in common is a universal. A thing without qualities cannot exist, nor qualities without a thing. And this is the same as saying that form and matter cannot exist separately.

The matter, then, is the absolutely formless. It is the substratum which underlies everything. It has, in itself, no character. It is absolutely featureless, indefinite, without any quality. Whatever gives a thing definiteness, character, quality, whatever makes it a this or that, is its form. Consequently, there are no differences within matter. One thing can only differ from another by having different qualities. And as matter has no qualities, it has no difference. And this in itself shows that the Aristotelian notion of matter is not the same as our notion of physical substance. For, according {279} to our modern usage, one kind of matter differs from another, as brass from iron. But this is a difference of quality, and for Aristotle all quality is part of the form. So in his view the difference of brass from iron is not a difference of matter, but a difference of form. Consequently, matter may become anything, according to the form impressed upon it. It is thus the possibility of everything, though it is actually nothing. It only becomes something by the acquisition of form. And this leads directly to a most important Aristotelian antithesis, that between potentiality and actuality. Potentiality is the same as matter, actuality as form. For matter is potentially everything. It may become everything. It is not actually anything. It is a mere potentiality, or capacity of becoming something. But whatever gives it definiteness as a this or that, whatever makes it an actual thing, is its form. Thus the actuality of a thing is simply its form.

Aristotle claims, by means of the antithesis of potentiality and actuality, to have solved the ancient problem of becoming, a riddle, propounded by the Eleatics, which had never ceased to trouble Greek thinkers. How is becoming possible? For being to pass into being is not becoming, for it involves no change, and for not-being to pass into being is impossible, since something cannot come out of nothing. For Aristotle, the sharp line drawn between not-being and being does not exist. For these absolute terms he substitutes the relative terms potentiality and actuality, which shade off into each other. Potentiality in his philosophy takes the place of not-being in previous systems. It solves the riddle because it is not an absolute not-being. It is {280} not-being inasmuch as it is actually nothing, but it is being because it is potential being. Becoming, therefore, does not involve the impossible leap from nothing to something. It involves the transition from potential to actual being. All change, all motion, is thus the passage of potentiality into actuality, of matter into form.

Since matter is in itself nothing, a bare unrealised capacity, while form is actuality, the completed and perfected being, it follows that form is something higher than matter. But matter is what becomes form. In order of time, therefore, matter is earlier, form later. But in order of thought, and in reality, it is otherwise. For when we say that matter is the potentiality of what it is to become, this implies that what it is to become is already present in it ideally and potentially, though not actually. The end, therefore, is already present in the beginning. The oak is in the acorn, ideally, otherwise the oak could never come out of it. And since all becoming is towards the end, and would not take place but for the end, the end is the operative principle and true cause of becoming. Motion is produced not by a mechanical propulsive force, pushing from behind, so to speak, but by an ideal attractive force, drawing the thing towards its end, as a piece of iron is drawn to the magnet. It is the end itself which exerts this force. And, therefore, the end must be present at the beginning, for if it were not present it could exert no force. Nay, more. It is not only present in the beginning, it is anterior to it. For the end is the cause of the motion, and the cause is logically prior to its consequence. The end, or the principle of form, is thus the absolute first in thought and reality, though it may be the last in time. If, then, {281} we ask what, for Aristotle, is that ultimate reality, that first principle, from which the entire universe flows, the answer is, the end, the principle of form. And as form is the universal, the Idea, we see that his fundamental thesis is the same as Plato's. It is the one thesis of all idealism, namely, that thought, the universal, reason, is the absolute being, the foundation of the world. Where he differs from Plato is in denying that form has any existence apart from the matter in which it exhibits itself.

Now all this may strike the unsophisticated as very strange. That the absolute being whence the universe flows should be described as that which lies at the end of the development of the universe, and that philosophy should proceed to justify this by asserting that the end is really prior to the beginning, this is so far removed from the common man's mode of thought, that it may appear mere paradox. It is, however, neither strange nor paradoxical. It is essentially sound and true, and it seems strange to the ordinary man only because it penetrates so much deeper into things than he can. This thought is, in fact, essential to a developed idealism, and till it is grasped no advance can be made in philosophy. Whether it is understood is, indeed, a good test of whether a man has any talent for philosophy or not. The fact is that all philosophies of this sort regard time as unreal, as an appearance. This being so, the relation of the absolute being, or God, to the world cannot be a relation of time at all. The common man's idea is that, if there is a first principle or God at all, He must have existed before the world began, and then, somehow, perhaps billions of years ago, something happened as a {282} result of which the world came into being. The Absolute is thus conceived as the cause, the world as the effect, and the cause always precedes its effect in time. Or if, on the other hand, we think that the world never had a beginning, the ordinary man's thought would lead him to believe that, in that case, it is no longer necessary to assume a first principle at all. But if time is a mere appearance, this whole way of looking at things must be wrong. God is not related to the world as cause to effect. It is not a relation of time at all. It is a logical relation. God is rather the logical premise, of which the world is the conclusion, so that, God granted, the world follows necessarily, just as, the premises granted, the conclusion follows. This is the reason why, in discussing Plato, we said that it must be possible to deduce the world from his first principle. If the Absolute were merely the cause of the world in time, it would not explain the world, for, as I have so often pointed out, causes explain nothing. But if the world be deducible from the Absolute, the world is explained, a reason, not a cause, is given for it, just as the premises constitute the reason for the conclusion. Now the conclusion of a syllogism follows from the premises, that is, the premises come first, the conclusion second. But the premise only comes first in thought, not in time. It is a logical succession, not a time-succession. Just in the same way, the Absolute, or in Aristotle's language, the form, is logically first, but is not first in order of time. And though it is the end, it is in thought the absolute beginning, and is thus the foundation of the world, the first principle from which the world flows. The objection may be, taken that if the relation of the {283} Absolute to the world is not a time-relation, then it can no more be the end than the beginning. This objection is, as we shall see, a misunderstanding of Aristotle's philosophy. Although things in time strive towards the end, yet the absolute end is not in time at all, or, in other words, the end is never reached. Its relation to the world as end is just as much a logical, and not a time-relation, as its relation to the world as beginning or absolute prius. As far as time is concerned, the universe is without beginning or end.

As the world-process is a continual elevation of matter into higher and higher forms, there results the conception that the universe exhibits a continuous scale of being. That is higher in the scale in which form predominates, that lower in which matter outweighs form. At the bottom of the scale will be absolutely formless matter, at the top, absolutely matterless form. Both these extremes, however, are abstractions. Neither of them exists, because matter and form cannot be separated. Whatever exists comes somewhere between the two, and the universe thus exhibits a process of continuous gradations. Motion and change are produced by the effort to pass from the lower to the higher under the attractive force of the end.

That which comes at the top of the scale, absolute form, is called by Aristotle, God. And the definitions of God's character follow from this as a matter of course. First, since form is actuality, God alone is absolutely actual. He alone is real. All existent things are more or less unreal. The higher in the scale are the more real, as possessing more form. The scale of being is thus