Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 39: Prime Matter, Potentiality, and Understanding Substantial Change

Transcript
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equal or unequal. So they're all of these in ability, but not in act. He doesn't see, he can't see the instincts in there, right? So he says all or none of these, right? So he's got a contradiction there, right? Well, in a way, that's what Ange Seamus does with matter, right? He has everything that matter is able, that matter is able to become, actually in matter, right? But in such a small and insignificant way that nothing is clear or distinct. So in a way, it's everything and nothing. See? Okay? Now the same thing happens with the modern mathematicians, right? You know? They speak of a straight line sometimes as composed of what? An infinity of points, right? Okay? Now why? See? One time they cut into a straight line. So you find that point. Right? Can't get something out of nothing, right? But what you're doing there is making what? Actual a point that's there only in what? Abilities. But they can't understand that. Ability. So they what? Falsely imagined it to be composed of an infinity of points. They're making actual in the line everything that's there in ability. So you can go through the different philosophers and thinkers and you see that they always have difficulty in understanding ability. Man's inability to understand ability. You know? In a sense it's difficult to understand it, right? But the ability of the first matter, being pure ability, right, is the most difficult of all to understand. In the ninth book of wisdom there, with the book on ability and act, Aristotle discusses the Megarians. We don't know much about them, but apparently they deny there's any such thing as ability. But you can see, you can't sense or imagine it, so what are you talking about? But I mean, there's other, probably deeper reasons, you can't. How are they able to do that? That's a point. That's a point. So Aristotle says, you know, they're blind and they have sight many times a day, you know, it's no miracle in Christ. Because you're only able to see what you actually see, right? So then when I close my eyes, I'm blind and now I've recovered my eyes. If I stopped playing the piano, I lost the ability to play the piano. If I stopped speaking English, I don't have the ability to speak English anymore. But anyway, that's something to the ninth book of wisdom, but you'll find, you know, running through here, the difficulty that they have. But it's kind of striking, as I say, to see it in the most advanced part of science that this way is speaking advanced, it just comes back, so, you know. So this is, this fifth paragraph which is kind of introducing us to thinking about the first matter, but it's so difficult and this is so brief, you know, that the ninth reading, right, was very important, and even the fifteenth reading, huh? But we'll see that when they come to them. For as bronze is towards statue, or wood towards bed, or the matter in the unformed towards any of the things having formed, before he sees a form. Thus the same has itself towards substance, and this something, which is the name of the way referring to individual substance and what is. Okay? This then is one beginning, not thus being one existing, as the this something, one of which there is a definition, and so on. So we're rising again. Okay? Now the last paragraph at the top of page four is the, again, a summary, again, of what has been said here, right? In what way there are two, in what way there are three, and so on. First then it has been said that only contours are the beginnings, as back in the tenth reading, right? Remember that? Later that is necessary that something underlying there be three, and that was the eleventh reading, right? Okay? And from the present it is clear what is the difference of the contours and how the beginnings are to each other, and what is the underlying subject. Whether the form of the underlying subject is substance is not yet clear. It's more in wisdom that you do that. But if the beginnings are three, and how three, and what the way of these is clear, how many then in which are the beginnings can be considered from these things? I see, nature, go back to the definition of nature. Nature was defined as the beginning and cause, right? Of motion and rest and that which it is first, right? As such and not by happening. And first it's going to take our way back to what? Substance, right? So in realizing that the first matter is to man and dog, like playing as a sphere and cube, you're also going to see the possibility of something else, that is to man and dog, like what? These accidental forms are to the clay, and what would that be called? What if the sphere, for example, or the cube, right, is composed really of the clay and the form, which is an accident that's been acquired, right? Then the man and the dog must be composed of the first matter and something proportional to that, right? But instead of being an accidental form, it's going to be a what? Substantial form, right? Okay. And that's the key to later on understanding the what? What the soul is, right? And if you go back to the Phaedo of Plato, in the Phaedo of Plato, there are really touched upon there, although one's not developed too much, two probable opinions as to what the soul is, huh? And one is the opinion that Socrates, or Plato maybe, is defending, right? That the soul is a substance, complete in itself, distinct from the body, right? Okay? So the Platonists are saying that the soul is a substance, you know, distinct and complete, apart from the body, huh? And then you have the other position, which is the position that Simeas brings in the Pythagoreans. The soul is the harmony of the body, right, huh? And this is the common opinion you have among the moderns, huh? You don't use the word soul, right? But if you ask them, why is some bodies alive and some are not? Well, it's the harmony, the order, the organization of the matter, right? Okay? So what they really have is an accidental form, okay? It says soul is an accidental form. Now, in the Phaedo, of course, Socrates is arguing more for this position, right? Okay? But you've got to realize that the dialogues are mainly dialectical, right? And dialectical means, well, that you have a part of the truth of these, but not necessarily the whole truth. And the part of the truth that Socrates is bringing out there in the Phaedo is that the soul is something substantial. And, you know, when he argues against the Symias, right, he says, well, sometimes the soul opposes the body, right? Like the man who's fasting or something, right, resisting his anger or his lust or his hunger, whatever it is, right? Okay? And Socrates says, would the harmony of the body, you know, the organization of the body oppose the body, you know? That seems to be the soul is something substantial, right? That opposes the body, right? Okay? Okay? Then Socrates is giving developing arguments there, which are solid effects later on in Thomas, that the soul is, at least a man, is immortal, right? Okay? And that's the point of the soul is being something substantial, right? See? Couldn't exist apart from the body, which is just an accidental form. But the rock that this position found us on is if the soul is really a substance, right, distinct from the body, and it's in the body like the old saying, it's like a sailor in a boat, right? then you can't understand the unity of man, right? The body is not really part of man. And that goes against our inward experience of what? When your body's in pain and you're thinking about how to relieve that pain, the one who's thinking is the one who's feeling pain, right? It's not like a doctor, you know, who's curing you or something, right? He might have sympathy for you, right? But there's an urgency when you're thinking about how to relieve your own pain, right? Right? So it's part of our inward experience, which is a starting point for the study of the soul. It's part of our inward experience, is that the one who feels pain in his body is the one who's thinking, right? So what the Plato's Candace can't explain, really, is the unity of man, right? If you say the soul is the form of the body, right, then you have the unity. But this can't explain the, what, the brutality of the soul, or I can't explain why the soul resists the body and rises above it in some ways, right? The truth is that the soul is a, what, substantial form. So there's an element in the truth here in the position that says the soul is an accidental form. It is a form, but it's not an accidental form. There's a truth in saying the soul is a substance, because it is something substantial. But it's, what, not the whole truth, right? It's not a complete substance, huh? And, like we say, the truth is between two extremes, right? It's like in theology, right, you know? You're in text, the two main mysteries of the faith there, the Trinity of Incarnation, right? You know, and you have similar errors, huh? There's some who deny, what, the Trinity of Persons, right? To hold on to the unity of the nature. Others deny the unity of the nature to hold on to the Trinity of Persons. But neither of those two extreme positions, which are both false and radical, can explain each other, right? Because if either one of them is true, the other position has no truth at all in it. Why doesn't anybody have thought that? But if the truth is that there are three persons, but one nature, then you can see why people would think there's one nature and one person, or why there's three persons and three natures. But neither of those positions can explain each other. So that the truth is in between. And then you have the reverse, as far as person and nature, the price, because it's a similar thing, right? You have one person with two natures. Some say there's two natures, and there are two persons. Others say there's one person, therefore, monophysicize one, one nature, right? But they can explain the error, right? But the middle position, that there's one person with two natures, is explained in both the errors. Because they both have a part of the truth. The same way here, right? This position can't explain the unity of man, right? And the fact that the body really is part of us, right? You see? But this position can't explain why the human soul is immortal, why it has an activity, in fact, as we show, that is not in the body, or why the soul should even oppose inclinations of the body, right? As it does in the same, and even the person fasting, right? Lose weight, or the alcoholic, anonymous person, for that matter, right? Or the soul is resisting the body, right? But this position here can do justice to both of these. Like we're not studying the soul right now, we're just saying here, this is the first thing you have to see, in a way, right? With that composition. The church, incidentally, didn't officially say that Aristotle was right until after Thomas had died, right? Oh, right. It was the Council of Yen, I think it is. You know, the member. There, there, it officially says that. But anyway, these two positions here are, both have an element of the truth. And that's why I think the Phaedo, I think the Phaedo is interesting. When Aristotle discusses the opinion of his predecessors in the first book about the soul, there's so many opinions, and they kind of get lost out of it. But I think if you look at the Phaedo there, you see these are the two main opinions. And you can see that each have a part of the truth, but the whole truth is found there. So this is a very fundamental text for understanding substantial change, huh? But if you go back to Empedocles and Anxagoras, and perhaps all of the first philosophers, they did not want to admit it, see, of any kind of change, except change of place. You know what I mean? They had difficulty with any kind of inner change. Why? Because they couldn't understand, what, ability, right? They didn't see how it could be possible. It's interesting, you know, Heisenberg is the physicist, the greatest physicist of the 20th century, as far as emphasizing the importance of ability or potency, as he calls it. But you see it sometimes in the other ones, too. You know, Louis de Broglie, the great French physicist, the father of wave mechanics, you know, he said, if you ask the physicist of the 19th century, what happens when white light hits a prism, you get this whole spread of different colors, he would have said, they're all in the white light, and the prism just sprayed at them, just to change the place, right? He said, now we no longer think that those colors are actually in the white light, except as in a, what, possibility, he says, right? Well, that's the idea of what potency, again, huh? It's an answer that would have very much surprised a 19th century physicist, huh? So it's interesting, huh, that the, um, uh, there's kind of a, um, not a, a circle in history there, but, you know, like, I, I used to think of a spiral staircase, right? But you come back and sense the same point, but at a different, what, level of experience, right, huh? You know? So you see in the early Greek natural philosophers, the attempt, what, to, to deny any change except change of place, right, and, and this ignorance really of ability in any radical sense, huh? And then you move towards Aristotle, and you start to, excuse me, understand ability, right, and you see the possibility then of inward change, and even a substantial change in how it's possible, and then you find if the early modern scientists, you know, they're speaking only of change of place, and, and so on, and then finally, you know, the 20th century in quantum physics, they started to, what, move away and back to the idea of ability or potency, but on a particular, more particular level of experience, right, an experiment and so on, huh? So in a, in a way you're coming back to the same position, but at a different, what, yeah, in a more general level, and then in a more particular level, huh? Right? You see that sometimes now the biologists are starting to come back to the idea that nature maybe makes things for an end or a purpose, you know, but, but, but in a very more complicated way, right, in a detailed way, in a particular way, huh? So in a way, but I say it's spiraled because it's a different level of experience, much more particular one, huh? Does the church say anything, have an official position about this first matter, prime matter? Is it, is that tied into it? Well, it's tied in, yeah, the two go together, you know? So they, yeah, I don't know if they, but they're concerned with much of defining what first matter is, but the, the definition of the soul is very important for theology, right? See, in theology you're more concerned with the soul than with matter because the soul is in the image, the human soul, is made in the image and likeness of God, huh? And that's what theology does, considers everything in reference to God, right? So the soul is much more important. So it's implicit in them saying that the soul is a substantial form, that prime matter? Yeah, it has to be that, yeah, yeah, the two go together, you couldn't separate the two. But what you find explicitly in the Consulate, I think it's the Vienna, I had to bring the text in there from the Vienna, but, um, uh, it's talking about the soul, right? Because that's the key thing, you know? You see, the way, the way that Aristotle eventually shows immortality to the soul, you have to reason that the soul has a, it does something not in the body, right? And you have to show that the soul does something not in the body, and once you can show that, then you know that its existence is not only in the body. Or as Thomas will put it, its existence is not immersed in the body, huh? Okay? Just like your card. I think, therefore I am, right? Well, you have to be before you can do something, right? So if your being depends upon something, your doing depends upon something, right? And if the soul had being only in the body, it would do something only in the body and through the body, right? So if it does something not in the body, which you have to prove that, right? That can be proven. Then its being is not just in the body, therefore its being is not tied to the body. But that shows that the being of the soul is not accidental being, it's substantial being, right? You see? Okay? But then once you see that part of the truth, you have to think of the soul as being a substance like that. You know? In the body like a sailor in a boat or something, or a man in this car, right? And then you don't understand the unity of man, right? You see? And then you realize it is the truth over here, and say that the soul is the accidental form of the body. Because it is the form of the body, that's not the accidental form of the body, it's the substantial form. And then you see the whole truth. And then with the truth, everything harmonizes. Aristotle said in the Comebackian Ethics, right? After the definition of the purpose of man, right? He says with the truth, all things harmonize, huh? And you can harmonize everything that we know about man with that understanding of the soul. But neither of these positions will work to harmonize. Everything won't fit with that position, huh? The soul is a complete substance of the state in the body, it won't fit with this idea over here. Then with the unity, with the experience of the unity of man, that the body is part of us, right? But this here can't explain that the soul is an activity, and therefore a being that's not in the body. I'm not sure of the body. We're incarnate souls? That's that way, huh? Composed as soul and body. But notice that way of being parts, you know, we're composed as soul and body. That's one of the four senses of parts in the Fifth Book of Wisdom. But it's the one that Aristotle is, what? Leads up to right here. In the 13th reading, we're up to that sense. But it's the one that is kind of hidden. You'll see it in the dialectic of Book 3 of Wisdom. You'll see it back in Book 1 here. That sense of parts kind of excludes. It's kind of hidden, huh? It's a different sense. You know, I kind of read it out as a simple example. I say, what are the parts of the word cap? C, A, T. Yeah. What's the thing? That's the first meaning of part, right? Okay. And so we say, you know, is the other part beside C, A, and T? You say, well, take away the C, take away the A, take away the T. Nothing's left, right? They must be the only parts, right? So there's nothing in the word cap besides those letters, right? But then you take the word act, and you say, okay. It's got the same letters, right? But now, if I say the parts of the word cap are the letters and the order, it's kind of strange to say that at first, doesn't it? It's another meaning of the word part, right? When I say C, A, and T are the parts of the word cap, period, right? Those are like the quantitative parts, you might call them, right? Okay. But when I say the letters and the order of the letters are the parts of the word, right? They're parts, we call them the central parts, right? Matter and form, right? Okay. And that's the way body and soul are now at least to that, right? Except there's not an example for it, but that sense of part, right? Body and soul are parts of us, not in the sense in which C, A, and T are parts of cap, but proportional, right? Identical to the way in which the letters and the order of the letters are the parts of the word cap, you see? Or what are the parts of a rubber ball? Well, the rubber and that shape, right? That's a different sense of parts than this, right? And once you'd be honest, you know, you used to have a nice phrase, you know, someone who's stuck on the first meaning of a word and can't see the other meanings of the word, you know? You can't move the word. Because, you know, the way that Thomas, you know, when he speaks of this, in Latin, you know, the term is impositio nominis, right? Which means what? The placing of a name upon something. Or as we say in English, the label on something, right? Put a name on it, right? Okay. So you place the name upon this, right? Then you carry it over. I use the word translatio, carry over. And you place it upon something else because of a certain, what? Similarity. Yeah. Or some connection it has, right? Then you pick up and place it upon something else, right? You know? Well, he's got four meanings of the word part there in the Fifth Book of Wisdom. Remember the one I was giving the other day there that when they talk about mystic arguments, right? And I give it to my students all the time. And I say, the whole is more than the part, right? I say, okay, now, what's a man, huh? Well, a man's an animal. But he's not just an animal. He's a rational animal. Okay. So animal's only a part of what man is. And they all agree, right? You say, yeah. But animal includes, besides man, includes what? Dog, horse, elephant, and many other things, right? So what is only a part of man includes much more than man. So sometimes the part is more than the whole. Well, this is a sophisticated argument, right? Based on mixing up two senses of the word whole and part, right? And rational animal, when we say that's a whole, an animal is a, what? Part. This is one of the three meanings he gives of whole and part that are, what, composed whole, right? A whole put together from its parts. And he distinguishes that from the, what? Universal whole, which is set of its parts, right? And so what you're doing here is confusing animal as it's a composing part of the definition of man, which whole definition contains more than that part, right? With animal as an universal whole and what they call subject part, right? Because of that of which it is said. And man is a subject part of animal. So man is a part of animal. An animal is a part of man in two different senses of the word part, right? Man is a subject part of animal, speech letter. An animal is a part of the definition of man, right? So two different meanings of parts and the parts of the definition and the subject parts of the universal whole. And then you have the quantitative part, right? And then you have, besides all of those, the one here, matter and form, right? Essential parts. Four different meanings of the part there. So, you know, there used to be old iron gets a soul as a guy used to, you know, cutting open cadavers, you know, for years, you know, in the medical school or something like that. And, you know, lungs and brain and liver and pancreas and so on. And they never found a soul there among those parts, right? Well, that's like, you know, when I was doing up here, right? You know, I slipped her away, right? Up here. I cut it up and I got a C and A and a T and that was it. There wasn't no order there besides, you know. But, you know, there is that order there besides that. But, uh, it's not when they show up in one of the quantitative parts of the word cat, huh? You can C, A, T and you get the order here. But that's more known to us that sense of part, the quantity of parts. Let me go back to the first reading here in the, um, in the, uh, first book that we had. He's manifesting the confused and distinct, right? We know things in a confused way before we know them distinctly. And he started out with like a quantitative whole, right? The sensible composed whole, right? Then he went to the definition, right? It's another kind of composed whole. Then he approached the universal whole, right? Which he's trying to show there. But this one that he ends up with down here is a different sense. But he leaves it out of that, doesn't he? Because that's what, in some sense, less normal to us. So you have to see how it makes sense to say that the letters and the order of the letters are parts of the word cat before you can see what it means to say we're body and soul, although it's not identical, it's only proportional to it. Okay, so we should stop here before we go into reading nine now. We're not too late tonight. My other grandchildren are arriving tonight too, so we are married to them. We've got their three little girls, so Lady Catherine and Lady Anne, Sarah rather, Sarah and Lady Cecilia, the last one, you know. You know, we haven't seen Cecilia since she was born, so. We've been working downstairs there. We had the Countess's commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. In the very beginning there, in the first chapter, St. Paul says, quoting the Psalms, he's made his angel spirit son, and his minister is, I think, a flame of fire. So Thomas says, well, two names for the angels, right, which means they, what, messenger, and then minister, which is the one who does things, right, or it's Lord and our master. And so, I like this there. Insofar as the angels are called spirits, which is taken from the word for breath or air. He says, well, the purpose of a messenger is to receive the message from the, like we're sending it, right, and then pass it on to somebody else. So he says, he speaks of them as being spirits or air, because air quickly, what, receives something and passes it on. You can see that with sound and color, how they, what, are easily received by the air and carried to our eyes and our ears, right? And it's a swift thing, too, right? And so that's why they're called spirits. And then he says, and then they're called, what, and his ministers, which is another name for the angels, but for their other function, and they're called a flame of what? Of fire, right? And he says, well, why is that? Well, of course, fire, he says three things about fire. That it's the most active of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and therefore, appropriately applied to their functions doing things, right? And then, of course, it warms things, right, which is their role in encouraging, what? Charity. Charity. And then the flame always goes upward, and everything they do, they refer back to the glory of God. Kind of a beautiful little passage, huh? So when he asks the guardian angels and Thomas to pray for us here, help us, we comment on the cause of what Thomas says about the angels there in that little passage there. It's kind of a nice one, though, huh? Fire also enlightens, too, didn't you mention that? What? Fire also enlightens. Yeah, but he's tying up fire there with the likeness for them as ministers, right? Rather than as messengers, they're more a teacher. I see. Okay. Of course, you're kind of speaking of the likeness of the metaphor there, right? And you know how fire can be, or like a lion can be, you know, a metaphor for Christ, it can be a metaphor for the what? Yeah, see? So you want to adapt the metaphor when it's being used, you know. What is it like this? Why do you call Christ a lion, right? Well, because he's courageous and he triumphs, right? And he's the king, right? And he's the king of the beast and so on, right? But why do we call, you know, St. Peter calls him a lion boy around, seeking whom he may devour, right? Kind of prowling around, right, looking for weaknesses, huh? To attack and so on. And then there's a likeness there to the devil, right? Okay? So fire can be, you know, a metaphor for charity, can be a metaphor for anger or concubiscence or something else, right? By different qualities that it has. Okay, so we're up to reading nine here. Actually, that's where you left off. We're going to start reading nine. And the reason why I attached reading nine to this is for a better understanding of this first matter. And so you might ask this question, is the first matter, is the first matter, matter before other matters, right? Is the first matter, is the first matter, an actual substance, or a substance in ability only? Now, the big philosophers up before Stalin, they thought the first matter was some actual substance. It might be Mother Earth, it might be water, it might be air, it might be fire, right? Or it might be, you know, all four of these, as in Metacles say, right? But, if there is change of substance, if there really is change of substance, then the subject underlying change of substance would have to be what? Not actually a substance. Yeah. Because in that case, right, all change would be what? Accidents. If the matter underlying all change, right, the very first matter, was an actual substance, right, then that actual substance would be eternal, you might say, and it didn't come into existence and allowed existence, and all you do would be to have, like, accidental modifications of the substance. But they couldn't understand how that first substance could be in ability only. And we talked before a bit about how ability is hard to understand, and how we tend to imagine the first substance, the first matter to be something actual, right, but we have all kinds of problems. And in a way, in our friend Enix Egrus, you see the difficulties we get into when he tries to make the first matter a combination of actual substances. Now, so that goes back, if you go back to Aristotle's categories and you say, give me an example of a substance, it would give us an example of a substance, a man, or a second example would be a dog, or a cat, or a horse, okay? Now, if man is a substance, then there is change of substance, isn't there? Because men do come into existence, right? They do go out of existence, in the same way for a dog, right? Okay. Now, if you deny that man or a dog is a substance, then you're going to probably end up saying that man or a dog is something composed of many, what? Other substances. Yeah, yeah. And therefore, something like a word that's made out of many letters, right? Arranged in some way, huh? Well, the question is, is a man one thing, with many parts, though? Or is he many things in some way arranged or put together? Which is he, huh? Well, the early Greeks, like many modern international scientists and people in general following him, they imagined a man or a dog to be composed of, let's say, earth, air, fire, and water, or to be composed of atoms and molecules, right? As if these were all many distinct substances, right? In some way, or together. Which case would a man be really one thing? He'd be no more one thing, in a way, than an army is, right? Or a family is, right? You know, a city is, huh? So what do you think a man is? Is that part of your inward experience of being a man, that you're one thing, huh? First, I will take the example, then, of the fact that a man dies, or a man comes into existence, or even that a dog dies, or a dog comes into existence, as an establishment of the fact that there is change of substance in it. And then going back to our understanding, and then going back to our understanding, and then going back to our understanding, and going back to our understanding, a change in general, if there's a change from man, let's say, to any other substance, let's take man to dog, but there must be some subject or matter underlying that change, just as if there's a change from, let's say, a sphere to a cube. There has to be something underlying that, right? Okay? What underlies sphere and cube being accidents would be some actual substance? Now, we take my example here of clay, if you take the other example on the tape. Well, what underlies a change from man to dog? What does that? Well, if it were actual substances like clay, then man and dog would be not what substance is. It is contrary to our starting point there. So, the subject underlying that must not be an natural substance, but substance and ability. What is able to be a man or a dog, but not at the same time, right? And Aristotle said, but you have to know this first matter by a proportion, right? Because you could say that the first matter here is to man and dog, something like the clay is to sphere and cube, huh? Okay? But you could be even more explicit and say that it seems to be knowable only by its proportion, right? And why isn't it knowable by itself, huh? Well, if we try to consider this first matter by itself, it'd be a substance-only inability. So it'd be in itself or by itself anything actual? No. It certainly can't be an actual substance if it's only substance and ability. And so it can't be an actual, what? Accident. Again, an accident underlying substance. Therefore, it must be something only in ability. But now ability, as we said in general, is difficult to know because ability is not knowable by itself or through itself, huh? And that's true not only about this ability, but any kind of ability. The ability to see, the ability to walk, the ability to think, and so on. These abilities are known only through the acts which they're an ability. They're never known by themselves, huh? And this being an example of pure ability, huh? Most of all this would be true. It's not knowable by itself. So it easily escapes our understanding, right? Now, when you get down to something less known than man or dog or substance, when you get down to what do we call sometimes the elements, the Greeks called elements, you get down to the most basic forms of matter that we know, which for the Greeks of the Earth, they're a fire and a lot, right? Okay? For us in modern science, the most basic forms of matter we know are the so-called elementary particles. But if Earth, air, fire and water are the first forms of matter, if there's no form of matter before Earth, air, fire and water, are Earth, air, fire and water eternal? Or do they change? Yeah. It seems that you can burn up these things, right? Or you can dissolve themselves, right? So if the very first forms of matter are not eternal, but fire becomes water or water becomes fire eventually, right? Then underlying that change must be something which is only what? Substance and ability, right? Okay? And I say that argument for the existence of substance and ability is not as sure as man and dog because you're not so sure that Earth, air, fire and water are the first forms of matter as we are that man and dog are what? Substances, huh? Okay? Now in modern science, they found out that water was not the first form of matter, right? That before water there's something called hydrogen and what? Oxygen, right? Now they're elements. But are hydrogen and oxygen the first forms of matter? No. Because underneath them are proton and electron and neutron, and they call those things not atoms but what? Particles. Yeah, that's the name for them in science, right? Okay? So the molecule is not the first form of matter because before that is the atom, right? The atom is not the first form of matter because before that is the elementary particles, huh? Now, you might say, well, are the elementary particles so eternal? Well, in the high energy experiments with elementary particles, they found out that no elementary particle is what? No elementary particle, right? Okay? Everyone is, it showed, as Heisenberg said, the complete mutability, right? The complete changeability of matter, okay? Now, so you might say, well, maybe below earth, air, I mean, not with air, water, proton, neutron, there's a more basic form of matter, right? Just as the atom was found to be below the molecule and the elementary particles to be below, right? Okay? Now, that's a new question now because what happened was in the experiments, something very strange happen. Okay? When they accelerate one particle and shoot it against another particle, okay? And that particle you shoot against doesn't remain, right? It disappears. What do you end up with? Well, sometimes you end up with particles of more mass than the original particle, which isn't true when you, what, break water down into hydrogen and oxygen, right? Yeah. The molecule of water has more mass or size and so on than the hydrogen atom or the oxygen atom, right? When you break those up, you know, the protons, say, or the electrons have less mass, less size, right? So it makes some sense to say that the water molecule is composed of the hydrogen nitrogen, and they're composed of the hydrogen atom, right? But now when you try to repeat that with the elementary particles, and you shot other particles at them, what they found out was that the result of this showed that that form of matter didn't remain, right? But you didn't necessarily get smaller particles, you've got what? Sometimes one with what? More. More size and more mass. Right. And that seemed to show that these basic forms of matter, called the elementary particles, are not, in fact, made up of something smaller, right? You see? And yet, since there's change from one of them into the other, there must be what? An underlying subject, but that subject would not be an actual substance, right? And that's why Heisenberg says that we know matter only through the forms of matter. You say we don't know matter by itself, right? I was going to bring in, I forgot to, but I'll bring in sometime Heisenberg's lectures there on the unified field theory of elementary particles and stuff. Heisenberg and Wolfgang Paul, you got the Nobel Prize in quantum theory, they went on to study elementary particles afterwards, right? And this is the theory they came up with. But when they begin to study elementary particles, it's seen that out of any elementary particle, you could eventually get all the rest. Yeah. And therefore, you'll find Heisenberg saying, quoting several times in the book, the well-known formula. Every elementary particle is composed of all the rest, right? Uh-huh. See? It's interesting that that way of speaking will be exactly like Ana Xavier's speech. Yeah. And of course, it's going to render the same difficulties if you take that exactly what it says, that Aristotle would point out for what? Ana Xavier's, huh? But both that well-known formula of the students of elementary particles and Ana Xavier's as their similar way of speaking, I think both reveal the difficulty our mind has in understanding the first matter, right? See? And understanding that there can be, uh, you can get out of something, something that isn't actually in there. Can you get money out of my pocket? You know, if there's no money in the pocket, well, here's my chapstick here, but there's no money in my pocket, how can you get money out of my pocket, right? And, um, now, in Japan, I was using class there. We have wooden chairs there, maybe in one of the classrooms, and I say, you know, occasionally you get a class, you know, and it's over-enrolled or whatever it is, and someone would have to borrow a chair from another room, right? But then you get you Chairs out of the other room if they're not chairs in the other room? No, okay. It's not too hard to see what that means, you've got a chair out of another room. You've probably done that many times in your life, right? Got a wooden chair out of another room, right? But originally these wooden chairs, we got them out of what? Trees. Now were there in fact wooden chairs in the trees out there? Potentially, yeah. But not actually, right? But the way we get a chair out of a tree is much more hidden than the way we get a chair out of the next room. And so, notice, the way in which chairs are in the trees out there in the camp and the grounds here, and the way a chair is in the next room, has a much different sense of in, isn't it? In the case of in the next room, that's the first meaning of in, in some place, right? And what is in something, is in a place, is actually there, okay? When you get to the sense in which something is in matter before the matter has been formed, is that actually in there? It's in there in what? Ability, right? Okay? And so, you can say that the most common fallacy, too, of equivocation is involved here, because one is imagining the way something is in matter to be like the way something is in a place. And that's in their only what? Actually, okay? I mentioned before how Weizsaka, the student of Heisenberg, said that when we imagine something, we make it actual in our imagination. And so, the fundamental cause of deception on the side of our knowing powers, what the philosopher calls false imagination, right, is especially active here. When we study place there in the fourth book of actual philosophy, the fourth book of the actual area, Aristotle there would distinguish the various meanings, the very central meanings of the word in. And he gives eight different meanings of the word in. And Thomas orders those eight meanings in the way Aristotle teaches us to do so in the fifth book of wisdom. And just to recall those meanings, huh? The first meaning of in, or being in, if you want to get to a phrase, the first meaning is in place, huh? Okay? Like you and I are in this room, right? Or the chair is in this room, right? The second meaning he gives of in is that of a part in a whole, huh? Like my teeth in my mouth, right? Okay? Now, the second sense of part in a whole is very close to the first sense. Because if you hit me in the jaw here, and loosen one of my teeth, I could take it in and out, then that tooth would no longer be in my mouth as a part in a whole, but as, you know, place, right? Okay? In the same way, if I was to, you know, I was to take my electric saw here and cut a round hole in the top of this table, and then take out a piece of wood, right? In fact, take it in and put it back in again, would it be in the table, read as a part of the table anymore? No. You see how a very close part in a whole is to, like, in place, huh? Okay? Then the third meaning he gives is the sense in which a genus is said to be in the species. Okay? And in general, the part of the definition in the definition. So genus is in the species. Again, that's still a sense in which something is actually inside of something. So if you take the definition of square, let's say, as an equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral, in that definition of the species, square, is quadrilateral, equilateral, or right-angled, right? But there are actually parts of that, right? Okay? In other words, this here is something more in the mind, right? Right? This here is something more in the senses you can get at, huh? You see that? Okay? So this one is more sensible and therefore more known to us, that meaning, in this sense, right? Okay? And then the fourth sense, it's actually good, but it tells the order, if you forget, the more you study it, the fourth sense is the sense in which the species is in the what? Jesus. Yeah. Okay? Now, the sense in which man is in what? Animal, right? That's very interesting, huh? Animal is in man in the third sense of in. Man is in animal in the what? Fourth sense, right? Okay? Um, now, in what sense is this third sense like the earlier senses, and especially like the third sense that follows directly after, huh? Yeah, yeah. Because the genus is a universal what? A hole, right? Okay? The species, or the definition of the species, as well as the hole we have in mind here, are composed holes, right? So here you have composed holes, but the one is in the material world, an insensible world, right? Or the other one is only in the mind, right? So one is more known to us than the other, right? But in both cases, the part is in that kind of a hole, actually, right? So, um, but then you have another sense of hole, which is universal hole, right? Which you also sometimes call the general, right? We talked about that in the beginning of the course there, where in Greek, the word for general is kathal, which comes to the Greek word for hole. Kathal, kata, according to the holasa, the hole. In English, we had for the less universal, the term, what? Particular, right? Which obviously comes from what? Part, right? Later on in Greek, you see the word just like particular, merikon, which comes from the Greek word merasa. So they have, the word for part, gives rise to the word for, what's a species, right? Species of part genes. So this is somewhat like this, right? Okay? It's also the money, but it's likely part of the whole. But here, what is in something is not actually a part, but ultimately it's not ability, right? And then comes the fifth sense, the form in matter, the form in matter is going to form, right? Okay? And that's very much like species in the genus, the form in matter. But here you have, if you can take these three senses actually in, right? And here it's in, only, in, ability. You see that? Now later on you get to the sense in which, I've got you in my power. And that's again a sense where, what? A different kind of ability there, the active ability, right? Like that too in my power, right? Okay? Or as you say in English sometimes, it's out of my hands, right? You know? Or the other, right? Or we're in God's hands, right? Okay? But see, that's like the sense of form in matter, but it's a different kind of ability. But for a person right now, we'll stop here at the fifth sense, right? Okay? Now, I think I mentioned how John Locke, right? He's trying to understand the general idea of triangle. Okay? Well, he can't really transcend his imagination, right? So he's trying to, he says that the, what is a triangle in general? What's a three-sided plain figure, right? Now those three sides equal or just two of them or none of them? Right. But he says it's all and what? None of these, right? He's trying to, in a sense, to imagine triangle in general. Now, can you imagine triangle in general? I don't know. Any triangle you imagine will be a particular triangle, right? Yeah. Either equilateral or isosceles or scale, right? Yeah. So he's trying to, to imagine it, right? So, if he's,