Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 52: Three Sources of Modern Anti-Teleological Custom

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It wasn't that she wanted, right, but everybody says, for example, television or something like that, even radio, it's an advertising medium, you know, and people just go crazy, you know, if they're watching, you know, a movie on a commercial station, you know, a movie maybe is going to take an hour and a half at a time, you know, every 10, 15 minutes, it's like it's interesting, there's 15 minutes of commercials. I mean, you know, it's just absolutely crazy, right? I remember when she was just coming in when I was young there, and used to have, you know, like a Sunday evening movie, you know, and everybody, you know, this is something new, you know, you can have a free movie in your house every Sunday evening, but the sponsor was GMK, you know, saves the day, they were kind of a dry cleaning place, you know, they're aiming at the female audience, they can send everything off and we'll clean it, you know, and send it back, you know, instead of watch the movie, you know, watch the movie, you know, but he must have had like a half hour of commercials, you know, it doesn't matter, crazy. You compare that with the Greek, what, festivals that produced, what, Sophocles and, you know, Agerpides and Aeschylus and so on, right, these kind of religious festivals, right, where they had, you know, competition among the playwrights, right, produced the best playwright, there was a symposium of Plato there, takes place, you know, at a dinner, honoring the, what, winner of the prize for the greatest tragedy of that year, Agathon, right? Okay, and so, but imagine the elevation of the great tragedy when you read that, huh, how different that was from a commercial thing, you know, where these movies are made nowadays, you know, to make a million dollars in the box office and so on, right? You see, they're not very good, most of them, you know, or Aion, where Socrates talks to Aion, who's a rhapsodist, you know, he just recites Homer by, and he's won all kinds of prizes, but he recites Homer, you know, I mean, it's really amazing to see that, huh, the difference there between the stochastic thing, and the support of the arts, right? Okay, so that's the first major source of the modern world and its customs. Now, the second major source, and this is the one that's going to be most important for us, is the mathematics, human, of natural and technical science. And this really got going in the 17th century, the 17th and then the 18th centuries, so this really came to prominence a little bit later than that, huh? I think I gave you Thomas' division there of order in comparison to reason, when we talked about the definition of reason. There's the order which reason does not make, but only considers, as is the natural order, right? And then the order made by reason, in its own acts, which is a concern of logic, and then in the acts of the will, which is a concern of ethics. And then exterior matter, which is the concern of what he calls mechanical arts, or the syruva arts, as they're called sometimes, but the old word for them is the mechanical arts, huh? Well, there's something quite different, huh? Natural philosophy, which is about natural order, and mechanical arts, which is about the order that is made in wood or steel or something else, right? Well, what took place in the 17th and 18th century was a union of natural science with the mechanical arts, or we sometimes call it technical science, right? Sometimes we say the union of science and technology, right? But the two came fused together. And so if you read the histories there of science and technology in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century, it would be the same history. The history of science and technology in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century would be the title of the book. You can't really separate one, because they become intertwined. New techniques enable them to perform experiments they couldn't perform before. In new theories, right? Suggest new experiments and new techniques and so on. And so they become intertwined, huh? But this union or marriage of the two is made possible by mathematics, huh? Because mathematics abstracts from the differences we saw between the natural and the artificial. And the four mathematics is neither by nature nor by art, huh? The four legs of the chair are by, what? Art. The four legs of the cat are by nature, right? But the number four, the abstract four, is that by nature or by art? It abstracts the difference, right? In a way it's applicable to both. So, the fact that union was mathematical also facilitated the marriage of the two, right? Now, Heisenberg, in discussing this, in the Gifford Lectures, he says, it turned our attitude towards the natural world from one of, what? Contemplation, desire to understand, to what can you do with the natural world, right? What can you make of it? To a pragmatic attitude, he said, huh? And so when you read the modern philosophers who are in this or influenced by it, they start to see the purpose of this as power, right? Now, the oldest part of this is the part of physics called, what, mechanics, right? It's interesting the very words there, because the word physics comes in the Greek word for nature, right? And mechanics goes back to the mechanical arts that Thomas was speaking about. So, the oldest part of modern science, part Galileo and Kepler and Newton were perfecting to some extent, was called physics and part of physics called mechanics, huh? So, you have kind of a sign in the words, right? Of the union going on there between the natural and the mechanical, huh? And, of course, Newton, who united Galileo and Kepler, huh, become so important and such a model for this knowledge that the physicists in the 20th century, huh, they refer to the physics of the 16th, excuse me, the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. They call that either classical physics or Newtonian physics, right? And, if you look at Ernst Kassir's book on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, everybody took Newton as the model of all thinking, everywhere, who followed Newton. As John Locke said, I'm just clearing the way for more Newtons, you know? We've got the way here, so you can have more Newtons. And, the poet says, what, all was darkness, God said that Newton would be, and all was light. So, this had tremendous influence upon the modern philosophers, huh? And, much more so than this here, right? So, men like Descartes, for example, or Kant, huh? They were Newtonian physicists or something like that, right? They were physicists. Descartes, of course, developed one kind of mathematics, huh? And, Newton, of course, and Leibniz is a lot of founder of calculus and so on. And, Kant's critique of pure reason, in a way, is trying to understand what kind of knowledge they have here. But, this becomes the whole of the knowledge of the natural world, huh? These people. That's the second major source. Now, I don't try to reduce these, you know, one to the other, but you could say that the first one here might, in a way, dispose of the second one, right? Because, in a mercantile city, you might be interested in natural science, not for its own sake, but with what you can use it to make things and sell, right? So, this first one, I don't want to say, I don't want to say that it's a cause, really, but so he kind of disposes for that, right? Okay? And, anybody who looks at the modern world, huh, from the Renaissance on, as a whole, they all talk about something which they call the Industrial Revolution. It's not a revolution, in a sense, a good revolution, but it's a change that they want to call. In fact, there's a major change, right? The Industrial Revolution. And, in a way, the Industrial Revolution, ...involves these two, doesn't it, working together, yeah. A pretty brief question, I don't want to sidetrack too much, but do you think that, did Newton merit that grandeur of title that was given him, you know, God and God said, let there be light, let there be Newton... Well, he's a great, certainly a great scientist, yeah, but I wouldn't take Newtonian physics as a model for all human knowledge, right, okay? Of course, Newton himself said, I don't know why it appeared to be to other men, he says, but to me, I always seem to be a little boy down the seashore there, you know, playing with the shells and now, Alan Vendt, they're rid of himself with a prettier one, with a whole vast ocean of truth lay out there in front of me undiscovered it. But, no, it's interesting, huh, in his later years, Newton, what, became, what, he meant, he meant the monetary system, right, chancellor of the checker, you know, or what do you call him, the treasury secretary, you call him the United States here. Kind of funny, right, huh? That, you know, there's the aristocracy, right, so that's the revolution, the way it involves both of these things, right? And so a lot of the support of this here in our society comes from what? From business and then from government, right? Whether it be from business or from government, it's for practical reasons, huh? So if you're a chemist working for Minnesota Mining, your ideas belong to the company. The merchants, to some extent, are using the scientists, huh? So, but there's a tie in many ways of these two. Now, the third major source of the modern world are the democratic revolutions and then the social condition of equality, which is quite different from the hereditary inequality that you had in ancient societies. And, of course, there are many democratic revolutions. The most striking one, of course, is the French Revolution, huh? Frite, egalite, fraternite. Now, the French Revolution takes place at the transition there into the 18th century, right? So this really gets going in the 19th century. The 19th century is much more democratic, even in England, right, which had its democratic revolution earlier, you might say, but back in the 17th centuries. But the 19th century is much more democratic in England than it was the 18th century. And in some ways, the 20th century is even more democratic than the 19th. And the most important book for understanding democratic customs is Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, right? And de Tocqueville came to America to study a pure case of democracy. Because in France, you had kind of the hangover of a bit of the aristocratic order, right? And he wanted to see, you know, kind of a pure case of the democratic thing. But in the second volume of Democracy in America, it's more general than the first volume. The first volume is more dealing with American institutions, starting with the local government, going all the way up to the federal government. But the second volume is a beautiful contrast of democratic customs with what he calls aristocratic customs. And if you read the book, it's got four books to the second volume. And the first book talks about the influence of democratic customs on the life of the mind, on the broadest sense. And the second and the third one is an influence upon our morals and so on, and our manners and so on. And the fourth book is about the influence on government, right? Yeah. It's very interesting what he says about the influence of this upon the mind. And it's everything from, you know, literature and history to science and so on. And you contrast the historic, the democratic historian with the aristocratic historian. The democratic historian will emphasize mass movements, right? As if individuals, even those who came to the forefront, were just kind of, what, almost like a tool of the mass movement, right? And if it hadn't been them, somebody else would have been pushed forward, right? But mystocratic historian will see the role of great men in history as changing things, right? And you can see that kind of, you know, when you read, you know, the history there around, let's say, our friend Winston Churchill, you know? I mean, it's really questionable whether England would have not made a deal with Germany in the absence of Churchill, right? And this would have been, you know, who knows what would have happened as a result of that, right? So sometimes we downplay the importance of an individual like Churchill, although in other cases we can see that he was forced to recognize the importance of Churchill at that moment. But I was rereading Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, and Cassius, you know, or Casca, one of them, calls Brutus, you know, the soul of Rome, right? And a beautiful phrase, but it struck right away how much more apt it would be to say, you know, that Churchill was the soul of Britain, right? At that time, you know, when the things were so dark there, right, you know, and yet there was anybody who made him on this song, but the soul was best in England there. Now, if you look at this from the point of view of world history, as they say, you know, I think I'm taking McNeil's world history, you look at the panorama of the modern world, they'll speak of the Industrial Revolution, the Democratic Revolution, right? That's it. I mean, you want the major changes, right? But the Industrial Revolution, as they say, involves, you know, the connection of these two, and that is obviously is down here, right? When he's talking about the literature, he says something very interesting, that in aristocratic times, men look to the past, right, for inspiration, for the imagination. In democratic times, they look to the future, for inspiration, for literature. Well, you know, you think about the greatest works of Greek fiction, huh? They are things like the Iliad, right? That's the greatest work in their Greek fiction. And the Iliad is set, what, way in the past, right? Another age, right? When men were greater than they are now, right? And so on, huh? And even, you know, you need it, too. It's set in the past, right? This kind of mythical origin of Rome, right? Okay? But now, in our time, you know, when I grew up, everybody was reading 1984, which in that time was in the future, right? And Brave New World was in the future, right? And all these, you know, science fiction things, like Star Wars, they're all set in the, what? Future, right? I don't know exactly why that is, but I mean, it's interesting observations that he makes, right? When he talks about the influence of democratic customs upon religion, he says that they naturally suggest pantheistic ideas. It's an interesting observation, you know? He says you can see this pantheism in German philosophy, you can see it in French literature, right? And I often refer to that text when we talk about Einstein's mind, because it's pantheistic, it's mind as opposed to the greater mind of Anaxagoras, which is altogether distinct from things, huh? But if you read, you know, the ingredients similar, I mean, we have the official documents of the church and the official, you know, corrections, too, and so on. You know, it seems like all the way through the 19th century, you have them always correcting some German theologian who's a Catholic, but who's gotten into somewhat pantheistic ideas, right? Just like Karl Rahner did, right, a little bit, and actually I'm going to get a compatriot there, even more so, right? But there's that tendency, right? And so he talked about the influence of history, literature, how it makes them interested in immediate applications of science, right? And so on. So, these are the three major sources, huh? But now this one here, perhaps the most important, as far as this question is concerned, right? So, this one here, perhaps the most important one here, perhaps the most important one here, perhaps the most important one here, perhaps the most important one here, perhaps the most important one here, perhaps the most important one here. Because if you understand mathematics, if you look at things mathematically, in mathematics there's no substance, there's no sense qualities, and there's no purpose. And it strikes me, in my own experience of the modern mind, the way substance seems to be persona non grata, or res non grata, if I could twist that phrase, you know. You find Bart, do you know, denies any material substance, and then Hume denies any substance at all, right? All the way up to Bertie Russell there, you know, saying, the accidents of Mr. Smith, he says, have no more need of a substance to exist in than the earth has need of an elephant to rest upon. It's very cleverly said, right? And I notice even in the church, the influence there, you know, like in the Nicene Creed, they don't want to say consubstantial, they want to avoid the word substantial, the same substance, they say the same being, you know, or a vague word, right? So it's a reaction against substance, right? But there's no substance in mathematics. And of course Descartes, you know, has no substance, he just has, what, extension, huh? Which is really quantity, the second category, huh? And that's in place of substance. And then if you read any of the modern philosophers, and a lot of the modern scientists too, they all deny that there's any sense qualities. There's no redness out there, no greenness out there, that's just the mirage, you know, of our... There's no sense qualities. There's nothing hot or cold out there, really. And of course, when you describe the world mathematically, there are no sense qualities, because there's no sense qualities in math. Yeah. Short of you, though, I would point out an interesting thing, you know, he says, though, but when you read instruments, you make use of the sense qualities. You know, black mark here, or blue column going up or something, right? So, we can't read instruments and do science without using sense qualities, but in our scientific picture of the world, there's no sense qualities. Kind of a strange situation to be in, right? And then in mathematics, there's no end or purpose. My brother Mark used to talk about that, say, you know, we don't say that the geometrical sphere is smooth and so it can roll away out of danger, right? Or that the pyramid is pointed to protect itself, you know, like the porcupine has these things that take from being bitten, you know. We never give any reason, right, huh? But it's better for it to be this way, right, huh? It's better that the triangle has its interior angles, its interior right angles. No, it just has to be that way, but not better, just the way it is. So, that's very characteristic. The moderns tend to see the world as a world without sense qualities, without substance, and without purpose. That's the influence of the customs, yeah. I guess this seems to be, this whole worldview seems to be one of the main reasons why, because in Fides et Ratio, our only father is continually mentioning that the modern world is characterized by an anti-metaphysical stance. Yeah, but it's, this is part of that. But it's more basic, you know, it's against the things we learn in actual philosophy, right? Sure, yeah. Okay, okay. So, would that be correct if I'm not, if it wasn't all about the sayings? Yeah, but I think you could say, you know, it starts right here in the study of the natural world, right? Yeah, I agree. Now, I mean, I have a colleague, you know, who was converted to the modern philosophy in a way, you know, you've converted into this business of denying the sense qualities, right? Right, no? Mm-hmm. You see? You'd be so convinced by the arguments of the modern philosophers that the sense qualities don't exist, you know, that, to quote somebody, I forget who it was, you know, this would be a sign of irrationality that you'd see that there aren't any sense qualities. Oh. In other words, if you're still holding on to the reality of sense qualities, this is reason to call it question your irrationality. So, if you're accustomed to this kind of knowledge, right, then you're accustomed to seeing the world without any sense quality, right, and without any substance, you know, without any purpose. And if this is the only thing you're accustomed to as far as the natural world is concerned, and it seems unscientific, right, irrational to talk about inter-purpose, huh? Mm-hmm. Now, apropos of that, I sometimes bring in Sir Arthur Eddington, huh, who is kind of interesting. Sir Arthur Eddington is a British mathematician, physicist, and so on, and he's the one who actually conducted the first team to confirm the general theory of relativity. I guess he's the one who told von Einstein, told him, your theory's been confirmed, and Einstein says, I knew it would be. And, of course, then, the results of it, you know, the official announcement of which, you know, and they had the thing packed with scientists from everywhere, you know, and he didn't know the man who presented it. But anyway, he has one of his books, a very interesting image, too, about this thing. It says a man goes down to the ocean, right, and he casts his net into the ocean, and he gets a bunch of fish, right, and he pulls it on shore, and he examines the fish, and he finds that he has no fish shorter than that, right? And he's caught. And year after year, he goes down, and he casts his net into the ocean. He never picks up a fish smaller than that. And finally, he concludes that there's no fish in the ocean shorter than that. Along comes the ichthyologist, and he says, just a minute now. Now, I could have told you before, you started casting the net in there, right, that you would not find ever in your net a fish any smaller than that. Why not? Well, examine your net, see? Your net is not designed to catch a fish shorter than that, even if there's one out there. It's not care how many times you've thrown your net into the ocean and never found a fish smaller than that. That's no proof there is no such fish, right? Is it? It's like a man saying, you know, I've never heard of color. Have you ever heard of color? Huh? Therefore, there's no... I've been hearing things all my life and never heard of color. So I don't think color exists out there. That's absolutely absurd, right? Because the ear is not designed to, what, to catch a color, even if there's a color out there, right? See? So you might say that a mathematical net is not designed to catch and end your purpose. Even if there's one out there, right? So the fact that end or purpose never showed up in a mathematical net is no reason to say there's no such thing out there. Now, if that was an argument, you'd have to say also that there's no matter in the world around us. I sometimes take the words of one of the great physicists of the 20th century in this regard, Erwin Schrodinger. Schrodinger is responsible for the Schrodinger equation in modern physics and so on. But he's the physicist who perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics, huh? And when he perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics and published it and so on, that same year, Heisenberg came out with a mathematical scheme for quantum mechanics, huh? And the physical world, meaning the world of physicists, was amazed to see there are two mathematical formalisms that both, what, fitted the fact. They both seemed to be true, huh? And then, subsequently, Schrodinger wrote another paper where he showed, you know, the equivalence, right, ultimately of his mathematics with Heisenberg, right? But sometimes it's more convenient to use one rather than the, what, other, right, huh? I mention all that just as background to say that if anybody understands the mathematical theory of matter as a mathematical aspect, it would be Schrodinger, right? Because he's the man who perfected the mathematics of quantum, of wave mechanics, which was used to talk about the atom, right? At the same time that Heisenberg and Born perfected the mathematics of quantum mechanics, but he showed the equivalence of the two, right? But anyway, one of his papers, Schrodinger says, The modern atom consists of no stuff at all. I know. I know. There's absolutely no stuff there. It's a purely mathematical theory of matter. It contains no stuff. There's no matter there. And he compares it to the mathematical theory of matter that Plato gives in the Tomalus, right? Which is a geometrical one for earth, air, fire, and water. But it's all in terms of geometrical figures. There's no matter there. So, if you say that because I haven't found an end in my mathematical net, therefore there's no end in the actual world, you'd have to say also there's no matter there. Which is hard to say, right? And maintain, huh? They usually don't go that far. But there was concern in Moscow, you know, when the Communist Party was still in control. There was some concern, you know, that science is not proving Marxism-Leninism because Marxism-Leninism is Daletical-Materialism, right? And matter seemed to be disappearing from modern science, right? So there's some question about the doctrinal purity of modern science, right? But it's not really an argument against it being matter, right? It doesn't appear in a mathematical net, huh? So likewise, huh, but, you know, assuming that matter exists and so on, and you see, therefore, that the mathematical net not catching matter is not a reason to say it isn't there, right? Well, then the same thing would be applied to N, right? But again, as I say, men who are accustomed to this kind of knowledge, and this is what dominates the modern world, right? And of course, with all the technological applications, you know, really it comes, you know, just really with electricity as a result of this, right? I mean, our society now is, what, can't survive without this, right? So this is really ingrained, right? You see? And, but if that's all you're accustomed to, well, then it's going to seem, what, unscientific, right? And that's going to influence people more than any argument against there being an end in the natural world, right? Because custom, for the most part, and even with the scientists, is stronger. I was quoting Max Planck, you know, but Niels Bohr is supposed to have kept his, what, paper on the atom, on the, applying the quantum to the atom, locked in his desk for almost a year. He was afraid to publish it for fear that he'd be, what, laughed at, huh? Right? And when Louis de Broglie, huh, came out with the idea of wave mechanics, huh, the reaction was, they called it Le Comité Francaise, you know, there's supposed to be the national theater there in France, right? Le Comité Francaise. I mean, if he's a Frenchman, that's what his theory of wave mechanics is, Le Comité Francaise. Well, fortunately for Louis de Broglie, Einstein was still, you know, quite a bit of authority. He said, just a minute now. It might be something what Louis de Broglie says. And let's test it. And so they tested it in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, and exactly what Louis predicted took place, right? But no, it's the first reaction was, look, what he thought it was, right? You're going to be laughed at because your ideas are, what? Not customary, right? See? Now, if I walked into class with a toga on, right? Which would be customary, maybe to wear it in Greece, you see? Or, you know? I'd be laughed at, right? I can't. So the force... I guess I did arrest somebody in New York with a toga. So, I think this is more important than the arguments as far as why so many people might deny that nature acts for an end, and more important than the misunderstandings, too. But neither the misunderstandings nor the custom are a reason for saying that nature doesn't act for an end. But you have to be aware of those and how much they influence people. Okay? But now, finally, we come down to the arguments for or against, right? And we have to try to understand those arguments, and then weigh them, and whichever side we think the truth is, before our mind can rest, we have to answer the arguments on the other side, right? Aristotle gave the five or so main arguments for saying that nature does make things for an end. And that's the first text I've given you there. And then, I've given you three main arguments that you hear in various forms in the world against nature acting for an end, partly in ancient times and more modern times. Then I restate Aristotle's arguments, expanding on some of them, and actually taking his third argument and making two separate arguments out of it, right? So, eventually, I gave you six arguments there, right? Since six outweighs three, but in quality as well as, I think, in quantity, then I reply to the three arguments on the opposite side, right? Okay? The first thing is to go through the arguments. Now, sometimes, I take Aristotle's five arguments, and as I say, I make two arguments out of the three ones, so we end up with six arguments. But now, the first two arguments of Aristotle has something in common, right? They're separate arguments, and each is a good argument, but together they're even strong, right? Okay? And the first two arguments are based upon observation of nature's production of the good, and something about nature's production of the good and the way it produces the good that leads our mind to conclude that nature is directed towards the good, right? It just didn't happen, right? Okay? Then Aristotle's third argument, which I've made two arguments out of, and therefore our third and fourth arguments I will give, are arguments drawn from human art acting for you, right? Okay? Okay? And two different ways you can reason from what we all know, that human art acts for an end, how we can reason from that to nature, in fact, acting for an end. Okay? So my third and fourth arguments will have that in common. They both start from something everybody knows, that human art at least acts for an end. And two different ways of reasoning from that, one going through all the arts, or making use of all the arts, and the other making use just of those arts in health nature. Okay? Then Aristotle's fourth argument, but our fifth, since we made two out of that three one, is what I call the inductive argument, right? And we'll try to do some justice to it, but the more intimate your experience is of even the lowly insects that he calls upon, right? The more convincing that fourth argument is of his or our fifth argument. Okay? But it's very much an inductive argument, huh? And then his fifth argument, or our sixth argument, is going back to something we saw before about matter being for the sake of form, right? It's a little more. General argument, and the first two arguments, and even the third and fourth, or in the fifth one, they're always up to that. The emphasis is more upon seeing this in living things, right? In animals and plants, right? The last argument is a more general one, huh? But in their purpose is more obvious in the biological world than in the, what, in non-living world, huh? It's hard to see a purpose for water, for example, unless you get into living things, right? With an eye or an ear or teeth, it's kind of hard to deny in their purpose, huh? It's interesting that the great physicists like Niels Bohr, for example, or even Heisenberg, huh? They're quite open to the idea of in their purpose in the living world, right? And more so than some biologists, right? I mean, it's kind of funny, because here are biologists imitating, you know, they have this respect for the physical scientists, huh? Because that's the oldest part of modern science, is they try to imitate it, right? And imitate its neglect of yin, right? Even though they're very subject matter, but seem to call them back to the end of their purpose. And, you know, some, just very recently, some biologists, like Denton and so on in Australia, have started to bring out they didn't actually end. But the physicists, the great physicists, like Bohr and... And Heisenberg were already open to this, huh? So in a sense, it's interesting how the great minds sometimes see better than their followers, their fawning or flattering or enthusiastic followers, see the limitations of their ideas, huh? They say that Sir Isaac Newton didn't think he knew why the apple falls to the ground or the stone falls to the ground, that the editor of his works here made it appear as if Newton had fallen across gravity, right? But Newton himself said, I don't know why they fall to the ground, but I can calculate the way which they fall and so on, right? I think it's an interesting point, because when Albert Einstein went to England, he gave his famous talk on Newton, right? And he said he admired Newton more for knowing what he didn't know than even for what he did know, right? Well, everybody else thought that Newton found the reason why the apple fell on his head. And Newton himself said, I don't know. You see? I think it's kind of an interesting example, but there are many other examples of that in history, right? Where the great mind, right, sees how far he's gotten better than his, what, admiring, but indiscreet, enthusiasm of some of the followers, right? So let's look at the first two arguments. Now, the first argument is based on the fact that nature, and animals, and plants, you might say, produces the good almost all the time. Almost all of this, right? It rarely, what, fails, right, huh? Okay? So if you look at the parts of your own body, they are well-arranged and well-ordered, right? Okay? And you look at the body of an animal, right, or a plant, the parts of where they should be, right, the ears and so on, the teeth there in the mouth or on the side of your body or somewhere, right? Or on the side of your stomach or something. And the so-called defective baby is not the usual baby that's born, right? And even the so-called defective baby has, well, maybe one or two organs that have a problem, and it can be very serious, but how many organs are there that are not defective, right? Okay? In themselves, they may be affected by the one that is defective, but, you see? So, I mean, almost always nature produces the good, right? Okay? Now, if nature was producing the good by luck or by chance, it wasn't directed towards the good, you'd expect it to produce the good, what? Rarely. Rarely, like the things that happen by luck or by chance, right? Because Aristotle's taking this up after he's shown what luck or chance is, right? But you can get to the good by luck or by chance, but it's something that happens, what? Rarely, right? Okay? By nature, in animals and plants, it can be used to be good almost always, huh? So this is the fact of experience, right? Okay? And we'll develop that even more when we come back to the, what? When the reply to the third argument against it. Okay? But just to dissipate that a bit here, right? I always take a very simple example in class, and I say, you have a wooden chair there, you know, one of the legs there is broken, huh? And you want to replace that leg, right? Now, if I go down to the wood shop there and I cut a piece of wood at random, right? Just any length. What are the chances of I getting the right length? Well, there's really only one length that is right for that chair, right? And there's an infinity of lengths that are too long or too short, right? So if I'm not intending the right length there, the good, right? Just cutting, you know, just cutting. You say, practically, you know, my chances of getting, what? The right length, huh? And that's an extremely simple thing, though, compared to an eye or ear, you know? All the things got to be right, not in their size, but in their arrangement, right? So, if nature was not directed towards the good, did anyone produce the good almost always good? Okay? Do you see that? That's the first argument, huh? And since you put it into form from on to like, there's also kind of either or, right? Nature produces the, what? Good because it's directed towards it or produces the good by, what? Chance, right? Unintended, huh? The things that happen by chance happen rarely, but nature produces the good almost always, right? Therefore, it must be directed towards the good, huh? Do you see that? Okay? Plus, it's based upon the way nature is seen to produce the good, huh? Now, the second argument is based upon another fact of the way nature produces the good in animals and plants. And that is that nature produces the good by going through an ordered number of steps, huh? Such as to result in the good. So, the production, let's say, of a piece of broccoli plant, right? Nature doesn't start just anywhere. It starts with a particular seed, right? And then, from that seed, eventually develops the plant, or in the case, an animal. An animal. And there's a definite series of steps that goes through, right? And in the book of embryology, we, what, actually enumerate the steps, right? So, you talk about where the human body is at a week or two weeks or three weeks, right? When the heart starts pumping and so on, right? So, such as nature operates, Sarah Stahler says, right? So, does it act, right? So, by going through an ordered number of steps, such as to result in the good, it must be, what, acting for the sake of the good. And he compares it to what we do in art a bit, where if I follow the recipe for a lemon-erang pie, is it by chance a lemon-erang pie rather than a chocolate cream pie? No. There's an ordered number of steps there, right? Starting with these ingredients and going through these steps, such as to result, if you follow it correctly, to in a meringue pie, right? And it's not by chance then, right? To end up with a meringue pie. So, nature does the same thing there. It goes through an ordered number of steps such as to result in something good. And again, that's contrary to the idea of nature just happening to produce this, huh? Because when things just happen, anything might lead to anything, right? I might run into your car and end up burying you, as an example I gave there from the Wister newspaper, you know. You said to me, I'm going to go to the restaurant and meet somebody I haven't seen for 10 years, right? But I might have met this person in any of those numbers of ways, right? So, the fact that nature is apt to go through an ordered number of steps, such as to result in the good in animals and plants is a sign that that's the way it's apt to operate them. So, notice, those two are separate arguments, and each one, I think, is good, and, but together they're even stronger, right? The fact that nature both produces the good most of the time, and it does so in an orderly way, huh? Both of which are contrary to which is happening to produce the good, huh? Now, the third and fourth arguments, kind of two ones out of Aristotle's third one, the starting point, of course, is something we all know, that human art, huh, acts for the good, it acts for an end. Now, how can we reason from human art acting for an end, for the good, to nature also, right? Well, one way of doing this is to reason from all human arts, huh? Okay? And two things we notice about all human arts, huh? Excuse me, rather. I don't know whether we're around. He's getting a little back. What the term is going to be is basically this. We know that human art acts for an end. What we're going to point out is that human art cannot act for an end without imitating what nature is doing. Now, if human art just sometimes acted in the way nature acted, you'd say, well, that's an interesting coincidence, right? We're going to try to show that human art, which we know acts for an end, cannot act for an end without imitating what nature is already doing, right? And what is it that nature already does that human art has to imitate in order to itself act for an end? Well, we see in animals and plants that nature makes each part out of a material that is suitable for its function. So I always take the mouth, a very obvious example. It's made my teeth and my tongue out of a different material, right? Or it's made my heart and my bones out of a different material, right? And I'd be in a sad state if my teeth were made out of what my tongue is made out of and vice versa. Or if my heart was made out of bone, what my bones are made out of so I'd get a contract and so on, right? And if my bones are made out of what my lips are made out of I'd get the floor in, you know, in a pile, you see? So, as a matter of fact, in the parts of my body and the same with the parts of the cat's body or the tree, nature has made that part out of a material suitable for its function, as a matter of fact. The second thing that nature has done is to give that matter a form that is suitable to its function. So nature's given the teeth in the front of my mouth a different shape than the teeth in the back, right? And its shape in front is suitable to bite a piece of apple off, right? And the shape of the teeth in the back is suitable to chew that apple off, right? And if you feel the inside of your teeth in front here, it doesn't go straight up, but it's like that, curving back, right? When it went straight up, you'd be getting food stuck there all the time. But when it's like that, curved, when you bite it off, it starts to go back to the, what? Chewing teeth, right? Okay? So those are the two things we see nature doing, huh? Now, can human art act for an end without making what it makes out of material suitable for its use? I don't know. If it made the chair out of paper, you'd be on the floor, let me tell you something, right? If it made the saw out of cardboard, right? It wouldn't serve the purpose of sawing wood, right? So nature or human art, which we know acts for an end, right? It cannot act for an end without imitating nature's making materials, things out of a material suitable for the function. Likewise, human art cannot act for an end without giving that matter a form suitable for its use. Like the chair, right? Or the saw, you know? Okay? But it doesn't give the pillow the shape of a saw or the saw the shape of a pillow, right? We've got to do its function, right? So the force of this argument consists now in seeing then that it's impossible for human art to act for an end and we know for sure that it does act for an end but it's impossible for it to act for an end without imitating what nature's doing. Now we say imitating, doing something like it but something that nature originally had done because nature's older than us, huh? Now the fact that not only is it always but it's impossible for human art to act for an end without imitating nature, that's a very good sign that nature must be acting for an end. Sometimes I take an example from philosophy, a little bit of an argument. The most commonly used work in introduction to philosophy is the Apology, right? And you'll find most philosophers, you know, talking about what Socrates is kind of a model of what a philosopher is, right? On that call, you're just saying that today, you know? And now, if you can't philosophize without in some way imitating Socrates, right? That's a pretty good sign that Socrates must have been doing something like what? Philosophy, right? You see the point, right? So here, we're giving a sign, a very good sign that nature is acting for an end is the fact that human art, which we're sure is acting for an end cannot act for an end without imitating what nature is doing. That is to say, making, what, things out of materials suitable for their function or use and giving those, that matter, a form suitable for the function of that thing, okay? Now, the other argument from human art acting for an end is taken from those parts that, what, help nature, right? Like the ones we mentioned before, the medical art, for example, or the art of lodging. Brother examples would be the art of farming, right? The art of gardening, right? So seeds will fall to the ground and grow into plants without man, right? So what is the farmer doing? He's helping those seeds to grow into plants and healthy plants and so on, right? The doctor, right, is helping women in nature to push the baby out of the woman, right? The magician is helping the mind, right? To give birth to thoughts and develop its thoughts. Now, like all arts, these arts that help nature are acting for an end, huh? Acting for the good, huh? But you can't act for an end or the good in helping another, right? Do what he's trying to do, if that other itself is not trying to do something good or to act for an end, huh? Sometimes I take a homely example, you know, I say, sometimes when you're hired, you know, first day on the job, they're kind of breaking you in, you know? And they'll say to you something like, you know, I'm looking for something for you to do. Go over and help Joe there, okay? Now you're going to help somebody who's there. Well, if you can't figure out what Joe's trying to do, if Joe's not trying to accomplish anything at all, how can you go over there to help Joe, right? You know? You've got to in some way see what Joe's trying to do, and then you, you know, like you suddenly, you know, spontaneously go over and help somebody, right? You've got to kind of see what they're trying to achieve otherwise. You say, hey, we wouldn't be acting really for purpose in helping them, right? So if the human arts had helped nature, if the medical doctor there is acting for an end of their purpose in helping nature do what it's doing, then nature must be trying to do something, right? Okay. Now the fourth argument of Aristotle, but our fifth one, very interesting, I call it the inductive argument, and as I say to the students, we can't leave justice to it in the classroom. It's interesting that Aristotle goes all the way down to the insects there, right? Because action for an end is so familiar to us with the, what, cat or the dog that we sometimes don't, aren't struck by it, huh? When we go down to these lowly insects, and we see action for an end that are really struck by them. And Aristotle makes a very interesting observation, he says, so much does action for an end appear in what the bee or the ant or the other insects do, that some people wonder whether they have a mind, right? Okay. And that's what Aristotle is saying, right? He's not saying that the insect has a mind, right? In fact, if you know what a mind is, as we've been taught by our teacher, Anax Agrius, you might eventually conclude that the insects don't have a mind. Let me look at how we do that, right? Aristotle's not even asking whether they do or not have a mind, right? He's saying the fact that people wonder whether they have a mind is that they associate action for an end with a mind, right? And so much do they see action for an end here, that they wonder whether they have a mind, these insects, right? Okay? Now, I say to really do justice to this, you'd have to go and study the insects, you know, in some detail, right? Like Aristotle did. And the next best thing would be to get a book on the spider or the ant and read in detail, right, what these things do, you know? And I'll give a few simple examples. Let's say the spider net, right?