Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
Lecture 48: Matter, Form, and Their Union in Natural Substances

Transcript
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Everybody hands, okay, to page 5 here at the bottom of page 5, 4, okay, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, ordinance bloom in our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelic Doctor. Pray for us. Help us to understand all that you have written. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. So, having in the first two readings shown that matter and form came to sensible substance, in readings 3 and 4, he's taking up form and matter. And in the third reading last time, you saw him speaking about form. Now, in the fourth reading, he's going to talk about matter, and about their union, of course, in the fifth reading. Now, Thomas, when he's commenting on the fourth reading there, he says that Aristotle compares matter to the things that come to be from matter, and then he compares matter to the other causes that are involved, interact with it, and then he speaks of matter with reference to the change of coming to be and ceasing to be. So, in the beginning of the fourth reading, he's going to point out that although there might be one matter behind all things, in a remote way, the proximate matter, will be different. It should not remain hidden about the material substance, that even if all things come from the same first cause, or the same first causes, and the same matter is as beginning for the things coming to be, yet there is its own for each. For example, a phlegm, the sweet, or the fat, and a vile, the bitter, or something else. Well, perhaps these come from the same. Consequently, you can say that there are many, what, matters of the same thing in a certain order, when one is the matter of the other. For example, phlegm comes from fat and sweet, if the fat is from the sweet. Now, it's a little bit like if you say, you know, are sentences made out of words or letters, right? Well, it's made out of words, but the words are made out of letters, so in some sense you can say the sentence is made out of what? Letters, but letters is like the remote matter, right? And the proximate matter is the words, huh? Now, at the end of this first complete paragraph in page 6, he's kind of obscurely touching upon the fact that although we usually say that the thing made out of matter comes to be from the matter, right? Sometimes we use the word from in the reverse direction. So I might say that a brick wall comes to be from bricks, and bricks being the matter of which the brick wall is made, but in another sense of from, you could say that from the brick wall, there comes to be what? Gricks, right? Or if you follow modern chemistry, you might say from hydrogen and oxygen comes to be water, right? And that's why hydrogen gets its name, hydrogen, it generates water. But from water comes what? Hydrogen and oxygen, but that's a different sense of from, right? And we're more apt to say, or more fundamentally, that the whole comes to be from the, what? Or parts. Hearts, yeah. The word from is also used in talking about the mover or the maker, right? I'm just looking at the article in the Summon there, where he's talking about the appropriation of things to the Trinity and so on, and St. Paul says, from him and to him and in him. And Thomas is saying, well, from him could be appropriate to the Father, right? Through him, to the Son, in him, to the Holy Spirit. But then he starts to explain what it means, or why from him is said to be from the Father. It's not from the matter, but from the, what? Maker, right? Okay, so, but it comes from vial when vial is broken down into the first matter. Okay, that's the reverse process we're talking about, right? Okay. For this comes from that in two ways, in two senses. Either because it will be further along the way, and then you're going from the matter, right, towards the final product, or because it is taken apart into its beginning. And that's like getting the bricks from the brick wall, right? Okay, no big deal there, huh? Now, the second complete paragraph in page six, he's beginning that second part of the fourth reading, where he's going to compare matter to the other, what? Causes, right? Okay. Of course, the first thing that might come to your mind is that if many things come to be from the same matter, why are they different, right? And that could very well be because of the, what? Mover or maker, right? Imposing a different form upon the matter. And so he gives a simple example of that. It is possible for other things, things that are other in kind, to be generated when the matter is one, because of the moving cause, the mover or the maker. So chest and a bed might both be made from the same, what? Wood, right? But the difference between them comes from the mover or the maker. But as Thomas says, unless you, lest you misunderstand that and say, well, then he can make just anything from matter, right? Then he says, well, if you go back, especially to the approximate matter, you can't make it from just any matter. You've got to have one that's appropriate to it. But necessarily the matter of some different things is other, such as a saw could not come to be from wood, nor is this an ability to the moving cause. For it could not make a saw of wool or of wood or of paper or something like that, right? Okay. But if the same thing can be made from a different matter, it is clear that the art in the beginning as mover is the same, huh? So if I'm making a, what, wooden chair and a, what, maybe a metal chair, right? The form I have in mind might be the same, right? I'm going to realize in this particular matter or in that particular, what, matter. For if both the matter and the mover were different, so also what comes to be would be different, huh? Okay. Now, the next paragraph here is partly because he has in mind something we saw back in the third book, huh? But something you see in the history of the Greek natural philosophers. I guess we looked at the fragments one time, didn't we? Yes. A little bit. And of course, the first people looked for only one, what? Cause. It's just matter is going to explain everything, right? Sure. And so, in order to get everything out of the matter, they've got to have, what, some kind of accidental collisions of matter and so on. And Aristotle was saying, well, no, you should state all the causes that are involved, huh? Which, you wonder, you know, with the, some of the evolutionary humanists, you know, some of them were atheists and so on. Which came first, the idea of evolution or the idea that matter is the beginning of everything, huh? Everything comes to be from matter. If matter is the only cause, really, huh? Then how do you get all this formal difference in the world, right? Well, evolution is trying to explain how this could happen, right? Even though it might not be sufficient to explain that, huh? So, when one seeks the cause, one should state all the causes that happen to be. And he says it happened to be, because although he distinguishes, as you know, four kinds of causes, And he says it happened to be, because of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause. Thank you. Matter, that from which something comes to be, existing in it. And form, which completes the definition of the thing. And then the mover or maker, and then the end. You don't look for all four causes everywhere. Like in geometry, you say you look only for the four, right? So in 1.6, the cause, it says, one should state all the causes it happened to be, since the causes are said in many ways. As I've said more than once, I think, Aristotle distinguishes four kinds of causes that are found in the natural world, in the real world. But at the same time, this is a distinction of four meanings of the word, what? Cause. You can see that, right? You know, if I said, what's the cause of the chair? Or you'd probably jump and say, well, it's a carpenter, right? Okay? And maybe you wouldn't think of sitting as being a cause of the chair, but in some way, sitting is responsible for the chair. Because it's for the sake of sitting that he made the chair in the shape that he did make it. And in some way, wood is responsible for a wooden chair. Wouldn't be a wooden chair without wood. And in another way, right? The shape of the chair is responsible for its being a chair. But you might think of the mover or maker right away. Which is a kind of sign that the word cause here is not being used in just one sense. If the word cause was said equally of the wood and the shape of the wood and the carpenter and the sitting, you wouldn't know which one to say first, right? Like I'd say, I'm thinking of an animal, right? Well, animals said equally of dog, cat, horse, elephant, horse. So if I'm thinking of an animal, what animal in particular am I thinking of? You'd have no more reason to think that I'm thinking of dog than cat or horse than dog or cat or elephant or something else, right? You see? And so sometimes you have somebody just seizing upon one kind of cause. It's just that we're the only kind of cause. But you wouldn't do that with animals. Think of a dog as the only animal. And when, say, David Hume discusses causality, he kind of jumps to the mover maker right away, as if that would be the only kind of cause to be considered. And actually, as you see in the history of Greek natural philosophy there, the material cause is the kind of cause that is most known and most undeniable. And everybody seems to admit that kind of cause. And the questions then are, is there other kinds of causes besides that, right? And so he kind of begins with the most known here. And so he exemplifies with man, huh? What is the cause of man as matter? Is it the menstrual fluid, huh? I don't know if that's good biology. I suppose the, you know, you know how blood feeds the whole, what? Body, what? It seems to be true, right? Yeah. Okay. What then is the mover? Is it not the seed, huh? What as the form? The what was to be? What is that for the sake of which? Well, the end or purpose of man, huh? And he says that perhaps both of these are the same. He's hinting at the fact that sometimes the form and the end are the same. When we say the form is the end of the, what? Generation, huh? Okay. But then you may have an end beyond what you are. And then the end is not the same as the form. And then he says it is necessary to say the proximate causes. What is the matter? Well, of course, in the older natural philosophy, the first kinds of matter were earth, air, fire, and water. But you would not be giving the matter of man if you went back to that remote cause and we would talk about flesh and blood and bones or whatever the proximate one is. But the thing's own matter, meaning it's proximate matter. So he says about natural and general substances, which are the ones like man or the dog or the tree, is necessary to search thus. If one is going to search rightly, the causes are such and so many, it's necessary to know the causes. But then he has this position about the sun and the moon and the stars, right? And as far as he could see, or remember, the sun, the moon, and the stars seem to go on forever, right? They don't seem to be generable and, what, reputable. Now, of course, the fact that we have not seen them really change is not a necessary reason to say they don't change, but it's a probable reason, huh? But Thomas, sometimes, when he comments on this, he'll say, well, maybe it takes longer than the lives of many men, right, huh? Aristotle and Thomas thought that light takes no time to illuminate the room, and we can't perceive any time that light takes on with ordinary senses, huh? But you can say the same thing that Thomas says about the heavenly bodies. Maybe light is so fast you can't see, and it takes very ingenious, what, instruments, huh, and apparatus to detect the speed of light, huh? But it's so fast compared to anything that we, what, can observe, right? That seems kind of incredible, right? So Aristotle thought that the sun, moon, and the stars have an ability to be in different places, huh? They're subject to change of place, but they're not subject to change of quality or substance or something of this sort. And it's a good thing. Aristotle said that the sun is a stone on fire, and they say perhaps he got the idea from these meteors, which are rocky in character, and occasionally there's a meteor that hits the earth, still burning because it's so big. And we know that there was, in his part of Greece, some meteors that came out of the sky, but still burning when they hit the earth. There was one down in the southwest in that state, huh, that the Indians used to tell the white men about. And, you know, it was an Indian tale or something like that. Well, now I guess they can see the evidence for it, this burning rock, huh? So that makes an impression upon you, right? And you know how there are what we call falling stars. They don't think there are any stars, but they're really meteors. But they look like a star falling, don't they, huh? So maybe those stars are just, what, rocks and fire. And Aristotle said, well, if they're rocks and fire, they would have burned out a long ago. And, of course, it's simply amazing how much energy the sun gives off. I mean, they say we're about, what, 93 million miles from the sun, huh? And all these plants going out here depend upon the sun and so on. But, you know, if you figure out geometrically, you know, if you draw an imaginary sphere, 93 million miles with a diameter, or a radius of 93 million miles, right? And we're getting a very small part of what the sun is, what, emitting, right? Yeah. Just imagine, how can it do that, right? I've been told that Heisenberg's pupil there, Weitzker, right, in the 20th century there, gave an explanation of why the sun can go on so long, right? I mean, maybe it is gradually dying, you know? But it is a kind of amazing thing to see that it goes on and on and on. And it's certainly not fire in the ordinary sense because that, you know, even the great fire of London is not going to last for a century or something, right? The forest fires in California, I mean, they talk about controlling them, but they're going to, you know, eventually burn out, right? By nature, if not by man, put out. So Aristotle, I think, was correct in saying, I mean, the sun is something quite different from, you know, ordinary fire. It's a rock of the fire, right? So he's saying that there would be another account of natural and eternal substances as he thought the sun and the moon and the stars were, huh? Or perhaps some have no matter in the kind of matter as we have down here, or not such as we have down here. It's corruptible, but only matter that it's movable according to what? Place, huh? He then finally compares it to accidents, huh? Nor does matter belong to those things which exist by nature, but are not substances. Their subject is the, what? Substance, huh? Notice there's a difference here between the accident and substance which exists and matter and form in the genus of substance, huh? Because the matter of the genus of substance, considered by itself, would have no actuality at all. It's pure ability, right? The substance in which an accident exists is an actual substance, huh? Kind of funny, I was reading in Thomas today, he was talking about how given the simplicity of God, right? There's no distinction in God of matter and form, no real distinction of matter and form, and there's no real distinction of substance and, what? Accident, right? Okay? So if you say Socrates is wise, let's say, or Socrates is just, right? Socrates' wisdom or his virtue of justice is an accident existing in Socrates. But it's not the same thing as Socrates, huh? There's a real distinction between Socrates and his wisdom or Socrates and his, what? Justice, right? But wouldn't we say that God is, what, wise or God is just, huh? The multiplicity is in our thinking, in our thoughts, but not in what we think about God, right? Because God and his justice are not two different things, huh? Or God and his, what, wisdom are two different things, huh? But then, when we talk about, say, God and divine nature, well, the divine nature would be said to be in God, right? But is there, again, a real distinction between God and his divine nature? Like there is in the things that have matter and form, no. So we'd say that God is his Godhead, right? His divine nature. But it's interesting that we can't escape this way of talking that we have of material things, huh? When we talk about even God, huh, in theology. But in general, I mean, apart from the particular difficulties of talking about God, why does this run through our language, the, what they sometimes call the abstract word, and the concrete word, huh, like justice and just, health and healthy, right? What's the reason why we have that in our language, huh? Well, it's because our mind is naturally turned towards these material things, which are composite of matter and form. And so we sometimes distinguish, right, the composite and its form, talk about the form by itself. And so when I take the abstract, health, I'm thinking of the form by which the healthy is healthy. And so you have these two words, health and healthy, huh? And they correspond to real distinction in material things. But then when you talk about God, we can say God is good, but we can say God is his own, what, goodness, huh? Because there's no distinction of matter and form with God, in the abstract, in God. But nevertheless, we have two thoughts, right? And they can both, to some extent, be applied to God, right? Because if you merely said that God is goodness, then you wouldn't be saying that God is good. Because goodness signifies that by which the good is good. So you want to signify that God is really good, so we say God is good. But good signifies, is what signifying is what has goodness, right? And that might seem to imply a distinction between the have or what he has. And so to avoid that composition in God, we say, but God is his own goodness, okay? But in that sense, we never have a name that is adequate to God, right? And we can't really transcend those two ways of speaking about God, because this is a connection, you might say, to our mind. Inborn from the fact that, as you saw in the third book about the soul, that our reason's own object is the what it is of something sensed or imagined. And so it can't, and all those things are a composite of matter and form, something like that. So that we have to understand other things in the way we understand material things, but then we have to negate in order to not attribute our way of knowing to the thing itself. So we can't get a word that's really adequate to God. So it's interesting, we have here the distinction of matter and form, and also substance and accident, and how that comes up even in consideration of the Trinity. When we get to that truth as a Trinity, someday Thomas was answering an objection, you know, about the divine persons being these subsisting relations. And if it's the relation that constitutes that person, like fatherhood, right? Fatherhood and the father are the same. Because in God, the aspects and the concrete don't really differ, right? Although fatherhood signifies, has that by which the father is the father. Okay? But the father and his fatherhood are the same thing. And that's denying, you know, the distinction of matter and form. But then you have something else that is the father, like he's the, what, common breather of the Holy Spirit, right? Well, that's like accident to subject, right? But in God, there's no real distinction. So between the father and the common breather, there's no real, what, distinction. So he goes back to those two kinds of composition in the creature. And you get to the question on the simplicity of God, which is the first question, on the substance of God right after his existence, right? In the Summa Theologiae. There'll be one article that shows there's not a composition of matter and form in God, right? And another article that there's not a composition of subject and accident, right? So there's two different kinds of composition in creatures that have to be, what? Denied. Denied, yeah, yeah. But because our mind's adapted to thinking about such things, huh? We speak in those ways about God, but we have to negate the real distinction that there is in the creature between the form of what has the form and the subject and the accident, huh? So, kind of subtle, right? But here you see in the texture already that there's a difference here between the way in which a substance has matter in form and then the way you have this other composition of the substance with the accidents, huh? Because the accident is not really made out of matter in the way that the substance is. But the subject is a little bit like matter because it's able to receive the accidents. A little bit like matter is able to receive, what? So he says, nor does matter belong to those things which exist by nature but are not substances, the accidents. Their subject is a substance. And then he talks about the eclipse, cause of the eclipse. For example, what is the cause of the eclipse? What is its matter? There is none. But the moon, the substance, is what undergoes this eclipse, right? What is the cause of its mover and correct in the light? Well, the earth, right? Okay, the earth has come between the sun, I guess, and the moon, right? Okay. What's the cause in the sense of end or purpose, that for the sake of which? Well, he says, probably there is no that for the sake of which, huh? What's the purpose of the sun coming between the earth and the moon, right? That's very good, Don. My friend, Ward Murray, is telling me. Thank you. I studied at the University of Minnesota that this, there was a Tobin scholar there, you know, was saying Aristotle has this theory of there being four kinds of causes, and he applies it everywhere. You know, like, you look for four causes and everything, right? Well, Aristotle's saying there didn't seem to be the cause in the sense of it, you know? Now, he said, probably, Thomas says, because it's very difficult to study the sun, the moon, and the stars, right? But it seems to Aristotle that there probably is no, you know, inner purpose in this sort of thing. Hmm. Okay, the definition is as a form. This is obscure if the account or not with the cause, huh? Because this is the famous example of the posture of the living, huh? The full definition of the eclipse would say it's not only the lack of light, but the lack of light because of the, what, sun, or the moon, the earth coming between the sun and the moon, okay? Or he gives another example there, huh? Aristotle's quite interested, apparently, in sleep, huh? There's this crazy story I told you about Aristotle having a metal basin, you know, and holding a metal ball like this so that if he started to fall asleep, the ball would fall into his hand and wake him up, you know? I don't think he did that. He was kind of, you know, all kinds of stories, you know, floating around, you know, that have no basis, huh? And some of them are kind of funny, you know, and so on. But I know, um, somebody like Charles DeConnick, especially when he's younger, you know, he goes on into a day or two without sleep, right? He's thinking about something, you know, so. I'm kidding, he'd be any good in the second day, but. So there is something, you know, something that people can really, you know, get long and less sleep than most of us require, you know? I've known people, you know, get on four hours sleep at night, huh? I don't know if you can, some of you people can't, I don't know if you can. There's another kind of apocryphal story told about Aristotle. He'd been warning Alexander the Great about this beautiful young woman, huh? And she was a little bit annoyed with Aristotle doing this. So she decided to tame him, right? And she came to the point that she could get him down to all fours and ride him around the room like a horse, right? So one day she's riding around him on the horse and in comes Alexander the Great, huh? And, uh, what's this, you know, you've been warning me about this woman, you know? And so Aristotle's kind of, you know, impressed himself off and says, Look, she says, if she can do this to me who am old and wise, look what she can do to you who are young and foolish. There are these stories floating around, I don't believe them, you know, but they kind of, you know, make a good story to tell. It's just like a little bit frustrating reading Aristotle, you know, and make him a little more human. There's another story about him being kind of a foppy dresser, you know? Like some kind of other. So he gives the other example here of sleep, right? And of course he's saying it's not so clear now what it is that's undergoing, what? Sleep, huh? It has something to do with the senses, huh? But there was even a disagreement among the Greeks as to whether the heart or the brain was the, what, kind of center of these senses, yeah. Now in the last three paragraphs here on page seven, the last three paragraphs of the fourth reading, now he's going to make this third consideration of matter in comparison to coming to be and passing away and so on, huh? And a point that we saw somewhat earlier in the book here. It's kind of subtle what he's saying here. Since some things are and are not without coming to be and ceasing to be, such as points that they can be said to be, and in general forms, huh? So when I put the soft butter in the refrigerator, what comes to be? Yeah. Hard butter comes to be. Does hardness come to be? No way. You can say hardness didn't exist before, right? And now it exists, but did the hardness as such come to be? No. It was a hard butter that comes to be, right? So the forms as such don't come to be. There's many examples of this where, let's say I'm taller than my, what, son, right? And then he grows until he's taller than me. So now there's a change in me from what? Taller to shorter. Yeah, yeah. But is that really me changing as such? No. Something else. Changing, right? Okay. So forms, if you want to say forms come to be, as a heurist always says they're not coming to be, because they don't come to be as such, right? But if you want to say in some sense that the form comes to be, it comes to be when something else comes to be. And therefore it's said to come to be by accident or by happening, huh? Because it as such is not coming to be, huh? So we felt the problem before that the form came to be that you'd be making the form out of what? Matter, right? And therefore, since you can have different forms in the same matter, you'd have to have a form of a form, right? To distinguish one form from another form made out of the same matter. And then you have the same problem about that form, right? Because you have two different forms. And yet you have to have a form of the form of the form and the same one forever, right? So the forms as such don't come to be, right? And that does tell us something about forms in the sense of the angels. If they're just forms, right? And have no matter, then they can't come to be or cease to be even accidentally, huh? They're eternal things, huh? Once they're created, huh? They always will be. Strange, huh? But you kind of see something about that, right? Just as Plato thought of the forms, right, that he had, huh? As being eternal, right? And he's seeing some of the truth about not exactly what the nature of these, you know, separated substances are, but if they're form only, then they are, what? Ingenible and incorruptible. Quite a creature, huh? For the white does not come to be, but the white would, right? Hard is such that it doesn't come to be that the hard but or something. If everything that comes to be from something comes to be something. If everything that comes to be comes from something, comes to be something. Now looking back to natural philosophy. Not all contraries in some sense can come from one another, but it is in other ways. That a white man comes to be from a black man, that's kind of a strange example, right? I don't know if that happens. But you might say, as hard but it would come to be from soft but, right? But does the hard come to be from the soft? Well, the soft as such cannot become hard, huh? Now there's a apparent contradiction and change that the great Heraclitus said, right? Day and night are the same thing. Because we say day becomes night and night becomes day, right? Well, it's really the air that can have light or dark, yeah. Nor is there a matter of everything, but of those there is coming to be, but of those where there is coming to be in changing to each other. Whatever things are or are not about changing have no matter. That was a question back in the third book, you know. Is everything that comes to be comes to be by some kind of what motion, right? When the material world, this might be so, right? But Aristotle was kind of hinting at the idea of maybe there's something that, what we'd call creation, right? Now Suni's opinion there about the human soul, because he didn't think the human soul came to be by the transformation of matter. came to be by the human soul. He didn't think the human soul came to be by the human soul. came to be by the human soul. He didn't think the human soul He didn't think the human soul came to be by the human soul. He didn't think the human soul The human soul existed before the body, so it had to come into existence, right, by creation rather than by a transformation of some kind of matter. So Christel seems to have some idea of creation. Okay, now in the last two paragraphs he's talking about a little problem here. There is difficulty about how the matter reaches towards the contours. For example, if the body is healthy in ability and disease is contrary to health, is it therefore both in ability? And is water, wine, and vinegar in ability? Or is it the matter of one by having and by form, and of the other by lack and the corruption besides its nature? Well, notice an example of the body to being healthy or being sick. The body, you might say, is immediately has an ability for both. Just like the butter has an ability to be hard and soft, right? Okay. But does the water have the ability to become either wine or vinegar? Or does it have to become wine first, and then through the corruption of wine, you get what? Vinegar, right? Okay. Or is a body able to be what? Either alive or dead, it can become either one, right? Or must it first become alive, and then through the corruption of its being alive, it becomes dead? See? Or you could say the butter could be what? Immediately either hard or soft, or the body could be merely either healthy or sick, right? So there's a little difference here between how the body is to being healthy or sick, and how the water is to being wine and what? Vinegar. Or the body is to being alive and being dead, right? So, he continues that in the next paragraph. Further, there is a doubt why wine is not the matter of vinegar, or vinegar in ability, even though vinegar comes to be from it. And why the living is not in ability, to be the dead, right? And then he talks about the corruptions of these things, right? Now, you know, this probably looks back to the famous dialogue, the Phaedo, right? And I don't know if you've read the Phaedo, but Socrates is asking the question whether the human soul is a mortal or not, huh? And so, his first argument is very interesting, huh? Because he begins with an induction. An induction is the changes between contraries, huh? Okay? And so, it's the hard that is, what, softened. And it's the soft that is hardened. And it's the wet that dries out. And it's the dry that is moistened, huh? And it's the hot that becomes cold, and the cold becomes hot. And it goes through, you know, induction. So it seems that change is always between, what, contraries. Okay? Then Socrates says, now, since things are always changing, it's always changing. If there's changing from one contrary to the other, but not the reverse, would you continue to have both contraries in the world? No, see? And you can see, for example, that every year it goes from hot to cold, right? So that's a common change. When the sun goes down, it goes from hot to cold, huh? If there was never the reverse change, all things now would be what? Yeah. And it's always going from light to dark, every time the sun goes down, or any time you turn the lights off, it goes from light to dark, right? This is happening all the time. Things go from light to dark. So if things never went from dark to light, what would the world be like? It'd be all dark, right? Okay? And Socrates gets everybody to admit that, right? Okay? And then he says, now, living and dead are contraries. And he says, there is a change from the living to the dead, right? Okay? Now, if there was not the reverse change from the dead to the living, then everything would be dead now and nothing would be alive. Now, the students are a little bit bothered used by that argument, but I say, doesn't it follow from everything you admitted? You admitted the changes between contraries, right? And that one of the contraries would no longer exist in the world if there was change only in one direction, right? And then we applied it to living and the dead are contraries. Clearly, there's change in the living to the dead, right? And therefore, there ought to be what? If there's not the reverse change from the dead back to living, then now everything should be dead, right? Okay? So it's not there yet. Well, you know, sometimes students will object saying, well, I see people dying. I don't see the dead coming back to life, right? And I say, well, that's why we had a reason to it. If you saw it, we could just, you know, accept it, right? So it's a conclusion, right? And then, you know, I give these little simple comparisons, you know, if you saw people leaving houses all day long, as they are, and if nobody, you never saw anybody going into a house. If you saw people leaving houses all day long, what would be the houses by now? They'll be empty, yeah. So if walking around the neighborhood looking in the windows, you see there continues to be houses of people in them, what would you conclude? Yeah, maybe in the back door or track door or something. Or you see, you know, you go in a parking lot, people getting out of cars, in the supermarket, all day long getting out of cars, right? Okay? I suppose you never saw anybody getting into cars, people getting out of cars all day long, right? Well, if the reverse change didn't take place, or some people were also getting into cars, what would be the condition now of cars now? They'd all be empty, right? So you must conclude then that, although I don't see it, there must be people getting into cars as well as leaving them. So Socrates is saying then, death is the separation of the soul from the body. But souls must not only be separated from bodies, but must then be, what, joined to them again, right? And therefore, they must continue to exist after they separate from the body, so they can be joined again. Okay? Well, is the situation of wine, say, and vinegar, or living and dead, even one of his examples of Aristotle, is that the same as, let's say, the dishcloth being wet and the dishcloth being dry. And the dishcloth gets wet during the day and then it dries out, right? And the next day, the next time, it's used, gets wet again, right? And it dries out, you know? It goes back and forth, right? Well, are they alike? Is vinegar and wine like that? Vinegar seems to be really a corruption of wine, huh? And so you have a change from wine to vinegar. Sometimes my father-in-law would bring me one of his friend's wines, you know, they taste like vinegar, some of them are not too good. But once the wine changes to vinegar, you can't change back from vinegar to wine, huh? And Aristotle says the only way you could do this is to break it down, huh, and then start over again, huh? Break it down to like some first matter, right? And that's because these things can only come to be in a certain, what, order. I was applying that one day to modern philosophy, right? Modern philosophy is to philosophy like, what, vinegar is to wine, or the dead is to the living, right? It's a corruption of it, huh? Okay? So can you go from modern philosophy back to wood philosophy, from vinegar back to what? Why? Yeah, can you do that? Not directly. No, no. You have to go back to the very fundamentals again, huh? And build up to philosophy again, huh? You have to go back to the preceptics, right? And, uh, and, uh, gradually start to see things and build up to Aristotle. You can't really go from modern philosophy.