Wisdom (Metaphysics 2016)
Lecture 11: Wisdom as Speculative Knowledge and the Beginning of Philosophy

Transcript
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There's a connection between being certain and knowing the cause, because the cause tells you why something must be so, right? Now when you come to the fifth thing that he has now, it's more desirable for its own sake, right? Now, you know, a practical man might say, well, you know, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But remember how you spoke in the arts there, how the arts of what, you know, don't seem to be as wise as Shakespeare or something like that, right? I was telling you about even the painter there, right, huh? How the painter can do a painting where wherever you look, you're looking down. And I told you I bought this at Canaletto, you know, some paintings of Venice, right, huh? And on the right side of my room, looking at the painting, which is like in the center there, you know, and looking right down the canal. And then over there, over on this other side, and looking right down, right? There used to be a painting like that in the museum there in Boston there, you know, where you wish you went, you know, how did they do that, you know? It's amazing, you know, huh? You know? And they can do the eyes sometimes, you know, so the eyes seem to follow them around, you know? And my friend, watching her, makes, you know, fun of the servants there, you know, in the big houses in England, you know? There's something strange about that painting there, because the eyes, you know, follow them around, right? So you kind of admired that, right, huh? So the arts that are aiming at pleasure seem to be wiser, right, than the cook or the carpenter or something, right? And finally, you know, the chief artist seems to be wiser than the, what? Yeah. So McCarthy seems to be wiser than the men he's commanding, right, huh? Here at the time, McCarthy went up there and, right up in the front there, you know, and the guy kind of worried, you know, and he just killed a, you know, what do you call him, a sniper, you know? And he's going to keep whoring, McCarthy, and this is a dangerous place to be. So that's actually what you're supposed to do, he says. That's what you're supposed to do. He killed a sniper. Another example, you know, where the enemy strafed McCarthy's headquarters, you know, and the bullets came in to where, you know, his office, and the guy in the other office there, you know, the officer runs in to see if McCarthy's still alive or what, you know? McCarthy says, yes. Because I never thought that McCarthy was a little bit of an actor, you know, but you have to be a little bit of an actor there, you know, huh? So the chief artist seems to be wiser, right? So the wise man then would be like the chief artist, right? Now, he doesn't really deduce these things as explicitly as he might do, huh? Maybe in his lecture, I mean the lecture, you know, this kind of summary. But the last paragraph there on page four there of the second reading. From all the four said, right, the name sought, that is wisdom, falls in the same, what, episteme, huh? For it is necessary that this looks at the first beginnings and causes. For one of the causes is the good, and that for the sake of which, huh? Notice that that is touching upon the last two points, right? Because the end is what enables you to direct others, right? You know, at the end you're aiming at. And the chief artist knows what the end is, right? Other guys don't know the end, but just the means, but they've been told to do it this way. And also that it's more what? You're knowing a better thing, right? Okay? And this, when you study the causes, you find out that the end is the cause of all the other causes, huh? Okay? So wood gets to be the cause of a table because the carpenter, you know, because the carpenter, yeah, he shaped it, right? And the shape gets in there because the carpenter is the responsible shape getting in there. But why did he do this, right? So we could have, you know, look, he could set his books on it and so on. Or have his dinner on it or something, right? Okay? The chair is for the sake of sitting. That's why it's constructed the way it is, right? Why should this be a little bit of a tooth angle? I don't know. He just told me to put it in a little bit of a tooth angle. But it's for the sake of sitting, right? That's the reason why. Okay? In your philosophy, you learn some Greek doing. Okay. He's the chief artist there, right, huh? He knows down the road, right? He even helped me to read Gospel of St. John and the other things, right? Because that's in Greek, huh? Now, if you go back over these six things, you can kind of see that they do lead you to conclude that the wise man knows not just any causes, but the first causes. So I think I talked about the first thing, didn't I ask him? Did I? Why would it follow from his knowing the most universal that he knows the names of the first causes? Why was that? Did I explain that a little bit last time? Well, it's the connection between that, right? Because he's kind of concluding it from it, right? Right. Well, it's a distinguishing last time between two kinds of general or universality. In Latin, he used to always give us the universale in causando and universality in predicando, right? But speaking English, right, you know, the word general has two senses, right? One is something that is said of many things, right? And then the other is the general in the sense of Douglas Arthur, right? He's a universal cause, right? Commanding the whole of the army, right? Okay. Now, is there a connection between those two senses of general? Because they're not the same sense, right? Of course, you know, Descartes there, not Descartes, Hegel there, He's trying to deduce the whole universe from the most universal in predicando, right? The whole universe doesn't come from the most universal in predicando, but the more universal in causando, right? But take a simple example here, right? If you have a kingdom, right? Who's the top guy? The king, yeah. The top say moi, right? That's what the French king said, right? But under the king, he has a general, right, that commands his armies, right? So, the more fundamental cause is the king, right? The king tells the general he wants them to invade the other country or something. Now, the causality of the general extends to all the, what, soldiers. But the causality of the king extends to all the, what? Yeah. And which is said of more, citizen or soldier? Yeah. You could have a, you know, citizen army here, but every soldier would be a citizen, but not every citizen is a soldier, right? So, citizen corresponds to the causality of the king, because it extends in some way to everyone who's a citizen. The causality of the general extends just to everyone that is a, what, soldier. So, the more universal in predicando is what, citizen, the less universal, soldier. And the more universal cause is the king, and the less universal cause is the general. And so, citizen corresponds to a king, yeah, yeah. Now, in political philosophy, right, we ask the question, who is and who is not a citizen, right? And citizen is most universal, right? And we talk in political philosophy about government, right? They go together in the same knowledge, government and citizen, yeah. But the government governs everyone who is a, what, citizen, right? Okay. I am a father, right, huh? I try to rule three children, right? Yeah. But by. And that causality didn't extend to the whole, what, country, that alone the whole state, even this whole country. The neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, you see? So the governor of Iowa, his causality might extend to not every citizen, but to every Iowa, right? It doesn't tell the people of Nebraska what to do, right? Okay? See? But citizen is more general. Citizen is the United States than citizen of Iowa, right? And the president has more universal causality than the, yeah, yeah. But the government has a greater causality than the father. Father does, right? Okay? Grandfather got no more. So it makes sense, right? That if the wise man has a knowledge of all things in general, right, he knows what is said of all. As we learned in the fourth book, Wisdom is about being in one, right? This is said of everything. Then what kind of causes must he be considering? The cause of all, right? Okay? So the general extends to everybody in his army, right? He's a soldier, right? But the captain is just the company and the sergeant on his squad, right? Squad members and so on. Okay? But we say it's things that are, what, difficult to know, right? Oh, my gosh. The first cause would be most difficult to know if we know the effect before the cause and the cause before the cause of the cause, right? And therefore the last thing we'd seem to know would be the first cause, right? And it would be most difficult to know, even further away than the most universal in predication, huh? Okay? That's the way it said to be. He's more certain because he knows what? The causes, right? More than anybody else. Caused by something must be so, right? And he's most what? What's the fourth thing? Yeah. Well, okay. The man knows the first causes. Obviously most of all knows that, right? And then in terms of it being the most desirable knowledge, right? Well, if the first cause is the end of everything else, then that's the best thing, right? The end is better. So the first end is better than all the rest. And by the end that you also what? Order things, don't you? Because you order them to the end. So the man who knows the end can most of all direct others. What did comrade Lennon say, you know? There had been 10,000 men in, what, row? And the Russians knew what they wanted. We didn't want to come to power. Now, Thomas divides the, what, premium into two parts, and the first part is in the first two readings, right? We learn what wisdom is, what, about, right? We learn that it's about causes and about, or precisely the first causes, right? Or the first causes is just one. Now, the second part of the premium is the kind of knowledge that wisdom is, okay? I mentioned before that in this great premium, at the end of page five, in the bottom of page five, Aristotle has an epilogue, right, where he will recall these two things that he's talked about. But he recalls the thing he just did last and then goes back to the first thing. So what is the nature of the knowledge thought that has been said? That's going to be said now in the, what, third reading, right? And what is the goal of the investigation? And the whole knowledge of a road, you can see how he translated the methodos there, must reach, right? That was done in the first two readings. The goal was to know, what, the very first cause, right? Okay. Aristotle will know that in the twelfth book, right? He says it compels our wonder, the first cause. Now, the first thing he sets off to show here in the third reading about this kind of knowledge is that it's not practical knowledge, right? It's not for making or doing, but it's for the sake of, what, understanding, just for the sake of the knowing. And what does he give as a sign in the first paragraph here? That is not a making science is clear also from those first philosophizing. For men both now, it is time, right? And even at first, begin to philosophize through wonder. In the beginning, he says, wondering about the strange things close at hand. A new toy. And little by little, thus going forward, raising questions about the greater things, huh? It's about the changes of the moon. Sometimes you have a half moon, sometimes a quarter moon. What's the cause of that, right? Why is it? And the sun, right? And the eclipse of the sun. The stars. And finally, about the origin of the universe itself, right? So it's kind of a development of things. But the man in doubt and wondering thinks himself to be ignorant. So he's trying to escape his ignorance, right? So if God gives us the Vedic vision, he's taking pity on our ignorance, right? But then he makes an interesting comparison to the Philomuthas, huh? But before I go to Mark about the Philomuthas, Plato says that the chief philosophers are, I mean, Thomas says, are Plato and Aristotle. Can I give you the text from the Vedas? Okay, let's give it. Yeah. Yeah. Did I give it to the last time, I thought? No. Okay. Okay. See, I can't remember sometimes. I'm going to give you a win-win one. Plato thanked the gods for three things. That he was born a man and not a woman. That's the first thing he thanked him. Second, that he was born a Greek and not a barbarian. And third, that he had met, what? Socrates. Now, in the dialogues, right, this will come down to us in Plato, he always has Socrates, right, promised always, in there engaged in some kind of conversation that is somewhat philosophical, right? And you've got to be careful in comparing Plato and Aristotle, because Plato's imitations of men in philosophical conversation, the dialogues, right, have come down to us, but his lectures have not. And here's some references to his lectures, but they don't have any summary of his lectures, right? Now, with Aristotle, it's the reverse, right? The accounts of his lectures have come down to us. And in one of them, he actually had Aristotle, saying, now you should thank us for the new discoveries, you know, and forgive us for what, you know? So he's like a professor of lecturing, right? These are, you know, pretty good summaries of his lectures, huh? But Aristotle's dialogues have been lost. We know there's a dialogue that was a introductory to philosophy, and we know there's a dialogue with the poets, and so on. So you get kind of a false view, right? But Aristotle probably didn't have to write some dialogues, because Plato had done such a good job, right? As Aristotle said in the book on the Poetic Art, he has three famous statements about man and imitation. And one is that man is the most imitative of all the animals. And that's easy to see in our experience, right? I'm always meowing, you know, for my grandchildren, or my little niece was over at the house the other day there, and I'd have a very good meow, you know? And I got the old cat in here, you know? You know, I was looking at the cat, and so on. And when I was at my daughter's name, they have cows, right? And I was, mmmm! And all the cows came running over to me. They were amazed, you know? And I call them my cousins, you know? Not my brothers, not that close, but they're my cousins, you know? And I say hello to my cousins, so with the kids, I drive by the cows in the field, I give them a nice moo, you know? And so on. So, um, remember Mark, right? When you're coming back from the zoo, you remember Mark, you know, taking up the movements of the ape, you know, and solving a little rencia, you know? And, uh, so man is the most imitative of the animals, right? And the second thing he says is that, what? We all, therefore, delight in imitations, huh? Remember when I was at Laval there, there was a guy who was very good at imitating, you know? And he would, uh, Christmas party, right? He would imitate this or that professor. And everybody knew what professor was imitating. And every professor had little crooks in his voice or little crooky things in his hands or something, you know? And we'd be laughing, you know? And the professor has to laugh, too, because he's going to take it off, you know? And, uh, and the third thing he says is, at first we learn by imitation. That's very important, right? So that's how you learn your native language, right? You know, in my case, English. And I learned it from imitating my parents and brothers and so on. And, uh, so, um, Aristotle understands the importance of imitation and therefore the dialogues, right? Once you've been introduced to philosophy, you know, to the dialogues, because they're an imitation of men, right? You can kind of imitate them. Now, um, the dialogues are usually named, not for Socrates, because he appears in all the dialogues, but the man he talks to, right? And this dalai I'm going to refer to here is called the Theotetus, right? Because Socrates talks to the young Theotetus, who's the prize pupil of, what, Theodorus, right? And Theotetus is, in fact, a, what, historical person who made very great contributions to geometry, right? And so if you get the Heath edition, you know, of Euclid there, you'll see what parts, you know, they think, go back to Theotetus, right? But in the dialogue, he's a young man, you know, at the beginning of his academic life, you might say. And, um, the person that Socrates talks with, and who often gives his name to the dialogue, and the topic that he talks with or about is, what, appropriate, right? Okay? So he's going to talk, you know, about what Episteme is, right? Well, it's a geometer who would know something about or have some experience with Episteme, right? This is proportion to us, right? So it's appropriate you should talk about that sort of thing. But the thing we're interested in right here is that when Theodorus introduces his pupil, Theotetus, to Socrates, he says, he's something of a philosopher, this guy. And that was to, you know, press Socrates or make Socrates mean. Okay. Now, in the middle of the dialogue, Theotetus says, in regard to something they're talking about, By the God, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things. And sometimes when I regard them, it really makes my head swim, right? That's what Niels Bohr said about the quantum theory, right? It doesn't make your head swim, you know. You're not really getting into it. Now Socrates notes this, right? He's broken into this great wonder. And he says, Theodore seems to be a pretty good guesser about your nature. The Greek word is what? Progressing to guess. Topadze. Book of topics, right? Topadze. And Theodore seems to be a pretty good guesser about your nature, that you are something of a philosopher. For this, what? Is very much, I don't like the translation here. A little bit of a notorious bad translation. For this is very much what the philosopher undergoes, right? To wonder. To thamadze, right? So it's kind of a confirmation of what Theodore said, right? And then Socrates makes a very strong statement. Ugar, ale arche. There is no other beginning of philosophy than this. Very strong statement. That's it. Now, merely after saying that, Socrates says, And he who said that Iris was the child of Thalmas, seems to not make a bad genealogy. And that was the great poet, what? Hesiod. Now, who is Iris and who is Thalmas? Well, Thalmas is the Greek word for wonder, right? So Thalmas is wonder personified. He says, it wasn't a bad genealogy. The man who said that Iris was the offspring, right? Of Thalmas. Then he goes on to explain why he said that. I used to say to my students now, when I gave them this passage, I'd say, did you wonder why Socrates said that? Because if you didn't, you're not called to be a philosopher, right? But if you wondered why Socrates should say that, you know? Well, Iris is what? In Greek mythology, is what? The rainbow personified, right? And the messenger of the gods. Okay? So why would he say that Iris is the offspring of wonder? Shakespeare has Iris appear in The Tempest, right? And someone beats Iris. Hail, many-colored messenger! The two things that Iris is, right? Very subtle, what Socrates is saying, but he doesn't explain himself at all. He just goes on. God. Yeah, the messenger of the gods. Did you people celebrate today, Michael and Gabriel and... No, and St. Ramon's. Well, today we have the feast of the three ones that are named, Gabriel and Raphael and Michael, you know? And the Psalms, you know, they're reading some Psalms there, you know, praising God in the presence of the angels, right? It's like, it's very well, I think I gave you last week, you know? From St. Francis de Sales. They had two different songs, 103 and 138. What are the numbering systems? It drives me crazy that time. Yeah, numbering. But anyway, so Iris in both things, right? Being the messenger of the gods, the messenger of the gods, like the angels, you know, even the priest is saying, angel means messenger, right? Well, the angels unite us with God in some way, right? And Gabriel comes down to Mary, right? There's a union there between man and God, right? But the rainbow also seems to, what, join heaven and earth, right? Place of the gods, so to speak, right? With the place of man, right? And, you know, for us in the Old Testament, there, after the great flood, God pointed to the rainbow as a sign of reconciliation between him. He's not going to destroy the world again like he did. And so, Socrates is saying, right, it's not a bad genealogy because wonder unites man with God, right? But on the side of his reason, huh? Because it makes us look for the cause out of wonder and then for the cause of the cause and ultimately the first cause, right? It's very profound what Socrates is saying. It doesn't explain it, right? That's a beautiful thing, right? But the two chief philosophers, as Thomas calls them to play in Aristotle, agree that wonder is the beginning of philosophy, right? Isn't one of those names of Christ there in Isaiah? Wonderful, yeah. So because men become, like Theotinus, right, some philosopher, right? Because he's wondering, right? But the man is wondering, trying to what? Simply to know, right? He's not trying to make or do something, right? And therefore, if philosophy begins in wonder, then it must be looking knowledge, right? If you like to speak Latin, it's speculative knowledge. If you like to speak Greek, it's theoretical knowledge, right? I think it's good to speak English, yeah? And so it's looking knowledge, right? And then he compares, huh? The philomuthos to the philosopher, right? Now, what is the philomuthos? It means he's a lover of myths. And the myth is a little bit like our fairy tale, right? But it contains what? Wonderful things, right? So if you have children, you should get the Dover, you know, fairy tale books, right? The green book, and the blue book, and the yellow book, and the red book, the name, colors that they come in. But my friend Warren Murray has made some study of fairy tales. It says that's the best collection if you're starting, you know, make one. You stay out there with the kids and you read them. It's got very good illustrations, too. So the philomuthos is in some way a philosopher, for the myth is put together from, what? Wonders. Now, my teacher, Monsignor Dion, he brought to our attention what Albert the Great said when he's commenting on this, right? And he's talking about great literature like Homer or Shakespeare or Sophocles or somebody, right? And he says, poetry in that sense, It gives us the way of what? Wondering. So a poet like Homer or a poet like Shakespeare, they give us a certain wonder, which may not be exactly the same wonder as a philosopher, but it's a stepping stone to the wonder of the philosopher. And you really need that stepping stone, right? I confronted Monsignor Dion one time. They said, Would there have been any Greek philosophy without Homer? And he says, no. So Homer came before the philosophers, right? But he gave that wonder, which is the stepping stone to the wonder of the philosopher. That's such a very interesting observation of the great Albert the Great he is. Well, in history, it's Albertus Luggins, so Albert the Great. I know myself, when I was a freshman in college, the professor said, We're going to read some plays of Shakespeare, which you probably didn't read in high school. And that was the occasion for me to get a complete edition of the plays of Shakespeare, and I got all of them at first year, right? Well, that disposed me to be a, what? Philosopher, right? Philomuthas. Mr. Chesterton comments on it. He refers to it as detective. If you like detective stories, you don't like philosophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My brother Richard started out as a literature major, something like that, or English, and he soon got into philosophy, right? So, that's interesting, right? Now, notice also here the connection between wonder, not only Philomuthas, but the Mathematikos. If you look up the word Mathematikos in the Greek dictionary, it's like a synonym for Philomuthas, and it means a lover of what? Learning. So, is it appropriate, right? That a lover of learning, a very famous one, Philomuthas, the Mathematikos, of Theotetus, right? That he should be something of a philosopher, and be filled with wonder, right? So, the theorems in Euclid are really wonderful, when you see them, right? They don't teach it, you know, the way they, you know, I think of the way algebra, I mean, geometry was taught to me in high school, you know, doesn't arouse wonder, right? When you read, you know, Cusaric said to me when I graduated, get a copy of Euclid, and I said, why? Go get a copy of Euclid. He didn't argue with me, just said it at once. And so, but it arouses wonder, right? It's appropriate, right? This great statement about wonder being the beginning of philosophy is in a conversation with the Philomathas, and Plato says that, right? The philosopher must be a... You've got to be a lover of learning to be a philosopher, right? Let no one ignorant of geometry come in here. You could say, let no one ignorant of Homer come in here either. Because Deacon used to say, you should have read great literature before you did philosophy, right? So even a little child can be a philomuthos, right? So that's the first thing he's saying about the kind of knowledge it is. It's looking knowledge. It's not knowledge for making or doing, right? And then he gives a sign of it in the bottom paragraph on page four. What happened witnesses this. When almost all necessary things, like farming and hunting and householding and so on, tailor's art, and those for recreation and amusement existed, right? There's music and things. Then such knowledge began to be sought, right? So it is clear that we seek this knowledge through no other, what, need, huh? Then the third thing he says, huh? But as we call a man free, that is for himself and not for another, right? Now the one who's for another is a slave, right, huh? A slave exists for the good of his master. But the free man exists for his own sake, right? So this alone is free among the sciences, huh? For this alone is for the sake of itself. That's why we speak of the liberal arts, right, huh? Because they're for the sake of knowing, right? They're kind of a beginning, huh? The trivium and the, what, quadrivium, huh? The mathematical part is the quadrivium, right? Trivium is the verbal part, right? Logic and so on. Rhetoric. Now the next thing he says about it. Hence it might justly be thought that it's not a human possession. Because we have all these needs, right? For in many ways the nature of man is enslaved. I remember the professor of political philosophy of all, he said, say, you know, talking about the ancient world, there we had slaves, you know. But today he says each man is his own slave. He says, you know, he's got the trash, you know, he's going to be enslaved, right? Yeah. Now we, in a sense, expand upon the ways a man is enslaved, right? I mean, the needs of his body, right? All these needs, right? Maybe he's got family, he's got to be prepared for them. But then in addition, some people are enslaved to their passions, right? So a man who's irascible, you know, is a slave to his anger, right? And you maybe know some people like this. And even some saints, you know, had to fight this, huh? And then the lustful man is enslaved to his other passions, right? And the coward is enslaved to his fear, right? So on. Thus, according to Simonides, who's a poet, God alone can have dishonor, right? Knowledge for its own sake. It's something too great for a man, right? Man, however, is not worthy to seek knowledge for itself. That's what Simonides said, huh? If the poets are saying something, Aristotle says, and the divine is able to envy, it's likely especially to happen about this. And unfortunate are all those who excel in knowledge. But the divine is not able to be envious, huh? So God can't see the excellence of creatures as what? In your frame, it is excellence, right? Reflection of his. And according to the proverb, poets say many false things. Yeah, that's his definition, yeah. And then finally, he says the fourth thing here. Nor must any other knowledge be thought to be more honorable than this wisdom, right? For the most divine is most, what? Honorable. And he says this knowledge is most divine in two ways, huh? For that which God most of all would have is the most divine in sciences. And if it were of what? Divine things, yeah. Sometimes I, it's not an equivocation of divine here. I use the epiboli, right? Of knowledge of God, right? So as they tell Lady Wisdom, their wisdom is a knowledge of God in two senses. It's a knowledge about God. And it's a knowledge that God himself alone, or God most of all, would have, right? So it's a knowledge of God in two ways. He's saying the same thing here, hairstyle, right? It's the most divine in sciences. It's a knowledge that God most of all would have, right? And it's the knowledge which is about the first cause, which is God, right? For God seems to all to be among the causes, right? In the beginning. He's going to prove that God is the first beginning later on in the 12th book, right? And such knowledge God alone, or most of all, would have, see? So either God alone should be called wise, or only God in the full sense, huh? So this knowledge is looking knowledge, right? It's liberal for its own sake, rights-free, that is to say. It's not a human possession, but more a divine possession, right? Hence the most, what, divine knowledge, right? The most honorable, because God is most honorable. So he ends up by saying other kinds of knowledge are more necessary. You've got to have food, right? You've got to have clothing, right? You've got to have maybe some shelter and so on. But none is better. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. In some way, religious, the church says this is necessary. We take the contrast of Mary and Martha, right? Mary hath chosen the better part, which is the contemplative, and it shall not be taken away from her, because it will be continued in the next life, but perfected there, right? Where the practical life ends with this life, right? I told you so much to say, well, then God, we've got to be practical in this life, and we'll have a next life. But it's better to be Mary, right, huh, to begin this, right, huh? Look forward to having it perfectly, right, huh? Because I think when you see God as he is, as St. John says, or face-to-face, as the Psalms say and St. Paul says, then the knowledge you have of God in this life, in first philosophy, or even in theology, would seem to be ignorance of God, right? In comparison to the knowledge of God when you see him as his, right, face-to-face, like you more, you know, Thomas, you know, God took him at the age of 49, right, doing the mind as best, as Aristotle said. But he was getting some kind of supernatural knowledge, right, huh? And so these, you know, sumus seemed like straw, right, to him, right, huh? So theology will appear to be ignorance, compared to the B-division, right? Thomas sometimes speaks of theology as a consolation for the soul before it sees God as he is, right? His mind is best at 49, God took him in his mind as best. It is necessary, he says, however, to place the possession of this in the opposite for us of the searches in the beginning, because the wonder would kind of, what, cease, right, huh? Once you know the cause, right? But there's another sense of wonder, you know, which you can speak of as, what, admiring the excellence of a thing, right? And in the 12th book, he says that God compels our wonder, right? Because you see the excellence of God, right? So, for all begin, as we have said, from wondering if things are thus, as about things that happen wonderfully. by chance, or about the turnings of the sun or the incommensability of the diagonal. For it seems wonderful to all who have not seen the cause, that something is not measured by the smallest. Now, when Thomas talks about this example here of the incommensability, wonders arouse most of all when you wonder why something is so, but what is so seems to be contrary to what you expect. This is the example of it, right, huh? Einstein gives the example, you know, of his father bringing home a magnet, right? And the magnets seem to move things without, what, touching them. That seems to be contrary to Einstein's experience, right? You've got to touch something to move it. And now it seems like, you know, this thing is moving something, so that arouse is wondering, right? And of course, is there some kind of a touching going on? You know? Einstein's the guy who developed the edge of the field, right? And so on now. But I mean, you're also wondering, because it's contrary to what you'd expect, right? Well, you see, if your friend acts in the way you expect him to act, you don't wonder. Because he's acting strangely, right? In the way you wouldn't expect him to act, right? Then you just have to wonder, I wonder what's... Yeah, I wonder what's going to happen, you know? That's kind of interesting, right? And I sometimes, in doing geometry, I try to look for theorems, you know, that arouse a wonder in that way. One thing that struck my wonder a lot was the fact that you can have, in quadrilettos, is you can have more perimeter, but less area. Strange, right? A square will always have more area than a oblong, right, with the same perimeter. You can even have a square with, what? More area, but less perimeter. So let's say a square that is 5 by 5 would have a perimeter of, what? 20, but an area of 25. But an oblong, let's say, of 2 by 10 would have, what, a perimeter of 24, which is more than 20, right? But the area is only, what? Yeah. So I used to use this as an example, you know, for brevities to solve with, because you can have a perimeter that is less, but contains more. And so the wise man with less words says more, right? The fool multiplies up his words. With more words, he says less. So is that possible? Was it possible to have, you know, less perimeter and more area? Because there's a famous Russian story, I guess it is, of the man who was going to be given all the land he could run around in one day, and he tried to run around too much land and he didn't talk about a hard time or something. But I mean, it might make some sense what kind of a figure you were drawing. In a square you could run less and get more land, right? How'd you do that, right? And they said the geometry, you know, it's by and so on by perimeter, you know? So I ended up, you know, giving you more perimeter, you know, if I'm giving myself more land. I do geometry. It's kind of contrary to what you'd expect, right? I used to say to kids, you know, you can do numbers simply. If the sum of two numbers is greater, is the prodigal of two numbers then greater? And you'd think it would be, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah. But just the same thing, right? Proportionally, right? Five and five are what? Ten. Two and... So two and ten are more than five and five, right? The sum of them. But the two times ten is what? And five times five? Yeah. So the sum of five and five is less than the sum of two and ten. But the product. But you would think, you know, that if the numbers add up to more, that their product will be created, right? It's the same principle as in geometry. And so these things that kind of arouse your wonder, right? Because they, what? Now, you don't know why it's so, but it doesn't seem that it should be that way. I say the simple example is when you wonder about a friend, but strangely, right now. Why is he acting that way, right? Because I mentioned that many, I've heard it said many great scientific discoveries were not made by Saint Eureka, but gee, that's weird. That's odd. I didn't expect that. And they discover something. Yeah. So, so you end up, right, by taking away the wonder that's seeking to avoid evidence, right? Because you know why it's so now, right? But then there's this other kind of wonder where you admire the excellence of something, right? And then there's an epilogue there where he recalls the two things he's done, right? What are you going to do next now? All kinds of things you can do, right? I think we should talk about it the next time.