TWO:"As it happens, I know the gentleman," she said. "When I was governess to the Countess Lalage's little girl he frequently came to the house. I am a niece of Mr. Gilbert Lawrence, the novelist, who lives close by. There is a room to spare in his house, and this looks like a bad case. If you will follow me----"
THREE:It may be remarked as a general rule that the hardness of cutting tools is "inverse as the hardness of the material to be cut," which seems anomalous, and no doubt is so, if nothing but the cutting properties of edges is considered; but all cutting edges are subjected to transverse strain, and the amount of this strain is generally as the hardness of the material acted upon; hence the degree of temper has of necessity to be such as to guard against breaking the edges. Tools for cutting wood, for example, can be much harder than for cutting iron, or to state it better, tools for cutting wood are harder than those usually employed for cutting iron; for if iron tools were always as carefully formed and as carefully used as those employed in cutting wood, they could be equally hard.All these, however, are mere questions of detail. It is on a subject of the profoundest philosophical importance that Aristotle differs most consciously, most radically, and most fatally from his predecessors. They were evolutionists, and he was a stationarist. They were mechanicists, and he was a teleologist. They were uniformitarians, and he was a dualist. It is true that, as we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Mr. Edwin Wallace makes him recognise the genesis of things by evolution and development, but the meaning of this phrase requires to be cleared up. In one sense it is, of course, almost an identical proposition. The genesis of things must be by genesis of some kind or other. The great question is, what things have been evolved, and how have they been evolved? Modern science tells us, that not only have all particular aggregates of matter and motion now existing come into being within a finite period of time, but also that the specific types under which we arrange those aggregates have equally been generated; and that their characteristics, whether structural or functional, can only be understood by tracing out their origin and history. And it further teaches us that the properties of every aggregate result from the properties of its ultimate elements, which, within the limits of our experience, remain absolutely unchanged. Now, Aristotle taught very nearly the contrary of all this. He believed that the cosmos, as we now know it, had existed, and would continue to exist, unchanged through all eternity. The sun, moon, planets, and stars, together with the orbs containing them, are composed of an absolutely ungenerable, incorruptible substance. The earth, a cold, heavy, solid sphere, though liable to superficial changes, has always occupied its present position in the centre of the universe.317 The specific forms of animal lifeexcept a few which are produced spontaneouslyhave, in like manner, been preserved unaltered through an infinite series of generations. Man shares the common lot. There is no continuous progress of civilisation. Every invention and discovery has been made and lost an infinite number of times. Our philosopher could not, of course, deny that individual living things come into existence and gradually grow to maturity; but he insists that their formation is teleologically determined by the parental type which they are striving to realise. He asks whether we should study a thing by examining how it grows, or by examining its completed form: and Mr. Wallace quotes the question without quoting the answer.203 Aristotle tells us that the genetic method was followed by his predecessors, but that the other method is his. And he goes on to censure Empedocles for saying that many things in the animal body are due simply to mechanical causation; for example, the segmented structure of the backbone, which that philosopher attributes to continued doubling and twistingthe very same explanation, we believe, that would be given of it by a modern evolutionist.204 Finally, Aristotle assumes the only sort of transformation which we deny, and which Democritus equally deniedthat is to say, the transformation of the ultimate elements into one another by the oscillation of an indeterminate matter between opposite qualities.
THREE:Lawrence flicked the ash from his cigarette."I am going mad," Leona whispered. "To allude to that tonight! Well, I have got on in the world like other people. No need to allude to that. What can it possibly have to do with the matter?"
- Justine Goliyad
- Justine Goliyad
- Justine Goliyad