THREE:Sandy had lost his suspicious look. His interest, as much as that of his older chums, was caught and chained by the coming possibilities and he put down the letter to listen to Jeff.
THREE:I.As a result of the foregoing criticism, Aristotle distinguishes four different causes or principles by which all things are determined to be what they areMatter, Form, Agent, and Purpose.226 If, for example, we take a saw, the matter is steel; the form, a toothed blade; the agent or cause of its assuming that shape, a smith; the purpose, to divide wood or stone. When we have enumerated these four principles, we have told everything that can be known about a saw. But Aristotle could not keep the last three separate; he gradually extended the definition of form until it absorbed, or became identified with, agent and purpose.227 It was what we should call the idea of function that facilitated the transition. If the very essence or nature of a saw implies use, activity, movement, how can we define it without telling its purpose? The toothed blade is only intelligible as a cutting, dividing instrument. Again, how came the saw into being? What shaped the steel into that particular form? We have said that it was the smith. But surely that is too vague. The smith is a man, and may be able to exercise other trades as well. Suppose him to be a musician, did he make the saw in that capacity? No; and here comes in a distinction which plays an immense part in Aristotles metaphysics, whence it has passed into our every-day speech. He does not make the saw qua musician but qua smith. He can, however, in the exercise of his trade as smith make many other toolsknives, axes, and so forth. Nevertheless, had he only learned to make saws it would be enough. Therefore, he does not make335 the saw qua axe-maker, he makes it qua saw-maker. Nor, again, does he make it with his whole mind and body, but only with just those thoughts and movements required to give the steel that particular shape. Now, what are these thoughts but the idea of a saw present in his mind and passing through his eyes and hands, till it fixes itself on the steel? The immaterial form of a saw creates the real saw which we use. Let us apply the preceding analogies to a natural object; for example, a man. What is the Form, the definition of a man? Not a being possessing a certain outward shape, for then a marble statue would be a man, which it is not; nor yet a certain assemblage of organs, for then a corpse would be a man, which, according to Aristotle, criticising Democritus, it is not; but a living, feeling, and reasoning being, the end of whose existence is to fulfil all the functions involved in this definition. So, also, the creative cause of a man is another man, who directly impresses the human form on the material supplied by the female organism. In the same way, every definite individual aggregate becomes what it is through the agency of another individual representing the same type in its perfect manifestation.228
THREE:The ultimate stage of perfection is, of course, the identification of subject and object, the ascent from the Nous to the One. But, on this point, Plotinus never added anything essential to what has already been quoted from the analytical portion of his enquiry, and the essay containing that passage is accordingly placed last in Porphyrys arrangement of his works.It is, after all, very questionable whether human happiness would be increased by suppressing the thought of death as something to be feared. George Eliot, in her Legend of Jubal, certainly expresses the contrary opinion.180 The finest edge of enjoyment would be taken off if we forgot its essentially transitory character. The free man may, in Spinozas words, think of nothing less than of death; but he cannot prevent the sunken shadow from throwing all his thoughts of life into higher and more luminous relief. The ideal enjoyment afforded by literature would lose much of its zest were we to discard all sympathy with the fears and sorrows on which our mortal condition has enabled it so largely to drawthe lacrimae rerum, which Lucretius himself has turned to such admirable account. And the whole treasure of happiness due to mutual affection must gain by our remembrance that the time granted for its exercise is always limited, and may at any moment be brought to an endor rather, such an94 effect might be looked for were this remembrance more constantly present to our minds.
TWO:CHAPTER LVII. A WAY OUT.