Part 4

First Philosophy is defined by Aristotle as a "science which considers What Is simply in its character of Being, and the properties which it has as such." That there is, or ought to be, such a science is urged on the ground that every "special" science deals only with some restricted department of what is, and thus considers its subject-matter not universally in its character of being, or being real, but as determined by some more special condition. Thus, First Philosophy, the science which attempts to discover the most ultimate reasons of, or grounds for, the character of things in general cannot be identified with any of the "departmental" sciences. The same consideration explains why it is "First Philosophy" which has to disentangle the "principles" of the various sciences, and defend them by dialectic against those who impugn them. It is no part of the duty of a geometer or a physicist to deal with objections to such universal principles of reasoning as the law of contradiction. They may safely assume such principles; if they are attacked, it is not by specifically geometrical or physical considerations that they can be defended. Even the "principles of the special sciences" have not to be examined and defended by the special sciences. They are the starting-points of the sciences which employ them; these sciences are therefore justified in requiring that they shall be admitted as a condition of geometrical, or physical, or biological demonstrations. If they are called in question, the defence of them is the business of logic.

First Philosophy, then, is the study of "What Is simply as such," the universal principles of structure without which there could be no ordered system of knowable objects. But the word "is" has more than one sense. There are as many modes of being as there are types of predication. "Substances," men, horses, and the like, have their own specific mode of being--they are things; qualities, such as green or sweet, have a different mode of being--they are not things, but "affections" or "attributes" of things. Actions, again, such as building, killing, are neither things nor yet "affections" of things; their mode of being is that they are processes which produce or destroy things. First Philosophy is concerned with the general character of all these modes of being, but it is specially concerned with that mode of being which belongs to _substances_. For this is the most primary of all modes of being. We had to introduce a reference to it in our attempt to say what the mode of being of qualities and actions is, and it would have been the same had our illustrations been drawn from any other "categories." Hence the central and special problem of First Philosophy is to analyse the notion of substance and to show the causes of the existence of substances.

Next, we have to note that the word "substance" itself has two senses. When we spoke of substance as one of the categories we were using it in a secondary sense. We meant by substances "horse," "man," and the rest of the "real kinds" which we find in Nature, and try to reproduce in a scientific classification. In this sense of the word "substances" are a special class of _predicates_, as when we affirm of Plato that he is a man, or of Bucephalus that he is a horse. But in the primary sense a substance means an absolutely individual thing, "_this_ man," or "_this_ horse." We may therefore define primary substances from the logician's point of view by saying that they can be only subjects of predication, never predicates. Or again, it is peculiar to substances, that while remaining numerically one a substance admits of incompatible determinations, as Socrates, remaining one and the same Socrates, is successively young and old. This is not true of "qualities," "actions," and the rest. The same colour cannot be first white and then black; the same act cannot be first bad and then good. Thus we may say that individual substances are the fixed and permanent factors in the world of mutability, the invariants of existence. Processes go on in them, they run the gamut of changes from birth to decay, processes take place _among_ them, they act on and are acted on by one another, they fluctuate in their qualities and their magnitude, but so long as a substance exists it remains numerically one and the same throughout all these changes. Their existence is the first and most fundamental condition of the existence of the universe, since they are the bearers of all qualities, the terms of all relations, and the agents and patients in all interaction.

The point to note is that Aristotle begins his investigation into the structure of What Is and the causes by which it is produced by starting from the existence of individual things belonging to the physical order and perceived by the senses. About any such thing we may ask two questions, (1) into what constituent factors can it be logically analysed? (2) and how has it come to exhibit the character which our analysis shows it to have? The answer to these questions will appear from a consideration of two standing antitheses which run through Aristotle's philosophy, the contrast between Matter and Form, and that between Potential and Actual, followed by a recapitulation of his doctrine of the Four Causes, or four senses of the word Cause.

*Matter and Form*.--Consider any completely developed individual thing, whether it is the product of human manufacture, as a copper bowl, or of natural reproduction, as an oak-tree or a horse. We shall see at once that the bowl is like other articles made of the same metal, candlesticks, coal-vases, in being made of the same stuff, and unlike them in having the special shape or structure which renders it fit for being used as a bowl and not for holding a candle or containing coals. So a botanist or a chemist will tell you that the constituent tissues of an oak or horse, or the chemical elements out of which these tissues are built up are of the same kind as those of an ash or an ox, but the oak differs from the ash or the horse from the ox in characteristic structure. We see thus that in any individual thing we can distinguish two components, the stuff of which it consists--which may be identical in kind with the stuff of which things of a very different kind consist--and the structural law of formation or arrangement which is peculiar to the "special" kind of thing under consideration. In the actual individual thing these two are inseparably united; they do not exist side by side, as chemists say the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen do in a drop of water; the law of organisation or structure is manifested in and through the copper, or the various tissues of the living body. Aristotle expresses this by saying that you can distinguish two aspects in an individual, its Matter, (_hyle, materia_) and its Form (_eidos, forma_). The individual is the matter as organised in accord with a determinate principle of structure, the form. Of these terms, the former, _hyle_ (_materia_, matter) means literally timber, and more specifically ship's timbers, and his selection of it to mean what is most exactly rendered by our own word "stuff" may perhaps be due to a reminiscence of an old Pythagorean fancy which looked on the universe as a ship. The word for form is the same as Plato's, and its philosophical uses are closely connected with its mathematical sense, "regular figure," also a Pythagorean technicality which still survives in certain stereotyped phrases in Euclid. Aristotle extends the analysis into Matter and Form by analogy beyond the range of individual substances to everything in which we can distinguish a relatively indeterminate "somewhat" and a law or type of order and arrangement giving it determination. Thus if you consider the relatively fixed or "formed" character of a man in adult life, we may look upon this character as produced out of the "raw material" of tendencies and dispositions, which have received a specific development along definite lines, according to the kind of training to which the mind has been subjected in the "formative" period of its growth. We may therefore speak of native disposition as the matter or stuff of which character is made, and the practical problem of education is to devise a system of training which shall impress on this matter precisely the form required if the grown man is to be a good citizen of a good state. Since a man's character itself is not a substance but a complex of habits or fixed ways of reacting upon suggestions coming from the world around him, this is a good instance of the extension of the antithesis of Matter and Form beyond the category of substance. We see then that Matter in the Aristotelian sense must not be confounded with body; the relatively undetermined factor which receives completer determination by the structural law or Form is Matter, whether it is corporeal or not. This comes out with particular clearness in the metaphysical interpretation put on the logical process of definition by genus and difference. When I define any real kind by specifying a higher and wider class of which it is a sub-kind, and adding the peculiar characteristics which distinguish the sub-kind under consideration from the other sub-kinds of the same genus, the genus may be said to stand to the "differences" as Matter, the relatively indeterminate, to the Form which gives it its structure.

We further observe that Matter and Form are strictly correlative. The matter is called so relatively to the form which gives it further determination. When the words are used in their strictest sense, with reference to an individual thing, the Form is taken to mean the _last_ determination by which the thing acquires its complete character, and the Matter is that which has yet to receive this last determination. Thus in the case of a copper globe, the spherical figure is said to be its Form, the copper its material. In the case of the human body, the Matter is the various tissues, muscles, bones, skin, &c. But each of these things which are counted as belonging to the Matter of the globe or the human body has, according to Aristotle, a development behind it. Copper is not an "element" but a specific combination of "elements," and the same thing is even more true of the highly elaborate tissues of the living body. Thus what is Matter relatively to the globe or living body is Matter already determined by Form if we consider it relatively to its own constituents. The so-called "elements" of Empedocles, earth, water, air, fire, are the matter of all chemical compounds, the Form of each compound being its specific law of composition; the immediate or "proximate" Matter of the tissues of the animal body is, according to Aristotle's biology, the "superfluous" blood of the female parent, out of which the various tissues in the offspring are developed, and the Matter of this blood is in turn the various substances which are taken into the body of the parent as food and converted by assimilation into blood. Their Matter, once more, is the earth, air, fire, and water of which they are composed. Thus at every stage of a process of manufacture or growth a fresh Form is superinduced on, or developed within, a Matter which is already itself a combination of Matter and Form relatively to the process by which it has itself been originated. Fully thought out, such a view would lead to the conclusion that in the end the simple ultimate matter of all individual things is one and the same throughout the universe, and has absolutely no definite structure at all. The introduction of Form or determinate structure of any kind would then have to be thought of as coming from an outside source, since structureless Matter cannot be supposed to give itself all sorts of specific determinations, as has been demonstrated in our own times by the collapse of the "Synthetic Philosophy." Aristotle avoids the difficulty by holding that "pure Matter" is a creation of our thought. In actual fact the crudest form in which matter is found is that of the "elements." Since the transmutability of the "elements" is an indispensable tenet in Aristotle's Physics, we cannot avoid regarding earth, water, fire air as themselves determinations by specific Form of a still simpler Matter, though this "prime Matter" "all alone, before a rag of Form is on," is never to be found existing in its simplicity.[#]

[#] _Hudibras_, Pt. 1, Canto 1, 560.

"He had First Matter seen undressed; He took her naked all alone, Before one rag of Form was on."

*The Potential and the Actual*.--So far we have been looking at the analysis of the individual thing, as the current jargon puts it, statically; we have arrived at the antithesis of Matter and Form by contrasting an unfinished condition of anything with its finished condition. But we may study the same contrast dynamically, with special reference to the process of making or growth by which the relatively undetermined or unfinished becomes determined or finished. The contrast of Matter with Form then passes into the contrast between Potentiality and Actuality. What this antithesis means we can best see from the case of the growth of a living organism. Consider the embryos of two animals, or the seeds of two plants. Even a botanist or a physiologist may be unable to pronounce with certainty on the species to which the germ submitted to him belongs, and chemical analysis may be equally at a loss. Even at a later stage of development, the embryo of one vertebrate animal may be indistinguishable from that of another. Yet it is certain that one of two originally indistinguishable germs will grow into an oak and the other into an elm, or one into a chimpanzee and the other into a man. However indistinguishable, they therefore may be said to have different latent tendencies or possibilities of development within them. Hence we may say of a given germ, "though this is not yet actually an oak, it is potentially an oak," meaning not merely that, if uninterfered with, it will in time be an oak, but also that by no interference can it be made to grow into an elm or a beech. So we may look upon all processes of production or development as processes by which what at first possessed only the tendency to grow along certain lines or to be worked up into a certain form, has become actually endowed with the character to which it possessed the tendency. The acorn becomes in process of time an actual oak, the baby an actual man, the copper is made into an actual vase, right education brings out into active exercise the special capacities of the learner. Hence the distinction between Matter and Form may also be expressed by saying that the Matter is the persistent underlying _substratum_ in which the development of the Form takes place, or that the individual when finally determined by the Form is the Actuality of which the undeveloped Matter was the Potentiality. The process of conception, birth, and growth to maturity in Nature, or of the production of a finished article by the "arts" whose business it is to "imitate" Nature, may be said to be one of continuous advance towards the actual embodiment of a Form, or law of organisation, in a Matter having the latent potentiality of developing along those special lines. When Aristotle is speaking most strictly he distinguishes the process by which a Form is realised, which he calls Energeia, from the manifestation of the realised Form, calling the latter Entelechy (literally "finished" or "completed" condition). Often, however, he uses the word Energeia more loosely for the actual manifestation of the Form itself, and in this he is followed by the scholastic writers, who render Energeia by _actus_ or _actus purus_.

One presupposition of this process must be specially noted. It is not an unending process of development of unrealised capacities, but always has an End in the perfectly simple sense of a last stage. We see this best in the case of growth. The acorn grows into the sapling and the sapling into the oak, but there is nothing related to the oak as the oak is to the sapling. The oak does not grow into something else. The process of development from potential to actual in this special case comes to an end with the emergence of the mature oak. In the organic world the end or last state is recognised by the fact that the organism can now exercise the power of reproducing its like. This tendency of organic process to culminate in a last stage of complete maturity is the key to the treatment of the problem of the "true end" of life in Aristotle's _Ethics_.

*The Four Causes*.--The conception of the world involved in these antitheses of Form and Matter, Potential and Actual, finds its fullest expression in Aristotle's doctrine of the Four Causes or conditions of the production of things. This doctrine is looked on by Aristotle as the final solution of the problem which had always been the central one for Greek philosophy, What are the causes of the world-order? All the previous philosophies he regards as inadequate attempts to formulate the answer to this question which is only given completely by his own system. Hence the doctrine requires to be stated with some fullness. We may best approach it by starting from the literal meaning of the Greek terms _aitia_, _aition_, which Aristotle uses to convey the notion of cause. _Aition_ is properly an adjective used substantially, and means "that on which the legal responsibility for a given state of affairs can be laid." Similarly _aitia_, the substantive, means the "credit" for good or bad, the legal "responsibility," for an act. Now when we ask, "what is responsible for the fact that such and such a state of things now exists?" there are four partial answers which may be given, and each of these corresponds to one of the "causes." A complete answer requires the enumeration of them all. We may mention (1) the _matter_ or _material_ cause of the thing, (2) the law according to which it has grown or developed, the _form_ or _formal_ cause, (3) the agent with whose initial impulse the development began--the "starting-point of the process," or, as the later Aristotelians call it, the _efficient_ cause, (4) the completed result of the whole process, which is present in the case of human manufacture as a preconceived idea determining the maker's whole method of handling his material, and in organic development in Nature as implied in and determining the successive stages of growth--the _end_ or _final_ cause. If any one of these had been different, the resultant state of things would also have been different. Hence all four must be specified in completely accounting for it. Obvious illustrations can be given from artificial products of human skill, but it seems clear that it was rather reflection on the biological process of reproduction and growth which originally suggested the analysis. Suppose we ask what was requisite in order that there should be now an oak on a given spot. There must have been (1) a germ from which the oak has grown, and this germ must have had the latent tendencies towards development which are characteristic of oaks. This is the material cause of the oak. (2) This germ must have followed a definite law of growth; it must have had a tendency to grow in the way characteristic of oaks and to develop the structure of an oak, not that of a plane or an ash. This is form or formal cause. (3) Also the germ of the oak did not come from nowhere; it grew on a parent oak. The parent oak and its acorn-bearing activity thus constitute the _efficient_ cause of the present oak. (4) And there must be a final stage to which the whole process of growth is relative, in which the germ or sapling is no longer becoming but is an adult oak bearing fresh acorns. This is the _end_ of the process. One would not be going far wrong in saying that Aristotle's biological cast of thought leads him to conceive of this "end" in the case of reproduction as a sub-conscious purpose, just as the workman's thought of the result to be attained by his action forms a conscious directing purpose in the case of manufacture. Both in Nature and in "art" the "form," the "efficient cause," and the "end" tend to coalesce. Thus in Nature "a man begets a man," organic beings give birth to other organic beings of the same kind, or, in the technical language of the Aristotelian theory of Causation, the efficient cause produces, as the "end" of its action, a second being having the same "form" as itself, though realised in different "matter," and numerically distinct from itself. Thus the efficient cause (_i.e._ the parent) is a "form" realised in matter, and the "end" is the same "form" realised in other matter. So in "products of art" the true "source of the process" is the "form" the realisation of which is the "end" or final cause, only with this difference, that as efficient cause the "form" exists not in the material but by way of "idea" or "representation" in the mind of the craftsman. A house does not produce another house, but the house as existing in "idea" in the builder's mind sets him at work building, and so produces a corresponding house in brick or stone. Thus the ultimate opposition is between the "cause as matter," a passive and inert substratum of change and development and the "formal" cause which, in the sense just explained, is one with both the "efficient" or starting-point, and the "end" or goal of development. It will, of course, be seen that individual bearers of "forms" are indispensable in the theory; hence the notion of _activity_ is essential to the causal relation. It is a relation between things, not between events. Aristotle has no sense of the word cause corresponding to Mill's conception of a cause as an event which is the uniform precursor of another event.