THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

56
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
of the development of the chick which even today arouses the admiration
81
of embryologists. He must have performed some novel experiments in
genetics, for he disproves the theory that the sex of the child depends on
what testis supplies the reproductive fluid, by quoting a case where the
right testis of the father had been tied and yet the children had been of
different sexes. 32 He raises some very modern problems of heredity. A
woman of Elis had married a negro; her children were all whites, but in
the next generation negroes reappeared; where, asks Aristotle, was the
blackness hidden in the middle generation? 33 There was but a step from
such a vital and intelligent query to the epochal experiments of Gregor
Mendel (1822-1882). Prudens qu&stio dimidium scientice to know
what to ask is already to know half. Surely, despite the errors that mar
these biological works, they form the greatest monument ever raised to the
science by any one man. When we consider that before Aristotle there
had been, so far as we know, no biology beyond scattered observations,
we perceive that this achievement alone might have sufficed for one lifetime,
and would have given immortality. But Aristotle had only begun.
V. METAPHYSICS AND THE NATURE OF GOD
His metaphysics grew out of his biology. Everything in the world is
moved by an inner urge to become something greater than it is. Everything
is both the form or reality which has grown out of something which
was its matter or raw material; and it may in its turn be the matter out
of which still higher forms will grow. So the man is the form of which
the child was the matter; the child is the form and its embryo the matter;
the embryo the form, the ovum the matter; and so back till we reach
-in a vague way the conception of matter without form at all. But such a
formless matter would be no-thing, for every thing has a form. Matter,
in its widest sense, is the possibility of form; form is the actuality, the
finished reality, of matter. Matter obstructs, form constructs. Form is not
merely the shape but the shaping force, an inner necessity and impulse
which moulds mere material to a specific figure and purpose; it is the
realization of a potential capacity of matter; it is the sum of the powers
residing in anything to do, to be, or to become. Nature is the conquest
of matter by form, the constant progression and victory of life. 34
Everything in the world moves naturally to a specific fulfilment. Of the
varied causes which determine an event, the final cause, which determines
the purpose, is the most decisive and important. The mistakes and futili-
Part, An., iii, 4. ^ewes, 112. ^Gomprez, iv, 169.
of our readers will be pleased, and the other half amused, to learn that
among Aristotle's favorite examples of matter and form are woman and man; the
male is the active, formative principle; the female is passive clay, waiting to be
formed. Female offspring are the result of the failure of form to dominate matter
CD* Gen. An.*i^ a).