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Book Review: Locke, Science, and Politics1 8 3Aristotle “had confronted arguments similar to those later made bythe Baconian empiricists, weighed them, and rejected them” (19). He, too,propounded an “approach to knowledge [that] was resolutely empirical atits root,” an approach deriving from “Socrates’ turn away from airy abstractionsto a more common-sense approach to reality, as reflected in ordinaryhuman speech” (19). The empirical matter in question was speech, whichleads quickly to consideration of the noun—that is, to ideas or forms, “thepatterns or templates for the concrete objects we encounter in experience”(19). The Socratic/Platonic answer to Heraclitus’s claim that all is flux is thatall could not be flux because we detect relatively stable entities all aroundus, entities that moreover can be seen to fall into identifiable kinds or species.“It makes sense to call these patterns ‘forms,’ to reflect the empirical,even visual, root of the theory” (19). To know nature is to know the forms inwhich it manifests itself. In distinction to Plato’s Socrates, but not simply incontradiction of him, Aristotle maintained that although “the particulars areprior” to the forms, the forms “have independent being”; although the formswe see in the particulars exist only in those particulars, they serve as causesof the particulars—causes independent of material causes (21–22). Withoutan appreciation of form, one “cannot account for the order of nature, or forthe fact that there is qualitative as well as quantitative change” observable init (22–23). In particular, one cannot account for the capacity of what we nowcall organic beings to grow towards a form, to perfect themselves, to movetowards a telos. Things or substances “are compounded of form and matter,”both (24), with form the same in each individual within a species and matterthe source of individuation. To know, “we must always begin with senseexperience” but then “get beyond it or behind it, to a grasp of the forms andpermanent realities that will alone allow us to understand the world” (25). Asthe senses receive sensations that detect objects, the mind receives the formsthat permit us to understand those objects.Some of this fits the biblical account of Adam, charged by God withthe task of naming—that is to say, classifying—the objects in the Garden ofEden in accordance with their “kinds.” On the basis of this and other congruitiesbetween scripture and Aristotelianism, Thomas Aquinas achievedhis impressive synthesis of the two lines of thought. Although the Bible precludesthe Aristotelian claim that the cosmos is eternal, it does allow for theexistence of forms, now understood as “creations of God, or more precisely…part of the divine mind or essence” (27). God also implanted in His highestcreation, man, both the capacity to do good—syndaresis—and the capacityto fail, willfully and therefore culpably. “Aquinas follows Aristotle and Plato