THREE:"Not? Oh! they are sure to do it. All the villages are burning already. The smoke suffocates us here. In Bressoux there is not a house left standing, and in other villages all civilians have been killed, men, women, and children. Not even the tiniest babies escaped.... Oh!... and now it is Lige's turn!"To sum upWe have the following propositions in regard to moving and handling material:
THREE:The Greek love of balanced antithesis and circumscribing form triumphed over the infinite in both fields. While the two great masters of idealism imprisoned the formless and turbulent terrestrial elements within a uniform and eternal sphere of crystal, they imposed a similar restraint on the desires and emotions, confining them within a barrier of reason which, when once erected, could never be broken through. And although the ground won in physics was lost again for a time through a revival of old theories, this was because true Hellenism found its only congenial sphere in399 ethics, and there the philosophy of the finite continued to reign supreme. If the successors of Aristotle fell back on cosmologies of ampler scope than his, they retained his limiting method in their speculations on man.CHAPTER XIII. GEARING AS A MEANS OF TRANSMITTING POWER.
THREE:His expression altered to a puzzled scowl.
TWO: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
TWO:But from my personal knowledge and the evidence referred to, I am able to establish the following facts in connection with the events that preceded and followed the destruction of Louvain.