Note (return) — Chapter XII
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Aristotle admits, however, that there are ideas or principles in the mind which can not be explained by experience, and we are therefore entitled to an answer to the question--how are these obtained? "Sensible experience gives us what is here, there, now, in such and such a manner, but it is impossible for it to give what is everywhere and at all times." 680 He tells us further, that "science is a conception of the mind engaged in universals, and in those things which exist of necessity, and since there are principles of things demonstrable and of every science (for science is joined with reason), it will be neither science, nor art, nor prudence, which discovers the principles of science;... it must therefore be (νοῦς) pure intellect," or the intuitive reason. 681 He also characterizes these principles as self-evident. "First truths are those which obtain belief, not through others, but through themselves, as there is no necessity to investigate the 'why' in scientific principles, but each principle ought to be credible by itself." 682 They are also necessary and eternal. "Demonstrative science is from necessary principles, and those which are per se inherent, are necessarily so in things." 683 "We have all a conception of that which can not subsist otherwise than it does.... The object of science has a necessary existence, therefore it is eternal. For those things which exist in themselves, by necessity, are all eternal." 684 But whilst Aristotle admits that there are "immutable and first principles," 685 which are not derived from sense and experience--"principles which are the foundation of all science and demonstration, but which are themselves indemonstrable," 686 because self-evident, necessary, and eternal; yet he furnishes no proper account of their genesis and development in the human mind, neither does he attempt their enumeration. At one time he makes the intellect itself their source, at another he derives them from sense, experience, and induction. This is the defect, if not the inconsistency, of his method. 687